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Nicki Minaj is having her photo taken. I've never seen anything quite like it – so incisive, dramatic and bossy. "No close-ups," the rapping pop star growls. Then she kittens up to the camera, pouts, thrusts, threatens, giggles and pleads. Each pose lasts a split second. Blink and you miss it. Miss it, tough luck. The photographer looks shell-shocked. He's got more, and less, than he bargained for. "I think that's enough, thank you," she says. She walks over to him, wiggling her astonishing cartoon bottom like a rudder. "Let me see what it looks like," she says. "OK, that's enough.
For years, Minaj rapped for the stars – she had bit parts on hits by Ludacris, Lil Wayne, who mentored her, and perhaps most famouslyKanye West, for whom she contributed a brilliantly grotesque solo on Monster. In 2010, she featured on seven singles in the US charts – a record. Now she's on the verge of being ridiculously famous in her own right – and in the most unlikely manner. Minaj has just released her second solo album, and it has topped the US and UK charts. She has 11 million Twitter fans. Or rather, she did have before she decided on the spur of the moment to quit Twitter last week because a fan had leaked her songs. Typical Minaj. She says she might return, and presumes her fans will wait for her – she might be back by the time you're reading this.
Astonishingly, Minaj, best known for down and dirty raps that outfilth the boys, has found a new niche audience – little girls who still play with Barbies and wear long pink dresses in homage to her. She even calls her girl fans Barbs. She is now probably best known for a performance of Super Bass on the Ellen show, which she gave with eight-year-old fan Sophia Grace Brownlee, backed by her five-year-old cousin Rosie – it's been viewed on YouTube more than 38m times. In the song, a tribute to "a hell of a guy" who sells coke, and a warning to the ladies who might have their eye on him, Minaj raps: "When he give me that look/Then the panties comin' off, unh." On the Ellen show, the girls sing a cleaned-up version, but it is still disarming: a collision of two very different worlds.
Minaj, 29, was born in Trinidad and brought up by her grandmother while her parents made a new life for themselves in America. At the age of five she joined them in Queens, New York. She says she read her way through much of her childhood. "It was an escape." From what? "Bbbbrrrrrrrrrr," she says, with an impeccable impersonation of a ringing phone. "I don't know. In all the books I read, there were big houses and they had all this nice stuff and I always wished that could be my family."
She says her father was an alcoholic and drug addict. Sometimes, she has claimed, she would return home to find furniture missing – flogged to fuel his addictions. Her mother worked as a nursing assistant and did her best to keep Nicki and her younger brother safe. One night she dreamed her husband had burned down the house, and the next day told the children to sleep at a friend's house. That night, she says her father did try to burn down the house – Minaj's mother, the only one at home, managed to escape. Her father has said that her claims are exaggerated.
Her father sounds like a nightmare, I say. "He could be. Especially when he was drinking. It's weird, because when he was on crack, he was more peaceful, and when he would drink, he became loud and violent. Each drug has its own spirit. You could see it on the person and feel it in the room." Was she scared of him? "Of course. I was very, very afraid that he would snap. I wasn't afraid for myself but for my mother. He didn't do anything to me or my brother that made us feel we had to fear him.
"We moved so many times when I was a kid. We were always running away from him. Whenever we got to a new house, he would find us."
How old was she when her parents separated? She looks at me, surprised. "He's still with my mother. He went to rehab and cleaned himself up. Eventually they started going to church a lot, and he got saved and started changing his life. He's away from drugs now. He doesn't instil fear in people any more."
Did that shape her attitude to drink and drugs and men? "Yeah. Definitely to men. I vowed that I'd never allow any man to control me or to be an alcoholic or anything like that around me, because I don't want my children seeing that."
There is no hint of Trinidad in Minaj's voice. It is pure Scorsese Nooo Yoik. She talks quietly, reflectively, which makes the wig and leopardprint shorts and stockings seem a little incongruous. Underneath the pneumatic bosom and bottom (rumoured to be surgically enhanced, which she denies), the gold bangles, the screaming pink and green make-up, there's a rather delicate beauty – lovely big features in a small face. She refuses to talk about her body these days and looks aghast if it's suggested anything might have been worked on.
"Your teeth are beautiful," I say.
"Thank you," she says.
"Are they natural?"
She gives me a ferocious stare "Are your teeth natural?" she replies.
"You can tell they are," I say. "They're disgusting."
Now one of half a dozen big men sitting in the room with us stares at me. "I can see your plaque from here," he says, in an intimidating voice.
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