Onika Tanya Maraj known by her stage name Nicki Minaj is a Trinidadian-born rapper. She was born in Saint James, Trinidad and Tobago, and moved to the New York borough of Queens when she was five. Nicki Minaj has evolved into many crazy personalities over the past 5 years since the start of her fast paced rap career. That has recently sky rocketed her to famous feats she probably couldn’t imagine for herself. Her parents are of mixed Indian and Afro-Trinidadian ancestry and she lived in Saint James with her grandmother until age five, because her parents were looking for a place to live in the Queens borough of New York City at the time. According to Nicki, her father drank heavily, took drugs and once tried to kill her mother by setting the house on fire. She attended Elizabeth Blackwell Middle School 210, where she played the clarinet. She graduated from LaGuardia High School. At LaGuardia, a school specializing in music and the visual and performing arts, Minaj participated in the drama program. She had initially planned to sing at LaGuardia, but lost her voice on the day of the audition. Nicki released her first mixtape in 2007 after releasing Playtime Is Over with Dirty Money Records. She released another mixtape in July 2008, titled Sucka Free, under the label Be. In April 2009, Nicki released a third mixtape and appeared in XXL magazine. She won the Female Artist of the Year award at the 2008 Underground Music Awards. Minaj released Beam Me Up Scotty, another mixtape, in April 2009 under the label of Trapaholics Records; it received positive coverage on both BET and MTV. Check out this throwback video after the jump. Nicki looks amazingly nothing like she looks now… » Read more..