Nicki Minaj: Is she really over pink hair and crazy looks?

Nicki Minaj is turning over a new leaf, sort of. She's not so much into pink hair anymore, but she doesn't mind posing with a pink poodle.

She's featured in the November GQ, and the picture is worth thousands more words than the interview, in which she claims, among other things, that she always planned to "tone down" her on-stage persona by her third album.

She's toned for sure in the picture, curvy in her usual cartoonish way, but it's the pink-and-turquoise matching poodles flanking her that evoke all the cooing.

She tells interviewer Taffy Brodesser-Akner that she no longer feels she needs to hide behind outrageousness, that her next phase is about success.
“I always thought that by the time I put out a third album, I would want to come back to natural hair and natural makeup. I thought, I will shock the world again and just be more toned down. I thought that would be more shocking than to keep on doing exactly what they had already seen.”
But maybe she decided on one last outrageous picture, just for GQ.

Meanwhile, she's not sure what all the fuss is about her new song/video, Anaconda. She refuses to talk about the possible hidden meanings about male obsession with the female form, saying it's just a "normal" video.
“I don’t know what there is to really talk about... I think the video is about what girls do. Girls love being with other girls, and when you go back to us being younger, we would have slumber parties and we’d be dancing with our friends....It’s just cheeky, like a funny story.”
But later, Minaj acknowledges that the video is about power and control, and also giving viewers "something to talk about again."
“I’m chopping up the banana. Did you realize that? At first I’m being sexual with the banana, and then it’s like, ‘Ha-ha, no.’ ”
"Maybe she had been messing with me all along," reflects Brodesser-Akner. You think?

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