Nicki Minaj

📍South Jamaica, Queens, NY, USA

“Onika Tanya Maraj was born in Saint James, a lively district of Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, in December 1982. Her mother moved to New York first to make a home, and Onika stayed with her grandmother in Trinidad until she was five, when she joined her parents in Queens, settling in South Jamaica, a working-class neighbourhood of small houses in south-east Queens with a large Caribbean community. Her home life was frightening: her father struggled with drug and alcohol addiction and was violent, and he once set fire to the family's house. Onika coped by escaping into her imagination, creating characters and alternative personalities, and she dreamed of buying her mother a house and a car so they could leave. She loved performing and writing rhymes, and she played the clarinet. She auditioned for the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan, the famous school that inspired the film Fame, and was accepted to study drama. After school she worked as a waitress and in other jobs while trying to make it as an actor and then as a rapper. She began releasing mixtapes in 2007, and Lil Wayne signed her to Young Money. Her debut album, Pink Friday, in 2010, made her a star, and with songs such as Super Bass and her many characters, she became one of the best-selling female rappers of all time. She has said that her painful early life gave her the drive to rise above it, and she bought her mother the house she had dreamed of.”

Sources: biography.com Wikipedia: Nicki Minaj