Nicki Won’t Take Your Shit

Nicki, 31, grew up in Queens and attended LaGuardia, the high school from Fame. She says her father once tried to burn down her house while her mother was inside. She did odd jobs after school: She was a customer-service rep for a while, but that didn’t go great. “I like dealing with people, but I don’t really like a lot of bullshit, so maybe customer service wasn’t the best job for me.” She was fired from a waitressing job at a Red Lobster after she followed a couple who had taken her pen into the parking lot and then flipped them the bird. I asked her if it was a special pen. “No,” she said. “It was the principle.”

The principle, the pickle juice — Nicki is a model for us all when it comes to Not Accepting Bullshit, especially with the author of your magazine profile tries to insert subtext in your art where there is none. On the video for “Anaconda”:

“I don’t know what there is to really talk about,” she says. “I’m being serious. I just see the video as being a normal video.”

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.