Nicki believes the multi-company music executive is part of a scheme within the media and the Internet to sabotage her work.
Nicki Minaj’s “Big Foot,” the infamous Megan Thee Stallion diss, is doing pretty well commercially… but not as well as the Queen demands. Moreover, she recently hosted a Twitter Spaces conversation with Joe Budden on Wednesday (January 31), during which she made some very wide-ranging claims. One of these was the Trinidadian superstar’s belief that the Houston MC wanted “a Rihanna moment” with her testimony about the Tory Lanez trial. In other words, Megan wanted undue sympathy for abuse, she posited, which stirred up a lot of controversy from fans and detractors alike. Regardless, Nicki thinks much of this negative reception is false.
Furthermore, among many other industry big-shots, she took aim at Lyor Cohen, a music executive who has been YouTube’s Global Head of Music since 2016. Specifically, Nicki Minaj accused him of allowing or implementing bots on her content to sabotage the success of “Big Foot” or paint it in a bad light, perhaps through negative comments or other metrics. “We have screenshots of the YouTube bots, it’s cr*zy,” she remarked during the Spaces conversation. “Lyor, you better not… Lyor, don’t play with me, n***a. I hope you ain’t around that company no more right now.”
Nicki Minaj’s Full Twitter Spaces Convo With Joe Budden: Listen
The First Lady of Young Money didn’t stop there, as she also made similar claims against Twitter and TikTok about how fake backlash and criticism is being amplified as a sabotaging method. While she didn’t provide any direct evidence of this, it’s become a common narrative across her recent rants, particularly directed against Megan Thee Stallion. This is nothing new for Nicki Minaj or her Barbz to reckon with, and part of why it’s a prevailing sentiment is because she finds so much overwhelming support from her fanbase that everything else seems moot. But don’t get it twisted: she’s still the biggest female rapper right now, and one of the biggest of all time.
As such, perhaps these complaints will quickly meet folks’ disapproval or ridicule. Still, as “HISS” builds up momentum for a No. 1 debut on Billboard, its response track “Big Foot” reportedly falls behind. But is that due to “bots” or people’s own reaction to the track’s quality and impact? Unfortunately for us, perhaps we’ll never really know…