Onika Tanya Maraj-Petty, December 8, 1982 Saint James, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago
American rapper. She is known for her musical versatility, animated flow in her rapping, and her alter egos and accents. Between 2007 and 2009, Minaj released three mixtapes that gained him recognition. Pink Friday (2010), her debut album, topped the charts on the Billboard 200. The album’s fifth single, “Super Bass”, reached number three on the Hot 100 and was certified diamond by the RIAA. In her follow-up album, Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded (2012), Minaj explored dance-pop. “Starships” peaked in the top five worldwide.
She returned to her hip hop roots with her third album, The Pinkprint (2014). The second single, “Anaconda,” reached number two on the Hot 100 and became the first music video by a solo female rapper to reach one billion views on YouTube. Her fourth album, Queen, was released in 2018 and featured the U.S. top ten hit “Chun-Li”. “Tusa”, a collaboration with Karol G, became the longest-running number one single on the Argentina Hot 100 chart in 2019. ‘Trollz’ and ‘Say So’ were Minaj’s first two Hot 100 number-one singles in 2020, and ‘Super Freaky Girl’ was her third. For the first time since 1998, a female rapper debuted at number one with a solo song.
With more than 100 million records sold worldwide, Minaj is known as the “Queen of Rap”. She became the first female rapper to have one hundred Billboard Hot 100 entries and twenty one top 10 hits, the most of any female rapper in the 2010s. There are eight American Music Awards, five MTV Video Music Awards (including the 2022 Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award), twelve BET Awards, four Billboard Music Awards, a Brit Award, and three Guinness World Records to her name. The Other Woman (2014) and Barbershop: The Next Cut (2016) round out her film career outside of music. She has also voiced characters in the animated films Ice Age: Continental Drift (2012) and The Angry Birds Movie 2 (2019). Her name appeared on Time’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2016. Her outspoken views and social media disputes have been covered extensively by the media throughout her career.