James Devaney
Nicki Minaj has had a really, really hard few weeks. No, I’m not talking about her former assistant’s accusations that Minaj had committed tax fraud, and that her husband, Kenneth Petty, was continuing a well-documented pattern of abuse by harassing her female staff members. I’m talking about the daunting, terrifying, and formidable undertaking of having to rename her new single.
“What should the name of #FreakyGirl be y’all? Yep we have to change it,” she tweeted in the sweltering final hours of July. Until then, Minaj had repeatedly teased the song as “Freaky Girl” on her socials, to the tune of millions of views and excitement from the Barbz over her imminent return. But, at the last minute, her team had run into an unexplained legal wall over the song title. Minaj didn’t say whether the name change had anything to do with the song’s sample of the Rick James classic “Super Freak,” just that she was offering three new options for fans to vote on: “He Want A Freaky Girl,” “Super Freaky Girl,” and “Nick James.”
A week later, Minaj dropped the cover for the single—officially called “Super Freaky Girl” despite “Nick James” eking out .6% more of the fan vote—on Instagram. “Thank you for over 200k votes but we could not legally use the name Freak or Freaky Girl,” she wrote. “You’re stuck with this.”