Nicki Minaj, a few days after having Drake sing with her in Toronto, invited someone in Brooklyn she says was a huge inspiration to her life and career: Cyndi Lauper.
“I have been speaking about this woman in my interviews since I first began rapping,” Minaj said to the sold out crowd at the Barclay Center Wednesday on the most recent stop of the hip-hop star's Pink Friday 2 World Tour.
Lauper, the 70-year-old pop singer who broke through in the '80s, is from Brooklyn - if you couldn't tell from her accent - and was warmly received.
“Make some noise for this icon, this legend,” Minaj demanded of the 19,000 adoring fans when Lauper appeared on the stage in a colorful blazer during "Pink Friday Girls."
The song from Pink Friday 2 contains a sample of "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," which was Lauper's debut single in 1983 from her 7x platinum album She's So Unusual.
The women first met each other in 2010 at the Grammys back when Minaj was wearing crazy wigs and costumes.
"This is crazy. People don't know how obsessed I am with you," the rapper told the singer, asking if she had seen her duet/cover of "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" with Katy Perry at the VH1 Divas Salute the Troops.
"We were channeling you because we love you," she said told Lauper.
"This was the first time I ever met her," Minaj continued more than a decade ago, saying she had always listed her as a fashion icon.
Minaj is riding the wave of the success of her fifth album, Pink Friday 2, which spawned her first #1 single, "Super Freaky Girl," which contains a sample from another '80s legend, Rick James.
Of the 31 songs in the Brooklyn set, nearly half were from the new album that dropped December of '23..
The tour has been lauded as the most successful ever from a female rap headliner. In early April the concert analysis firm, Touring Data, declared Minaj the hip-hop performer with the most shows to gross over $2 million a night.
Besides Uncle Sam and Nicki's accountant, that milestone is important when people debate who is the Queen of Rap.
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Drake told her fans in The 6 where he stands when he gave her props in Canada.
“Toronto, make some noise for the greatest female rapper of all time Nicki, I love you,” he said on the second night of her tour there.
Minaj, a native of Queens, NY, is taking a week off for some home cooking and will be back on the road May 8 in New Orleans as the tour hits a few more US cities before going to Europe.
Tickets are available on Nicki's website.
