Kanye has some pivotal stuff on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy with Nicki Minaj and it’s pretty cool (she goes nuts in the song Monster, wow). So I was a little familiar with her music, but I never really entertained grabbing any of her stuff. Then I heard this song.
Let me digress for a moment, some of my best music discovery occurs during long car drives when I’m by myself. I just scan through the channels and try and find songs I like. There has been one particular region of the country that has been especially bountiful because I have to travel there for work, it’s the stretch of I-20 between Atlanta, GA and Augusta, GA (130 miles). In fact, one of the most pivotal music experiences of my life happend there – I heard Paranoid by Kanye West, which led to 808s and Heartbreaks, which led to Kanye’s whole catalog, which led to a more-than-passing interest in hip-hop and wrap. Go figure.
It was on this same stretch of road a few weeks that I heard Moment 4 Life by Nicki Minaj and Drake and I really liked it. Her opening stanza is an awesome, profanity-free, motivational poem that ends with, “greatness is what we on the brink of.” After the chorus, Drake chimes in with standard male wrap stuff, plenty of the n-word and f-word. It’s not bad. He ends his portion with, “everybody dies but not everybody lives” before Minaj kicks in with the chorus.
It’s on Minaj’s album Pink, which I’m batting around getting, but I’m not ready to take the leap.