Young Money rappers Nicki Minaj and Drake skipped out on XXL‘s Freshman Class edition because they felt like their buzz was so “massive” that they didn’t belong in the Freshman class. Nicki herself said that she and Drake felt like they deserved to be in the 2009 issue, not the upcoming 2010 issue, something XXL obviously missed out on. She further explained this to MTV last week on the set of her new music video for “Massive Attack.”
“Drake and I, we love XXL,” she told us recently on the set of her video for “Massive Attack.” “We just shot for XXL. With all due respect, we felt like we kinda had graduated from the freshman class. We felt that XXL missed the mark when they didn’t put us on the cover prior to that. They have to pay for that. They can’t say, ‘Hey, get on the next one.’ But we love XXL. That’s like a hip-hop classic. So we said, ‘Can we have something just a little bit more catered to us, so that we feel like we have still grown as artists, so we’re not at all disrespecting the magazine?’ They were cool with that.
“We didn’t dictate, we just asked nicely,” Nicki smiled. “Technically, we were freshmen when they didn’t put us on,” Drake told ImFlashy.com in February. “I feel now it’s just returning the favor.”
Hip-hop newcomers OJ Da Juiceman, Nipsey Hussle, Jay Rock, Pill, Donnis, Fashawn, J. Cole, Wiz Khalifah, Freddie Gibbs and Big Sean are all a part of XXL’s Freshman ’10 issue, which was released earlier this month.
