LunchMoney Lewis

Nicki Minaj's new album The Pinkprint includes a number of high-profile collaborators like Ariana Grande and Beyoncé - two artists who occupy the same small sliver of true pop superstardom as Minaj - each guest on songs in the first half of the album. Later tracks feature Philadelphia rapper Meek Mill and R&B singer Jeremih, the former a previous Minaj collaborator and the latter a singer whose "Don't Tell 'Em" is one of the biggest radio songs of the year. Then there's an appearance by someone named Lunchmoney Lewis.

Lewis appears on the album's 11th track, "Trini Dem Girls." A cursory Googling of this phenomenal stage name turns up almost nothing - a Discogs page, a litany of incredulous "Who is Lunchmoney Lewis?" tweets and almost nothing else. But who is Lunchmoney Lewis and why (and how) is he working with Nicki Minaj? Let's start with the more obvious stuff first.

Though his work on The Pinkprint looks to be the biggest moment of Lunchmoney's career, his 2014 includes a writing credit on "Burnin' Up," Jessie J's new single and the follow up to "Bang Bang." Lunchmoney has two other major songwriting credits, per All Music: one on "Scholarship," a street single from Juicy J's 2013 solo album Stay Trippy, and another on "Set It Off," from the recent album by Connecticut rapper Chris Webby. It's impossible to glean much about Lunchmoney from these three songs, but there are some dots that can be connected that might explain how he hooked up with Minaj.

Webby's "Set It Off" aside, there is one other name that appears alongside Lunchmoney's in the credits of both "Burnin' Up" and "Scholarship": a songwriter named Jacob Kasher. Kasher is a cog in the pop-music machine, having written for artists like Selena Gomez and Jason Derulo, but his most starry work has come alongside industry titan Dr. Luke. Kasher helped write Kesha's "We R Who We R," as well as a Luke-produced song called "Inside Out" from Britney Spears' 2011 album Femme Fatale. As a point of triangulation, Luke was the one who produced Juicy's "Scholarship," one of those two tracks that Kasher and Lunchmoney Lewis worked on together.

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