What’s new is new again. What’s old is old again. And we’ve canceled ourselves out yet again.

Nicki Minaj continues her marvelous balancing act with her hit single, “Super Freaky Girl,” a riff on MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” Rick James’s “Super Freak.” But is that a good thing?

Some critics say no. Despite’s the song’s popularity (it peak at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 upon release and apparently marked the biggest debut for a female rapper on Spotify), some pop culture purveyors have slammed it due to its heavy reliance on the Rick James music underpinning the rap.

Maybe these critics have a point; but what are they fapping about? Since the dawn of the genre, rappers have used the instrumentals of pop/funk’s past to lay down their skillful rapid-fire words (James is a credited writer on the track, and his voice is sampled in the intro). So “Super Freaky Girl” is no different in its use of “Super Freak” as the hook to bring listeners in, young and old alike. And that’s what it did for me.

As a middle-aged man who grew up on 80s music, I loved that Rick James track as a youngster. It was only natural that my ears perked up when I heard the Nicki Minaj take on the radio. It was a familiar “welcome in” to the song. And it wasn’t just a throwback to my early childhood; when I entered high school in the early ’90s, MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” also sampled/interpolated the “Super Freak” beat. So this is the third time in my life I’ve been drawn to the same track, instrumentally speaking.

So what else makes “Super Freaky Girl” fun? Well, it’s a pure club banger. If you ever hear it over the traditional airwaves on a commercial radio station, you’re hearing a heavily edited version, because this song is diiiiirty…basically, it’s Nicki’s unashamed, proud overture to her sexual conquests and a user manual on how she’ll “do it” for the conquests that are still to come (hehe).

James’s “Super Freak” was risque in 1981, even if it’s quite tame today, with its talk of a “kinky girl” that you wouldn’t “bring home to mother.” Minaj ten-folds that risque factor, which, in the 2020s, doesn’t so much as register a shrug. Minaj pulled a similar feat with her 2014 hit “Anaconda,” a dirtier riff on Sir Mix-A-Lot’s racy-for-1992 smash, “Baby Got Back.”

Released in August 2022, “Super Freaky Girl” has staying power, and is still a fixture in the prime time hours of my club gigs in 2023. When I try to hold off from playing it till later, someone inevitably requests it. Even more fun is playing a minute or two of the original Rick James track as an intro before bringing in the Minaj version; everyone’s loved that mix, except for one young clubber several months back who acted like she’d just been tasered and was relieved when the James intro mixed into the Minaj track (hey, ya can’t win ’em all!).

I still play “Anaconda” plenty, and I suspect “Super Freaky Girl” will be clubbing with us for the long haul, too.