Nicki The Nazi? Nicki Minaj channels Hitler in her new video, ‘Only.’

 Want attention? Emulate Hitler.
  Rapper Nicki Minaj has typically kept her sexual antics in an erotic, not a political, context, as she did here at the MTV EMA on Sunday, but not in her new video, "Only."

 

Nicki Minaj just employed that sure-fire trick in her new video, “Only.”

The five-and-a-half minute clip, which went viral on Monday, uses animation to depict the top- and bottom-heavy rapper as a ruthless, but sexy, fascist surrounded by Nazi-esque troops and flanked by banners than look like leftovers from the set of Leni Riefenstahl’s sieg heil of a propaganda coup, “Triumph of the Will.”

Her record label’s initials — YM for Young Money — are twisted into a swastika-like shape.

Minaj’s video, directed by Jeff Osborne, was viewed nearly 3 million times on YouTube on Monday. Meanwhile, the twitterverse erupted in outrage.

“Thanks for blatant nazi imagery in your new video! Really great allusion to persecution & genocide,” tweeted Melissa Morgan.

“Making a Nazi themed video w/yourself as a sexy Hitler & your initials looking like a swastika? Disrespectful,” echoed the tweet of Troye Sivan.

Neither Minaj nor Osborne has commented, but Osborne has, oddly, been retweeting numerous tweets about the video — positive and negative — without embellishment.

The Anti-Defamation League sided with the outraged, labelling the video in a statement “a new low for pop culture's exploitation of Nazi symbolism. The irony should be lost on no one that this video debuted on the 76th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the ‘Night of Broken Glass’ pogrom that signaled the beginning of the Final Solution and the Holocaust.”

Actually, that irony is almost certainly entirely lost on Minaj. The deepest sin of her video isn’t the stupidity. It’s the crassness.

Appropriating the imagery of Hitler’s Final Solution in this context has no purpose other than to generate clicks and chatter. The lyrics of the song, after all, address the people with whom Minaj has or has not had sex — and how she likes it when she does.

It’s certainly not the first time Minaj has done something to get everyone talking. But typically her antics have kept the eroticism in a sexual, not political, context.

She’s certainly not the first star to employ Nazi imagery in pop culture. Charlie Chaplin mocked Hitler in his 1940 film “The Great Dictator,” and decades later, Mel Brooks made a satiric hero out of a Nazi in “The Producers” to explore the limits of bad taste, and to undermine the power of evil imagery.

Alan Parker’s 1982 film for Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” also used totalitarian images. But the Hitlerian figure in that seminal rock movie was a clear symbol of fear and repression. Minaj’s Erotic Adolf persona makes her a stylish sex object. S.S. & M, anyone?

Ultimately, Minaj’s video doesn’t make any serious statement at all, other than to scream, “Please talk and write about me as much as you can.”