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Nicki Minaj Covers TIME’s ‘100 Most Influential People’ Cover

blame it on Shake April 21, 2016
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TIME Magazine just released their annual “100 Most Influential People” issue and Nicki Minaj has landed one of the covers.

Now, if you’re confused on how that could be possible, Lil Wayne offered his two cents with a brief write-up about the 33-year-old pop star.

You know, in New York they used to have these street DVDs. It just so happened that I appeared in one, and when I looked at the finished product, Nicki Minaj was on a part of the DVD. I was like, “Woooooow!” She was just being Nicki without the glitz and glamour. When I heard the first two and four bars, it wasn’t even about her rapping better than any female rapper. It was about, man, she’s rapping better than other rappers—period.

I always wanted more for my artists and saw Nicki’s potential from the first moment I laid eyes on her. She’s reached far beyond everything I would have imagined. Man, she’s so influential and doing all the right things. She’s an icon, a boss and a role model to all these young girls out here on how to do it the right way. Her work ethic speaks volumes and has yielded these results. The scary thing is she’s still going. Ha! Nicki Minaj will go down as one of the best to do it in the history of music. — Lil Wayne

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In total, six covers were released. The other five influential people being Leonardo DiCaprio, Priscilla Chan & Mark Zuckerberg, Christine Lagarde, Lin-Manual Miranda, and Priyanka Chopra.

Kendrick Lamar was also listed, but didn’t receive a cover.

Photo: Erik Madigan Heck

The first time I heard To Pimp a Butterfly was on a crowded plane heading to Jackson, Miss. With headphones on, there I was, bobbing my head and having audible conversations with myself because that album made me feel—moved and troubled, challenged, uplifted, angry, skeptical and raw. Far from creating “conscious rap,” Kendrick Lamar has evolved a new genre of movement music that asserts no answers but raises hard questions and brings us together to take them on. Thank God for his trip to South Africa, which he says made him want to put everything he was seeing and experiencing into an album that could translate that experience to someone in the ghettos of Compton, Calif. Kendrick should be applauded for inviting us to face things that are uncomfortable, for celebrating our will to survive and for being audacious enough to grapple with the questions that we all need to answer if we ever hope to get free. — Alicia Garza