#24, “Monster,” Kanye West (feat. Jay-Z, Rick Ross, Nicki Minaj, and Bon Iver) (2010)

150 Favorite Songs: #24, “Monster,” Kanye West (feat. Jay-Z, Rick Ross, Nicki Minaj, and Bon Iver) (2010)

I said that there were no Kanye songs on this list anymore, and I stand by it. Anybody who’s listened to “Monster” know that it’s a Nicki Minaj song. Kanye just put it on his record.

The song starts with Bon Iver doing his best impression of Vincent Price’s “Thriller” monologue, dropping his gentle midwestern woodsman bit in favor of turning up a surprisingly effective spooky factor. Then, following a piercing shriek, we get Rick Ross delivering a curtain-raising second intro, declaring himself—as is the song’s motif—to be a monster, either a vampire (“no-good bloodsucker”) or maybe the smoke monster from Lost (“as you run through my jungles, all you hear is rumbles”). There’s a heavy bass that, if you listen to “Monster” on a good system, shakes the room a little bit, along with two competing drum tracks. When Kanye does the chorus, the bass is what really hits you—the rest is just vibes, not really a coherent sentiment, just rhyming words like “gossip” and “stop it” and “profit” and “got it” and “concert,” and then Kanye does his own verse, which is mostly fine. He doesn’t really describe himself as particularly monster-like, except that his “eyes more red than the devil is,” which could just mean he’s got pinkeye? The most interesting bits of his verse are: when the bass drops out midway through and your car stops shaking for about thirty seconds; when he says “have you ever had sex with a pharoah? i put the pussy in a sarcophagus” which I think proves that Kanye has no idea how either a sarcophagus or a vagina works; and the final line, when he says “i’m living in the future so the present is my past,” which is the sort of perfect line that made me defend Kanye against all criticism from the years of like 2004-2018.

From there, we get a lazy Jay-Z verse where he just starts randomly naming monsters. We get the sasquatch, Godzilla and King Kong, the Loch Ness monster, plus less specific beasties—goblins, ghouls, zombies. It would have been funnier if he just kept going for the whole verse: “gobin, ghoul, a zombie with no conscience / a sexy witch, evil plants with sharp teeth / a guy in a scary clown mask named keith / mike, scully, and an evil merman / plus the slut gnomes of false berlin!” It is not one of Jay’s finest verses, in other words.

But who gives a shit about that, because then it’s Nicki’s turn. And she delivers one of the greatest rap verses of all time, an incredible show of talent and effort and one-upsmanship, making some of the most successful rappers who’ve ever lived look extremely old and slow by comparison. Most rappers will tell you that guest verses are a competitive sport—whether it’s explicit, like Kendrick’s “Control” verse, or more subtle, like Eminem’s “Renegade” verses. No less an authority than Bun B once told an interviewer exactly how you destroy the artist offering you a feature spot. In fact, I’m going to get out of the way for a minute and let him explain it:

[T]he first thing I do is I try to listen to whatever rapping is already on the track. I listen for cadence and melody to see how the track’s already been written, and to make sure that whatever flow or flows I decide to run with, or patterns or melodies that I decide to put into the song, that they’re not already in there. Then I try to see if there’s a different part of the subject matter that I can talk about. If there isn’t, I try to see if I can analogize it, break it down, flip it another way. If that can’t be done, the best thing I can do is pretty much out-rap the guy. And when I say out-rap the guy—say, if he uses ten syllables in a line, I’m going to use fifteen. If he uses fifteen, I’m going to use twenty, twenty-five. If he’s rhyming two or three words within two bars, I’m going to rhyme four or five words in two bars. I’m going to out-skill you… Basically, I’m going to take what you did, the bare-bones structure of what you were trying to do, how you were attacking the song, and attack it in pretty much the same way, just with more intensity to show you that you could’ve come harder. Like, I’ve been in situations where I’ve had to tell a cat how to rhyme his rhyme.

Nicki does those tricks—she uses more syllables, has more internal rhymes, ups the intensity—but that’s not all she does. She switches accents five (5) times during her verse; she varies her cadences wildly, starting with the same sort of mid-tempo that Jay and Kanye used, then going double-time, dropping lines like “monster giuseppe heel, that’s the monster shoe” a rhythm and rhyme scheme she runs through four times before she switches it again, jumping into a different voice every time she does, without so much as pausing for a breath. Lyrically, she stays on point the whole time, with no meanderings to explain that she doesn’t know what a sarcophagus is or to complain that she doesn’t get enough love—she takes the assignment of explaining how and why she’s a motherfucking monster very seriously. It’s her hair, her shoes, her friends, and most importantly, her talent that makes her a monster. so let me get this straight, wait, i’m the rookie? but my features and my shows ten times your pay? 50k for a verse, no album out, yeah my money’s so tall that my barbie’s gotta climb it, she raps, casually dropping internal rhymes and assonance that none of the dudes on the track bothered with. Then she switches the cadence and accent again, but keeps the rhyme scheme! climb it goes to climate and violent and then wine it and sign it and one-track-minded in the next four lines, and her voice bubbles over like she’s about to run out of air, except instead of doing that, she slows it down again, catches her breath by dropping to yet another cadence. And it goes like that for another twelve (12) bars, the beat changing beneath her and Nicki just riding it like Timotheé Chalomet surfing on one of the worms in Dune 2. (Timely reference, Dan! Your newsletter is so good.) At the end, she goes big with her voice again, jumping cadences and rapping like a cartoon character, letting an entire line just be her doing a monster-like howl before capping it off with the same line Kanye and Jay tried: i’m a motherfucking monster! But now it’s undeniable that Nicki Minaj is the final boss, and the other two are just henchmen. The song caps things off with Bon Iver coming back for a chill outro, just to let things come down from where Nicki left them, so the intensity of her “Monster” verse doesn’t overwhelm the next song on the album, as well, and make all the dudes on “So Appalled” sound old as shit too.

And, well, god damn. Not only is it one of the all-time-great verses anyone ever recorded, but the context of the whole thing makes it genuinely incredible. By the time Kendrick did “Control” there was no doubt that he was one of the greats, coming off a consensus album of the year instant classic. When Eminem did “Renegade” he was already the biggest star in the world. Prodigy’s verse on “Shook Ones Part 2” and Nas’s first verse on “NY State of Mind” are both hard as hell, but they’re on their own records and don’t have the same contrast that a guest verse brings. But Nicki Minaj, as she herself points out, didn’t even have an album out when she did “Monster.” Not only that, there just weren’t many women being given opportunities to rap with the Kanyes and Jays-Z and Rick Rosses of the world at that point. Women spent most of the first decade of this century marginalized in hip hop—you had Remy Ma and Trina and… not a whole lot of others being introduced. So there had to be a ton of pressure on Nicki when she did “Monster.” If the verse were just pretty good, it probably would have made the album, since everyone else’s verses are just pretty good, but it wouldn’t have launched her into superstar status immediately. And she knew that, because how could you not, so she went into the booth as hungry as anybody ever had, and she made a damn meal out of it.

What I love about “Monster,” which is to say what I love about that verse, is that you can just hear someone saying “this is my opportunity and there might not be another one, so let me show you exactly how good I am.”

That’s an energy I am constantly inspired by—the idea that when your moment comes, you not only have to be ready for it, but you have to reach down and find something even better than you’d done before, and make yourself undeniable. Nicki Minaj did that as well as anyone ever did, and even though most of Kanye’s music turns into ash when it hits my ears these days, I still get that same feeling when I listen to “Monster.”