Track Review: Nicki Minaj, ‘Red Ruby Da Sleeze’

After a year punctuated by standout guest verses (“Blick Blick”), excellent standalone singles (the Fivio Foreign-assisted “We Go Up”), and a history-making No. 1 smash (“Super Freaky Girl”), Nicki Minaj has returned with her first piece of new solo music this year: “Red Ruby Da Sleeze."

Tonally, Minaj’s new single is more in line with the confrontational energy of last year’s “We Go Up” and “Do We Have A Problem (feat. Lil Baby)” as opposed to the tongue-in-cheek levity of “Super Freaky Girl.” “Who the fuck told bitches they was me now? / I knew these bitches was slow, I ain't know these bitches senile,” she spits. The song’s verses are its peaks; Nicki rips through double (and, sometimes, quintuple) entendres, witty metaphors and punchlines, and sneak disses to fellow rappers Megan Thee Stallion and Latto. There’s no question that Minaj is pushing her pen on “Red Ruby”; even after a decade-plus in the game, she’s still delivering more intricate and intriguing rhymes than most of her peers, male or female. She fuses the Afro-Caribbean feel of the song’s Lumidee-indebted beat and her own cultural lineage into lines like “Super fakks, that's word to Super Cat / We ah rude gyal youth and we nuh tek back we chat.” The song’s production, which samples Lumidee’s classic “Never Leave You,” is Nicki’s most interesting beat in years; her ability to play with the “uh oh” ad-lib as both a reactionary sound effect and a pace marker helps the sample feel like more than just a nostalgia grab — despite being her second major single in a row to majorly rely on a familiar sample.

The issue with “Red Ruby” primarily lies in the song’s structure. While the verses are some of the best rapping and writing Minaj has done this decade, they’re separated by a chorus that feels thematically disconnected from the rest of the song, and an asinine bridge that recalls the onomatopoeia of “Megatron” in all the worst ways. The beat switch is wasted on a chorus that stunts the momentum of the verses and makes for an overall awkward structure that distracts from the strength of those verses. Moreover, from a conceptual standpoint, the “Red Ruby” persona reads as a reductive amalgam of Minaj’s past “Chun-Li” and “Queen Sleeze” alter egos. “Red Ruby” finds some differentiation by leaning into Minaj’s Caribbean influences and a Foxy Brown-esque approach to mixing New York rap with dancehall, but Ruby is basically saying the same things that the last two alter egos said. This stagnation holds “Red Ruby” back. In the same way that Jay-Z (4:44) had to forge his own blueprint for what a 50-year-old rapper with legitimate mainstream commercial pull looks and sounds like, Minaj will have to dig a bit deeper and do the same for female rap. She clearly has it in her, as evidenced by the verses, but she needs to fully commit so she’s not muddying some truly intelligent lines with vapid hooks.

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Score: 60