Video Analysis: Nicki Minaj "Beez in the Trap"

Video Analysis: Nicki Minaj- “Beez In The Trap” Rapper Nicki Minaj’s video for her song “Beez In The Trap” shows the artist in the club filled mostly with women, half-naked dancers, and cameos of the handful of males in her entourage. The atmosphere in the club is more festival than a normal night. Meanwhile, Nicki Minaj displays her arrogant, cocky, diva-like attitude on camera while being surrounded by female “groupies.” Normally a video like this would have a male artist exploiting the women in the video. However, this is not the case; at the hands of a female artist, the women are exploited through disrespectful lyrics and inappropriate physical interactions with the female artists, while at the same time the producers exploit the women by showing extreme close-ups of their barely-clothed body parts. Viewers listening closely to the words of “Beez In The Trap” find that the chorus and the majority of the first verse performed by Nicki Minaj exploit women in a manner like that of most male rappers. The song starts with the chorus and the first line is, “B****es ain’t sh*t and they ain’t sayin’ nothin’,” of course the B-word referring the other women in the video. Going into the first verse, the next few lines imply that she may be bisexual by saying, “…and if she ain’t trying to give it up she get dropped off. Let me bust that U-ie, b***h bust that open, might spend a couple thou just to bust that open…” In translation, Nicki Minaj says that if the female doesn’t have sex with her, then she is dismissed from her (Nicki’s) group. A “U-ie” is when someone makes a hard U-turn to follow the very extremely attractive women in the car that just passed by in the opposite direction. The last few words indicate that the artist is willing to spend a few thousand dollars on the woman to have sex with her. If an individual were to read these lyrics without hearing the song or watching the video, he or she would think that this artist was a male rapper exploiting women