So here's a question: What is the most watched music video by a black solo artist? If you guessed something by Jay Z or maybe Rihanna, you'd be wrong. It's actually "Super Bass" by Nicki Minaj, #21 on our top videos of all time chart.
"Super Bass" is Minaj's top music video by a long shot. By more than double, actually, since at the time of writing it has over 345 Million views, and her next most popular video, "Starships", has around 142 million. That's a big difference for such a popular artist, and one as visual as Nicki Minaj.
So what is it about this video that makes it so popular? Let's check it out! Today we're watching 2011's "Super Bass" by Nicki Minaj, directed by Sanaa Hamri.
"Super Bass" is divided into three acts. It starts off with basically Nicki in white and pink cycs with speakers mounted on ice, intercut with various objects that are either pink or made of ice. She also has a dance troupe that is made up of people that roughly resemble her, with pink wigs, jean shorts, and a white top.
The second verse finds Minaj in some sort of polar pool where she is drinking some Pepto Bismol looking drink out of a champange glass. There are some muscular dudes hanging around the pool and she has some interaction with them. The third act is a group lap dance with glow in the dark elements.
I think it's important to remember what Nicki Minaj tried before she hit on this forumla that she and Hamri tried for "Super Bass". The nearest precedent this video has is probably Hype William's 2010 video for her "Massive Attack" song, which features over the top styling and, coincidentally, a pink sports car. The issue was that "Massive Attack" wasn't a very successful song and that limited the exposure for the video. Williams and Minaj would have more success later on with videos like "Stupid Hoe" and "Va Va Voom", but maybe it wasn't the right time for "Massive Attack". Nicki worked with directors like Director X and Diane Martel in 2010, but Minaj was relatively normally styled for those videos, and they were relatively mild hits.
Hamri and Minaj's collaboration was the right video at the right time for the right song. "Super Bass" was distinctly more catchy than anything else on Pink Friday, and it recieved wide radio play over the summer of 2011. It was also a fairly family-friendly song when it was edited, as evidenced by the fact that Ellen had little girls in princess tiaras singing it on her show. That doesn't happen for a lot of songs, or at least I hope it doesn't.
The video is smart to accentuate that aspect of the song's appeal and shows some real restraint in over-sexualizing Minaj or doing anything too weird. Instead, a lot of focus is put on her facial expressions and her overall styling. The first thing we see is Minaj's face, and our gaze is pretty much directed there for the entire video. For someone with a famous butt, her bottom half is submerged in oblique pink water for a signicant portion of the video, and we barely see it for the rest. It's definitely a sexy video, but we see more skin from the dudes than we see from Minaj. Even the white dude by the pool.
This theme is carried throughout the video, and even though the last glow in the dark segment is a little weaker than the first two thirds, we still end up with a fantastic video that set an image that Minaj has been interating on ever since.
