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Trinidad-born rapper and the world’s oldest Barbie doll, Nicki Minaj, gave Trinidad and Tobago another public toast this week. Once again, it was with Gramoxone.
Minaj, a judge for the popular United States television show “American Idol”, compared Trinidad and Tobago to Liberia and said she was lucky to get out alive while bonding with Liberian refugee and performer Zoanette Johnson.
“I’m so proud that this place gives people like you and people like me, who came from absolutely nothing, a place that we didn’t think we’d make it out alive from,” said Minaj. “It gives us the chance. Thank you.”
(Courtesy Thesweet7.com)
Minaj, who grew up in St James, did not explain whether she considered hell to be long waiting lines for jerk chicken or frustrating searches for a parking spot; although neither should apply to her. The talented rapper was just five-years-old when she migrated to Brooklyn.
It is not the first time Minaj choose to give her homeland a slap to the face instead of a high-five.
In an interview with the UK Guardian last November, Minaj said 250,000 people on the island are living with Aids, which is just the type of thing to encourage a boom in our tourism industry. The 2010 UNAids global report actually indicated that there were 15,000 people living with the disease here. (The Guardian later corrected Minaj with a footnote—in the article not her rear end).
Mr Live Wire believes that every family has at least one member with a combustible combination of high self-regard and low common sense. That relative, by unwritten law, is usually kept at least six feet from the microphone at weddings and funerals.
Sport Minister Anil Roberts is not aware of that rule, which is not to suggest that he is necessarily the said relative in his family.
In 2010, Roberts made the Brooklyn rapper the headline act in a “Localise Itt” concert that also featured around a half-dozen local performers, including then reigning Road March champions, JW and Blaze.
Forever the joker, Roberts said Localise Itt would show “everything local as being just as good, if not better than anything else out there from anywhere else.”
He then promptly paid Minaj $382,000 of taxpayers’ money to turn up while the real local acts got $40,000 in appearance fees to split among themselves.
Roberts, at the time, described Minaj as “the number one Trinbagonian out there” and said her appearance “generated benefits far outweighing by 1000 per cent what we have spent.”
The Sport Ministry apparently sees much less value in Trinidad and Tobago athletes who are not named George Bovell.
The national football team, which had to endure several insults from Roberts’ Permanent Secretary and mini-me Ashwin Creed last year, is still owed match fees for its successful 2013 CONCACAF Gold Cup qualifying campaign.
Maybe “Soca Warriors” captain Jan-Michael Williams should put on weave, fake eyelashes and high heels and throw in a couple four-letter words to get a cheque.
But, going by Roberts’ poor judgment thus far, the Sport Minister might end up asking the goalkeeper out for dinner.
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Who really cares what did no talent pretend American (censored) says?????
I read the above comments and I honestly believe some Trinidadians are still in denial about the place they live……I totally agree with Nicki Minaj a born and legitimate Trinidadan rap artist or not…..
Again we have to think that when someone is ashamed of who they are and where they come from, they should not mention that place. This is just another American performer performing to get headlines. Everyone in the world knows TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO IS THE MOST LOVING PLACE IN THE WORLD!!!!!!!!!!! Nicki it is better to have kept silent and we thought you an —— than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. Don’t you think is time our Tourism Ministry responds to claims like this?
Who the hell is Nikki Minaj? I don’t even care what she says because she talks plenty and says nothing anyway. As far as I am concerned she is not a Trini and should not be speaking for us, to us, or on behalf of us. But she better don’t mess up, because one offence in the US will make her a deportee to Trinidad so fast her head would spin and she would become nauseous.
I have no idea why people follow/like this talent-less loser… She always trying to act special across there because she’s from here but then spits venom towards us. Fact is even though she was born here, it doesn’t make her a ”Trini” she was far too young to even remember anything about our country. Wish people would stop paying attention to her and they better not waste our tax payers’ money on her stupid ass again…
When I heard that comment, I had a reflex reaction: oh no she didn’t just diss T&T so quietly and calmly!! For real?!
Did Nicki’s family get admitted to the US as asylum-seekers?