It’s a smooth, pretty song that features Minaj further bridging the gap between her impressive skills as a rapper and evolving work as a singer.Īnd then, at the 1:20 mark it first arrives, sent down from the heavens as if from Jimmy Iovine’s all-giving hand: a Beats Pill XL portable speaker falling alongside a few purple tablets. Taken from her forthcoming album “The Pink Print,” “Pills and Potions” is a slow burn ballad featuring Minaj posing and looking beautiful as she sings and raps about anger, pills, love and frustration. With a few well-placed shots of a Beats-brand portable speaker amid the luxuriously filmed images of Minaj and her onscreen love interest, rapper the Game, the spot mixes marketing, message and meaning like a particularly vivid Saturday night drug cocktail. What, after all, is a clip but ad placement for an artist’s song? Still, the glaring one in Nicki Minaj’s new “Pills N Potions” clips blurs the line in impressive fashion. "But I spin off in a Benzie/I see the envy when I'm causin' a frenzy," she says, looking down on the haters from her house in the hills.Īfter coming back hard on the singles " Yasss Bish" and " Chi-Raq," the nearly four-and-a-half minute "Potions" is actually a huge move back into the pop game, setting Minaj up for what could be her biggest cross-over hit to date.Product placement and music videos go hand in hand. The haunting chorus comes back around, and then Nicki gets back to reminding whoever it is that she's going to forgive and forget the backstabbers, even though she knows they're jealous now that she's had her success. Nicki doesn't name names, but someone clearly messed her over. "Even though you out here looking so ungrateful/I'mma keep it movin' be classy and graceful." "They could never make me hate you/Even though what you was doin' wasn't tasteful," she says about someone who did her wrong. Once the verses start, Nicki has the urgency she promised in her bars, but she holds things at a simmer at first. Luke-produced song co-written by Ester Dean kind of gives us all those things, yet not in the way you'd expect.Īfter opening with a spare, haunting drum beat, Minaj comes in singing in a feathery, near-whisper about "Pills and potions/We're overdosin'/I'm angry but I still love you." The vocals are among the prettiest (and poppiest) we've heard from Nicki to date, especially when they get blown up with an echo effect in the second pass, where Nicki adds, "I still love, I still love, I still lu-uh-uhhhv." We wanted "Monster"-level bars, an incredible cameo and a hook that would haunt us in our sleep. There were a number of things we were expecting from "Pills N Potions," the first single from Nicki Minaj's upcoming third album, The Pink Print.