If there was any doubt that Nicki Minaj was the “it” girl of hip-hop, the Queens emcee wiped it away.

After going head to head with Kanye West when delivering her highly anticipated debut album on last week’s very crowded pre-Thanksgiving record release day, Minaj scored the No. 2 spot.

Minaj's “Pink Friday” sold 375,000 copies of the disc, behind West, who took the top spot after selling 496,000 of “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” according to Nielsen Soundscan.

With few female emcees on the charts, Minaj (who was recently profiled in The Times) has been hailed as a kind of savior with pop crossover potential. In the last half-decade, rappers such as Foxy Brown, Eve, Lil' Kim and Missy Elliott have been out of the spotlight, and with Lauryn Hill only vaguely on the scene, the absence of a powerful female voice has been notable.

The strong debut of “Pink Friday” is just another feat for Minaj. The last female emcee to push  first-week numbers like those was Elliott, whose 2002 album "Under Construction" sold 259,000 copies its first week out.

The rapper is no stranger to making chart history after her Annie Lennox-sampling single, "Your Love," became the first female hip-hop No. 1 to hit Billboard's rap singles chart since Elliott's "Work It" in 2002. She's also the female rapper with the most chart entries in one year on Billboard's 100 — she's had eight so far.

When we spoke with her earlier this year, the expectations for the album’s release weighed heavily on her mind.

“I think about the pressure to deliver, but it actually motivates me more than anything. I use that in a positive way,” she said about the attention placed on the disc. “Sometimes it’s a little scary. It’s funny, I’d rather people have low expectations of me than super-high expectations because then I just live my life like I want to exceed everyone’s expectations, so if you set them extremely high I feel like I have way more to do. Way more to prove.”

What Minaj’s big debut will mean for the future of female rap is uncertain -- especially as her would-be peers including Lil’ Kim definitely aren’t welcoming her with open arms (Kim released a diss track last week mocking Minaj, titled “Black Friday”) and fans continue to anticipate long-rumored returns from Elliott, Hill and Kim.

But despite all the naysayers, rapper Talib Kweli says Minaj isn't getting enough credit for what she is adding to hip-hop.

“Say what you want about her being a Barbie or whatever. But there are no artists out there who have elevated the level of the 16 bars to where she has it right now," Kweli said. She brags on one of her records that she’s never been on a record that didn’t make Billboard charts, and that’s not a fluke, because when Nicki goes on a record, whether it’s ‘Monster’ by Kanye West or ‘Bottoms Up’ by Trey Songz, she creates characters, changing her voice, doing inflections, doing everything emcees should be doing.

“Some people see all the pop and the marketing and it turns them off, but they don’t realize that the reason these artists are where they are is because they pay attention to the craft.”

-- Gerrick D. Kennedy
twitter.com/gerrickkennedy

Photo: Nicki Minaj poses at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards in Los Angeles in September. Credit: Mario Anzuoni / Reuters

On her breakout slow jam “Your Love,” Nicki Minaj raps, almost as if she’s speaking to herself, “Anyway, I think I met him in the sky. When I was a geisha, he was a samurai / Somehow I understood him when he spoke Thai.” It’s just another fantasy clattering around the head of this Queens-bred imagineer of urban music whose sense of identity is so whimsically schizoid that she makes Lady Gaga seem as fixed as Barbara Bush.

Switching accents, hair colors and musical styles, Minaj has absorbed a little something from most every bombastic female in the last 30 years of pop on her debut album, “Pink Friday.” Remember the Spice Girls and all their manufactured personas? Minaj rifles through all of them at warp speed — and it’s that very quality that makes her an electrifying talent and at risk for permanent disassociation from herself.

When she lands on a style, Minaj stays committed to it for the course of the song, even when it sounds awkward. The dis track, “Roman’s Revenge,” finds Minaj huffing and puffing with a hoary-sounding Eminem, slinging insults over a stagnant club-tech track. “Did It on ’Em” is aggressively scatological but with “A Milli” producer Bangladesh onboard, it at least fares better musically.

