by Diamond Brown & Lisa K. Stephenson
Image Credit: Jamie McCarthy | Getty Images
Picture this: You wake up in the morning, shower, brush your teeth, and get ready to start your day at a job where you consistently give 100%—far exceeding expectations and breaking records. Then, when employee of the year rolls around, you stand there, confident your name will be called… but it isn’t. No raise, no praise, no recognition.
How would you feel? We can’t say for sure that Nicki Minaj is feeling dejected, but if she were, would she be wrong? For the past seventeen years, Nicki Minaj has delivered lyrics, costumes, albums, tours, characters, and more, only to never receive a single Grammy despite her many efforts. This year, Minaj grossed over $108 million in tour sales. The ‘Pink Friday 2 World Tour’ is now the fourth-highest-grossing tour of all time for a rapper, and she is the only female rapper to achieve this—yet, still no Grammy awards.
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Nicki Minaj’s official submissions for the 2025 Grammy Awards included:
‘Pink Friday 2’ for
Album of the Year
Best Rap Album
Best Engineered Album
But instead, the nominees are:
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‘FTCU’ for
Record of the Year
Best Rap Performance
Best Rap Song
But instead, the nominees are:
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She also submitted for Song of the Year, Best Rap Performance, and Best Melodic Rap Performance, but to be fair, we believe the nominees for those categories are correct. What we wish to focus on is the ‘Best Rap Album’ category, where she was clearly deserving of a nomination, yet it went to albums like Alligator Bites Never Heal and Might Delete Later (we'll let you guess who the artists are for those albums).
Let’s face it—while there’s a strong chance Eminem may secure the win, it’s almost insulting that Doechii made it into the category despite the PF2 era being a global phenomenon. Not only did Minaj give her fans and the world new music, but she also launched business ventures (tastefully integrated into her Gag City brand) with both her shoe line and press-on nails, which her fans had highly requested.
The PF2 album featured vulnerable and raw songs like “Let Me Calm Down,” “My Life,” “Are You Gone Already,” and “Blessings.” We ask artists to dive into their pain and share it with the world, only to turn around and either laugh at them for doing so or, worse yet, completely ignore their efforts. Nicki Minaj is one of the few rappers who still delivers powerful storytelling through her music; she not only interacts with her fans regularly, but her journey is also documented through her work.