As proof that she “fears no bitch” taking over her reign (least of all Cardi B), Nicki Minaj opted to release her first solo single since 2020 (“Yikes”) on the same day Megan Thee Stallion dropped Traumazine. Then again, maybe Nicki knew that a single wouldn’t be competing with an album in the same way. Enter “Super Freaky Girl,” yet another track of late that chooses to blatantly sample (*cough cough* Beyoncé). And yes, before MC Hammer made the beat his own with “U Can’t Touch This,” it was Rick James’ “Super Freak.”
Minaj, no stranger to the sample game (hear also: “Anaconda”), additionally doesn’t seem to fear “Super Freak” being a “reworking” still primarily associated with MC Hammer. So it is that she flagrantly incorporates “Super Freak” into her own derivatively-titled track, “Super Freaky Girl,” in a manner even more obvious than what Beyoncé did in “Break My Soul” with Robin S.’ “Show Me Love” (and before her, Charli XCX with “Used To Know Me”).
But why shouldn’t she? Enough time has passed since 1990 for a new generation to get to know the Rick James classic through yet another sample (the same cannot be said of “The Queens Remix“). And if anyone should have “the right” to do it, it’s a “queen” of rap like Nicki. Plus, it’s not exactly her first time sampling the track, with a song from her early pre-fame days called “Dilly Dally” also wielding James’ “Super Freak” vocals. With this updated edition, Nicki doesn’t leave James entirely out of the picture either, opening her own iteration with his immortal lines, “She’s alright/That girl’s alright with me/Yeah.”
From there, Minaj wastes no time in reminding people that she’s the OG when it comes to “being nasty” as she announces with casual conviction, “I can lick it, I can ride it while you slippin’ and slidin’/I can do all them little tricks and keep the dick up inside it/You can smack it, you can grip it, you can go down and kiss it/And every time he leave me ’lone, he always tell me he miss it.” So it is that Minaj reestablishes herself as the progenitor of modern rap raunch (though many would argue she took her own act from Lil’ Kim, but we’re talking about the post-2010s here). And, in many ways, “Super Freaky Girl” feels like a companion piece to “Anaconda,” with Minaj offering such immortal lines as, “He toss my salad like his name Romaine” to the sampled beat of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.”
The usual rap girl themes about how “broke boys don’t deserve no pussy” (a Cardi special from “Up”) are present in this single as Minaj declares, “Hold up, fuckboys, ain’t need no for you to roll up/Ain’t no need for you to double tap neither, scroll up.” It’s around this moment that the similarities between Megan and Nicki’s themes are especially noticeable throughout “Super Freaky Girl” (with Megan herself having a song called “Freaky Girls” featuring SZA, which itself samples from Adina Howard’s “Freak Like Me”).
It starts when Nicki announces, “One thing about me/I’m the baddest alive” yet, at the same time, you have Megan on Traumazine (“NDA”) insisting, “How many more ways can I say that I’m the baddest bitch?” Perhaps it’s something that needs to be decided via a battle of the pussy (whatever that would entail). Since both women seem very focused on the powers of their own.
While Megan brags, “I walk in and bitches grab they nigga, that’s a compliment/‘Cause you know in his head he wanna spread me like a condiment,” Nicki asserts, “His ex bitch went up against me, but she didn’t survive.” The overarching motif being that both women can dominate any other supposed female “threat.” Elsewhere, with Megan recently taking ownership of the term “pressure” through “Pressurelicious” featuring Future, Nicki “dares” to creep up on it with the lyrics, “On applications I write ‘pressure’ ‘cause that’s what I apply/P-P-P-Pressure applied, can’t fuck a regular guy.” Nor can Megan, who has also discussed her own specific dick needs and wetness levels on “WAP,” which Nicki examines in her separate graphic detail with the euphemism-laden lines, “Wetter than umbrellas and stickier than apple pie.”
Megan even beat Nicki to the punch on knowing the value of spelling words out in songs (as Gwen did with “B-A-N-A-N-A-S”) via her 2020 hit, “B.I.T.C.H.”—yet another single that samples (specifically from 2Pac’s “Ratha Be Ya Nigga,” in turn, a sample of Bootsy Collins’ “I’d Rather Be With You”). Nonetheless, Nicki sees fit to flex with her own spelling skills by proclaiming, “He want a F-R-E-A-K/F-R-E-A-K/A-K, A-K, A-K/E-A-K/F-R-E-A-K.” What it all results in is the none-too-gentle reminder that Nicki is still here, and she’s not letting any supposed “rap queen” take over entirely just yet. In this sense, you might call her the Madonna of the genre. Complete with the ass implants.