The fact that those songs are front-loaded on “Pink Friday” suggests that the lone female MC of Lil Wayne’s Young Money crew wants to keep credit with the crowd that followed her mix tapes but the tracks lack free-wheeling energy. They feel premeditated and, at worst, as mere pandering to a male demographic. It might be a failure of the format as much as Minaj’s — the most exciting rap and hip-hop isn’t captured in the smothering confines of the album; it’s in the tossed-off mix tape, the ultimate underground pass-around.

Even though her roots are elsewhere, Minaj sounds better on the “Pink Friday” tracks that are more squarely in the club R&B vein, which she almost always spikes with enough rap to remind anyone that she isn’t another Beyonce or even Sasha Fierce, not by any stretch. “Fly” makes good work out of its Rihanna cameo — while the dark glamour bird soars, Minaj skitters around her with her vulnerable but choppy rhymes, equal parts tough woman and big softie.

“Pink Friday” shows Minaj is on the cusp — considering her facility with accents, she could be the perfect person to find a new patois, one that’s built of separate musical languages but without breaking any of them down. Or she could get caught in the net, punished by the relentless category police or her own doubt of how far she can roam. But one thing is for certain: she’s got the fight and the imagination on her side — and a good neon wig never hurt a girl either.

--Margaret Wappler

Nicki Minaj
“Pink Friday”
Cash Money
Three stars

In the last few days, pop fans in the media have occasionally stepped away from the frenzy surrounding Kanye's new album and made note of the imminent release of another crucial album of 2010: "Pink Friday," the debut long-player from mixtape empress and guest rapper extraordinaire Nicki Minaj.

Maybe it's inevitable, but a backlash against this fresh female artist has begun, primarily caused by her decision to include several R&B-style tracks -- structured around Minaj's very Latin freestyle-influenced and often computer-manipulated singing -- to offset the harder, Eminem-style flow on monsters such as  "Roman's Revenge."

I appreciate the argument made by writers such as Judy Berman in Flavorwire -- that women rappers are so generally unmarketable that even this extraordinary one has to soften herself up and croon to please her label and, ostensibly, her ever-growing public. But I disagree that Minaj's embrace of softer, more romantic -- and more melodic -- material is weakening her tea.

Minaj caught everybody's eye with her costume drama: Like Lady Gaga, to whom she's been compared, she is an intelligent manipulator of the visual, using wild costumes to present herself in ways that challenge the conventional images of female rappers as either strict sex kittens or hardy homegirls. But this daughter of Queens, the most culturally diverse neighborhood in America, obviously spent her youth listening to all those accents on the subway. She takes the art of the fluid self into new territory by cultivating multiple vocal personalities, making her not just another fashion plate but a true spokeswoman for the split and shattered female self.

With several alter egos helping her define her rhyming style, from the nastily aggressive Roman Zolanski to the coquettish (but never dumb) Barbie, Minaj has not just set herself up to be a necessarily versatile pop star -- she has taken on the very complicated subject of how any woman, artist or not, manipulates her own consciousness to adjust to what life within a still-sexist society demands of her.

Minaj doesn't always succeed on "Pink Friday," and I'm not even sure how thought out her split-personality approach is. But I for one admire her attempts to show range, vocally and emotionally, and to confront how confusing life for young women can be.

Many women in pop are currently struggling to reconcile how to be both (Sasha) fierce and tender; ambitious and open-hearted; hard and soft. Many, in fact, are already incorporating rapping into their vocal palettes, though only a few critics have dared to call Ke$ha or Lady Gaga "rappers."

By showing her formidable skills as an emcee, Minaj risked becoming the designated savior in the criminally unbalanced, frankly sexist world of hardcore rap. But as Tina Turner said so long ago, we don't need another hero. We need well-rounded artists who can be in this game for the long haul. I think that's what Nicki Minaj is trying to become, and despite a few stumbles on her debut album, she is on the right path.

I'll be writing more on Nicki Minaj, Kanye West and the fantasy life of hip-hop next week.

-- Ann Powers

Photo: Nicki Minaj. Credit: Business Wire