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kottke.org posts about Nicki Minaj

Chinese nicknames for American pop stars

Ethnographer Christina Xu discovered a few of the nicknames that young Chinese fans have devised for American pop stars.

Nicki Minaj - 麻辣鸡 (má là ji): a slant transliteration of “Minaj”. Means spicy chicken (ma la is a spice combo commonly used in Sichuan cooking).

Drake - 公鸭 (gōng yā): Literally “male duck”, as in the definition of a “drake”. I laughed out loud when I finally figured this one out.

Kanye West - 侃爷 (kǎn yé): a transliteration of Kanye. In Beijing dialect, this means someone who brags a lot with no actions to follow it up.

Update: According to @billyroh’s coworker, Rihanna is known to some as “the Pop Queen of Shandong Province”.


Adele rapping Nicki Minaj’s verses from Monster is everything

James Corden does this thing on the Late Late Show where he drives around with singers doing karaoke in a car. Yesterday, he picked up Adele and they drove around singing a few of her songs and then she did, without dropping a word, Nicki Minaj’s verses from Monster1 (starts at about the 10:15 mark). Soooo good. (via @djacobs)

  1. Which is, for my money, one of the rap performances of all time, album or no.