On Thursday, Nicki Minaj announced her retirement, tweeting that she was going to move into a retirement community in Boca Raton, Florida and finally take up knitting. Just kidding, she tweeted that she wanted to start a family!
Now, Minaj is backtracking a bit. “I’m still right here,” she tweeted in response to Barbz freaking out. “In hindsight, this should’ve been a Queen Radio discussion & it will be. I promise u guys will be happy.” She added that the tweet was “abrupt and insensitive.”
Let’s be real, is Nicki Minaj really retiring? So many rappers have claimed retirement during their career only to pick it back up again years later. When 50 Cent threatened to retire if Kanye West outsold him in album sales, he later admitted it was a ploy to sell more records and rile fans up. Lil Wayne said he’d retire upon finally putting out Tha Carter V, but he’s still out here, and has even now said that he’d never retire and that the initial retirement claims were just an outburst. Given their celebrity status, it can be hard to remember that constantly churning out music (especially if you need a hit record) can be exhausting for artists, and claims of retirement are a dramatic way to simply pull back (or threaten to pull back) from the hustle.
Nicki, just take a sabbatical!