Nicki Minaj Joins James Corden for 'Carpool Karaoke' Comeback, Talks Anxiety of Being 'Constantly Scrutinized'

Carpool Karaoke is back with a bang.

After a two-year hiatus, the Late Late Show segment returned Wednesday night with Nicki Minaj in the passenger seat. The Queen rapper and James Corden immediately kicked things off with her 2014 hit “Anaconda” before discussing Adele’s famous rendition of Nicki’s “Monster” verse on the show and split-screening the two artists delivering the iconic bars:

Corden and Nicki went on to do portions of the British singer’s “Someone Like You” before hitting Coi Leray’s “Blick Blick,” Lil Baby’s “Do We Have a Problem?” and Onika’s “Starships,” “Super Bass,” and “Chun-Li.”

In a conversation beginning at the 12:40, Minaj spoke on her experiences facing anxiety. “I think when you are a woman and you’re in the public eye all the time, if you’re not careful you can become less confident because you’re being constantly scrutinized, you know? And I just don’t think it’s natural. It’s not natural for a human being to just always feel like everyone’s critiquing them,” the 39-year-old told Corden. “Like when I first came into the industry, I had this amazing sense of freedom because nobody gave a shit about what I was doing. Like I could get away with doing anything, and they were just like, ‘Oh, haha, Nicki Minaj, haha.’ And then it goes from that to the complete, complete opposite. Where it’s like, you know, if I blink my eye wrong, they’ll have a story made up about why I blinked my eye that way.”

She said when she steps away from social media and deletes the corresponding apps on her phone, she feels “this just enormous sense of peace.”

Giving viewers a sense of peace, meanwhile, was Nicki’s soothing clarinet work:

Nicki previewed her appearance on Instagram earlier this week with a teaser featuring clips from past Carpool Karaoke segments with acts like Bruno Mars, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, BTS, and Selena Gomez. CBS pumped the brakes on the segment back in March 2020, when the United States declared a global pandemic.  

“It’s felt over the past year—very, very slowly, in one sense or another—like we started to get our show back,” Corden said this week, as reported by the New York Post. “But this was, this is obviously a big part of our show—this segment. The entire pandemic…there [were] so many things that we couldn’t do, and I think that’s true of every show. But for us, our show is very much about getting out there, whether that’s running out into the street and doing musicals in a crosswalk or big taped bits or having all the guests together on a couch at the same time.”

Camila Cabello is expected to take the passenger seat on April 18.