# Nicki Minaj's "Anaconda" Nicki Minaj's "Anaconda" is a 2014 rap single built on a sample of Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back," whose cover art and music video kicked off weeks of Photoshop parodies, reaction GIFs and YouTube spoofs[1]. The rollout turned a single Instagram cover reveal into one of the most meme-heavy pop moments of the summer[2]. ## Origin On July 24th, 2014, Minaj posted the single's cover art to her Instagram account with the caption "7/28 #ANACONDA on iTunes"[1]. BuzzFeed noted that the actual song was scheduled to hit iTunes on July 28th[2]. Within days the image was being Photoshopped into paintings and other album covers, with Hot New Hip Hop running a roundup of the edits[5] and MTV covering the meme on July 28th. The music video followed on August 19th, 2014, when the NickiMinajAtVEVO channel uploaded the official clip on YouTube[4]. According to Know Your Meme, the video pulled in over 26.6 million views and more than 87,000 comments in its first three days[1]. - **Platform:** Instagram (cover art) / YouTube (music video) - **Creator:** Nicki Minaj - **Date:** 2014 ## Overview Nicki Minaj's "Anaconda" is a rap track released in the summer of 2014 that leans on the bassline and hook from Sir Mix-a-Lot's 1992 song "Baby Got Back"[3]. The meme layer around it has two distinct pieces: the pink single cover, which shows Minaj crouched in a thong and quickly became a Photoshop template, and the jungle-set music video, which spun off reaction GIFs and parody uploads within hours of release[3][1]. The running joke across both formats is exaggeration. Bloggers cropped the cover into famous paintings and album sleeves[5], while GIF roundups isolated tiny moments from the video, including the closing lap dance Minaj gives Drake, and treated each as its own punchline[3]. The tone is unabashedly NSFW, which is part of why writers built entire listicles warning readers about it before showing the clips[3]. ## How It Spread The day after the video dropped, Mashable published "10 Moments From Nicki Minaj's 'Anaconda' Video That Will Destroy Your Innocence," a GIF-heavy recap that flagged the Drake lap dance and included a Twitter joke tying the clip to the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge[3]. BuzzFeed ran a companion post the same week collecting tweets and Tumblr reactions, with producer Hit-Boy quipping that "Nicki Minaj deserves free beats"[6]. Parody uploads landed fast on YouTube. On August 20th, YouTuber TimmyFellDownTheWell posted "Nicki Minaj – Anaconda PARODY," which cleared 50,000 views inside two days, and SpikeFe followed a day later with an "Official Parody Video" that picked up more than 1,000 views in its first 24 hours[1]. Music press including Stereogum and Rolling Stone covered the video's release the same week[1]. The remix life kept going into the fall. On October 19th, 2014, Tumblr user chenyakumo posted a mashup of "Anaconda" with PSY's "Gangnam Style" that racked up over 75,000 notes within a month[1]. ## How to Use The "Anaconda" meme typically works one of two ways. For the cover art, editors cut Minaj's crouched pose out of the pink single sleeve and drop it into an unrelated image, often a Renaissance painting or a classic album cover, letting the visual mismatch do the joke[5]. For the video, the common convention is to grab a two- or three-second GIF of one moment (the lap dance, a squat, a facial reaction) and post it as a standalone reaction to something completely unrelated[3]. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Nicki Minaj's "Anaconda"? A 2014 Nicki Minaj rap single that samples "Baby Got Back" and whose cover art and music video became the source of Photoshop parodies, reaction GIFs and YouTube spoofs[3][1]. ### Where did Nicki Minaj's "Anaconda" come from? Minaj revealed the single's cover art on Instagram on July 24th, 2014, and the official music video went up on the NickiMinajAtVEVO YouTube channel on August 19th, 2014[1]. ### What does Nicki Minaj's "Anaconda" mean? In meme use it points to the visual language of the rollout, the pink crouched cover pose and the jungle video, rather than the song's lyrics, and the joke is usually built on exaggeration of Minaj's body and choreography[3][5]. ### How do you use Nicki Minaj's "Anaconda"? People edit Minaj's cover pose into unrelated images such as classic paintings and album covers, or pull short GIFs from the video, like the closing Drake lap dance, and post them as reactions[5][3]. ### Is Nicki Minaj's "Anaconda" still popular? It is a classic 2014 music-video meme, with the cover-art Photoshops and GIFs from the video still tied to that summer's news cycle rather than to a current trend[3][1]. ## References 1. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDZX4ooRsWs]() 2. [https://www.buzzfeed.com/reggieugwu/nicki-minaj-bootylicious]() 3. [https://mashable.com/2014/08/20/nicki-minaj-anaconda/]() 4. [https://www.mtv.com/news/1881162/nicki-minaj-picks-favorite-anaconda-memes/]() 5. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nicki-minajs-anaconda]() 6. [https://www.buzzfeed.com/naomizeichner/internet-reacts-nicki-minaj-anaconda]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/nicki-minajs-anaconda Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library