Nicki Minaj burst back on the scene this summer with her latest single, demonstrating once again her penchant for dropping attention-grabbing astute songs and videos. The music video for Anaconda broke Vevo’s record for the most views in 24 hours, garnering 19.6 million hits the first day it was released. Yet I say astute because Minaj proves she has the ability to create work that reflects the spirit of our contemporary cultural condition.

Nowhere is this clearer than in her 2012 music video for Stupid Hoe. When I’ve expressed this opinion in the past, I’ve often been met with looks of derision, disbelief, and even laughter. I’m being quite serious.

At first glance, the music video directed by Hype Williams screams postmodernism. A diss track aimed at Lil Kim, the song basically consists of a Marilyn-styled Minaj repeatedly shouting “stupid hoe.” The video is a seizure-inducing projection of blaring neon colours, a chaotic pastiche of references to other pop videos. It is fragmented, distorted, sardonic, and contains a monkey. 

But other elements of Stupid Hoe indicate that these features are just the death spasms of the previous cultural condition.  For instance, the video defies postmodern deconstruction according to rigid lines of race, gender, and sexuality. As a female rapper inhabiting a typically male-dominated genre of music, Nicki portrays herself as un-human, arguably asexual and non-binary. When she reveals her body in Stupid Hoe, it is depicted as an animal, a Barbie doll, or with bush baby eyes.

These multiple personas also point toward her refusal to be categorised. Minaj’s ability to shift between speeds, voices, outfits, and hairstyles suggests a frenzied crisis of identity. We see this in her recent rejection of a theatrical colourful look for a more minimal and sexual one in Anaconda. Indeed, anxiety over identity – including anxiety over diet, health, geopolitics, and climate change – is characteristic of our contemporary culture.

What we also witness in contemporary culture is the simultaneous adoption of modernist sincerity and postmodernist irony, earnestness and detachment, desire and apathy. We lack today the naïveté and disillusionment which characterized the previous cultural conditions so we alternate between the two, conscious of their irreconcilability.

Stupid Hoe trumpets its stupidity in its own title and then bashes the listener over the head with it for three and a half minutes. By stupid, I don’t mean that it’s vulgar or obscene, but that it’s vapid, trite, and shallow. It has the complexity of a text message and the sophistication of Geordie Shore. You can tell that Minaj knows this too as she glares into the camera before giving an effervescent wink. Yet her grimace never breaks into a smile. She’s dead serious in conveying the idea that Kim really sucks.

We are witnessing today the democratisation of culture, which is the reason for this kind of vacuity. The viewer or listener actively participates in it through voting on a TV talent show or by leaving comments under the Stupid Hoe YouTube video. In this way, the viewer is effectively taking part in creating culture. This also means that the standards and what counts as art and culture are changing. We can interpret this change as an increase of expression and empowerment of cultural participants or an increasing consumerism, conformism, and vapidity of our cultural products.

Popular culture merits a more serious consideration and appreciation than it is often given. The distinction between low and high is no longer a qualitative one. Moreover, even bad culture contains the potential to teach us about ourselves. So unless we look outside the academies and the museums and even beyond the postmodern focus on TV and movie screens, we will have only a partial vision of our cultural condition. 

Minaj is due to drop her new album next month, but in a hundred years’ time future generations will look back and associate us with our cultural output. This is why we must understand a music video like Stupid Hoe. In the same way that we think of the Mona Lisa when we think of the Renaissance or of Andy Warhol’s Marylins when we think of Pop Art, certain works will come to represent what will have been our cultural zeitgeist. My hope is that one of them will be Nicki Minaj’s Stupid Hoe.