Nicki’s Menagerie

I’ve somehow found myself targeted at the intersection of tattoos and hip hop and comedy news. Hence my involuntary yet fervent investment in the Ariana/Pete/Mac Miller controversy.
What I did NOT expect though is to be served up articles about Nicki Minaj’s sexual predator/convicted murderer boyfriend who just got them both dragged on social media. The temporary nature of this relationship seems BLATANTLY obvious to me, and, I’m assuming to most people with any sort of critical thinking ability or, any memory at all of how fickle celebrity relationships are. Especially when one of them is one of the biggest stars in the world and the other one is essentially a vessel for bad decisions.
That makes it even more enjoyable when I get this update from People mag that Niki has not only encouraged this dude to get a tattoo of her name, BUT it’s also horribly designed, executed, on his neck and HIS VERY FIRST TATTOO.
To top it off, she announced it with a selfie video of her fixing her hair and then asking him if it hurt when she blips over to the scrawled nightmare on his poor neck. It’s equally painfully fresh and almost unforgivably dated. She then blips back to her main focus, now and always: herself.
The interaction feels familiar yet odd.
Like an old video of Paris Hilton pursing her lips before showing us the new diamond encrusted collar she got for her impossibly frail chihuahua. The dog’s head dipped low, under the immense weight of the new accessory.
The permanence of tattoos has started to shed real light on the impermanence of almost everything else right now.
Paris Hilton’s dogs were all disposable. We refused to believe it because dogs are alive and how in the world can you just toss them away when their necks break from a 1-foot-fall out of a limo? And yet when that literally happened, it was replaced and she was barely even late to the unveiling of her butter statuette at whatever club was plowing their last buck into this gasping final breath of an event.
The new chihuahuas, the new shrugs of existence are people. We’re becoming as swipe able as our dating app pics.
This new Niki accessory — tragically, hilariously, named Petty, has been branded for the moment. The worth of his life given it’s perfect ratio of time to her own image in her story. In History. Herstory?
The only real difference here is that I genuinely felt bad for the Chihuahuas. But Petty is a joke to me. A real life gag, an inevitable punchline that I can see coming from a mile away that, if it was written into a script I would scoff at the laziness of it. But the fact that at some point in the very near future, their relationship will become way too much drama for her to justifiably waste anymore of her highly valued effort on, and he’ll be tossed from the limo still sporting his branded necklace makes me laugh. And I feel no remorse. Maybe because he chose this life and the fact that he couldn’t recognize it’s catastrophic end screaming towards him even at its outset makes me shrug too.
Life is funny in that way I guess.
Happy Holidays everyone!