Nicki Minaj Won’t Play ‘Starships’ Anymore—Does She Owe Us That?
I suppose we should’ve seen it coming. In an interview with Pollstar Live in 2020, Nicki Minaj declared the hit that launched her into stardom, “Starships”, was “ew”. “Why did I do that?’ I really think that every time I hear it,” she recoiled.
On December 31, 2023, Minaj headlined New Year’s Eve at E11EVEN in Miami, where tickets started at $375 per person. Barely 30 seconds into “Starships”, Minaj told the DJ to cut the backing music. “Hold on. Psych, psych, psych, psych,” she said. “I don’t perform that song no more, y’all.” The crowd jeered. “I don’t like it, what y’all want me to do? Stupid song.”
The track was promoted as the lead single from her 2012 album Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded. It was lauded for demonstrating Minaj’s range with its massive dancefloor-focused production and it peaked at No. 5 on the Hot 100. Was the crowd right to boo?
Minaj certainly isn’t alone in her aversion to doing the thing that made her famous, but many other examples I could find are more nuanced than “I just don’t like it”. Take AC/DC for example. “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll)” is arguably one of the band’s biggest hits, but when lead singer Bon Scott died at age 33 during a drinking binge, his replacement Brian Johnson said he’d never perform it out of respect for his predecessor.
Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven”, meanwhile, comes from a place of immense trauma and sadness; it was written following the death of his four-year-old son who fell from the window of a New York apartment block in 1991. Clapton just doesn’t want to go digging around in those emotions anymore. “I really have to connect with the feelings that were there when I wrote them. They’re kind of gone and I really don’t want them to come back, particularly,” he told the Associated Press in 2004.
In 2014, rapper Talib Kweli Greene penned a piece defending Lauryn Hill—one of the greatest rappers of all time who famously (or infamously depending on who you’re talking to) released one album, The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill, in 1998, stopped playing “the hits” at shows, and frequently turned up over an hour late to said shows. “The great thing about making art for yourself is that if you do it well, millions of people will relate to it and embrace it,” Greene wrote.
It all boils down to the age-old question of what artists owe us, if anything at all. LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy grappled with this in two meta commentaries: First in 2010’s This Is Happening album with the lyrics: “You wanted a hit / But maybe we don’t do hits”, and again—in a rebuttal—in the naming of their 2012 documentary film chronicling the band’s breakup performance at Madison Square Garden: Shut Up and Play the Hits.
In the bleakest and perhaps most unromantic of terms, artists provide a service and we, as fans, pay for that service, upon which we attach certain expectations when we relinquish our hard-earned money. “Nicki Minaj owed her fans a performance of her hits. Her fans are the reason she is able to be up there, performing and making a living from her music, as are those hit songs,” singer-songwriter Caley Rose said. “I get that we singers and performers can get sick of singing our hits repeatedly, but it’s literally her job to make the performance of the song new and interesting to herself every time she performs them. It’s up to her to make new choices and keep the songs fresh.”
Of course, there are elements of all of our 9 to 5s that we enjoy less than others, but we do them regardless and without complaint because it’s what’s expected of us. Can you imagine if, one day, I refused to perform a mundane task because “I don’t like” to do it? I may not get fired right away, but if my uncooperative attitude continued, I’d be shown the door eventually.
Not everyone agreed with me, though. “Artists evolve; they change their style, create new music, and sometimes that means outgrowing some of their old songs,” said Lindsey Lee Seidman, Associate Director of Campaign Marketing at TodayTix Group. “If a song feels inauthentic to their current performance, they have the right to choose not to perform it.”
Cassie Petrey, co-founder of marketing and music management firm Crowd Surf told me this: “If an artist feels uncomfortable playing a song, they shouldn’t do it. As a fan, why would you want to watch an artist you love perform something they don’t want to perform? I get that it can be disappointing, but I would rather be disappointed than make somebody do something they don’t want to do.”
So what’s the answer here? I can’t help but feel there has to be give and take on both sides. Mutual respect shouldn’t be too great an ask and while obviously Minaj is allowed to perform whatever the hell she wants, there may be consequences to that. If fans stop buying tickets to her shows, she loses out on a chief revenue stream.
Being able to make a living (Minaj’s net worth is an estimated $150 million so a considerable living at that) from your art is a privilege very few artists get to experience. By the same token, artists should be able to perform in a way that feels authentic. Just don’t lose sight of what got you there.
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