Darling Nicki

There’s no ignoring Nicki Minaj right now, even if you tried. And not just because of her outrageous outfits, Day Glo wigs and lipsticks so neon they could light a dark room. Once the toast of New York’s underground rap scene, she has recently moved on to bigger game — namely, conquering the world.

Meet the Lady Gaga of hip-hop, a budding fashion icon who has graced the covers of Black Book, Vibe and Fader, touting a look that she calls “Harajuku Barbie,” blending Tokyo chic with Mattel moxie. Musically, she’s been omnipresent, releasing or making featured contributions to 10 singles that wound up in last year’s pop Top 40, including Trey Songz’s “Bottoms Up,” Kanye West’s “Monster” and her own “Moment 4 Life.”

Minaj first earned fame contributing saucy verses to other artists’ songs, but her debut album, “Pink Friday,” has sold more than a million copies since its November release, earning her high-profile appearances on “Saturday Night Live,” MTV’s Video Music Awards and this year’s Grammy broadcast. She was even shortlisted to fill one of the judge’s slots on Simon Cowell’s upcoming talent show, “X Factor.”

PHOTOS: THE MANY LOOKS OF NICKI MINAJ

Tonight, she performs at the Nassau Coliseum with Lil Wayne, the rapper who discovered her on a street-distributed rap DVD called “The Come Up.” Just 12 miles from the Jamaica, Queens, neighborhood where Minaj grew up, the Coliseum is just the kind of place where she always dreamed she’d wind up.

Minaj — birth name Onika T. Maraj — attended LaGuardia Arts, the so-called “Fame” high school, in the late 1990s through 2000, where her classmates called her “Cookie.” “I always remember her hanging out in the hallways rapping,” says LaGuardia classmate Rebecca Tredanari. “I went up to her and asked her about it, and she said she wanted to be a rapper. I said, ‘You’re in the wrong department,’ because she was in drama.”

Minaj had auditioned for the school’s singing program, but wasn’t accepted. She wanted to drop out, but her mother, Carol, insisted she stay and enroll in the drama program. Minaj continued working on music in her free time.

“She was friends with all the rappers in school,” Tredanari says. “They’d get into a circle in the lunch room and start freestyling. Sometimes we’d see her in the train station and she’d be freestyling. Anyone who was around her, she’d throw out their name and start rapping about them.”

“She was always carrying around this notebook and writing rhymes,” says Dominic Colon, an actor who co-starred with Minaj in a 2001 play at the Developing Artists Theater Company on West 21st Street. “She spit a couple of times, and I was like, ‘Wow!’ I was surprised because she looked like a little girl.”

“I do remember her talking about Barbie. Even back then,” Colon recalls. “It was very cute.”

Minaj was just 18 at the time. (The rapper claims to be 26, but records show she was born in December 1982, and is actually 28.) She was waiting tables at a Bronx Red Lobster — one of many dead-end jobs she had, including office manager and customer-service rep — and struggling to make it as an actor or hip-hop artist.

She was born in Trinidad and lived with her grandmother for the first few years of her life while her mother and father set up residence in South Jamaica. Minaj moved to the States as a young girl and attended Elizabeth Blackwell Middle School in Ozone Park.

Minaj has said her upbringing was difficult. Her father, a crack addict, was abusive and once tried to burn down the family’s apartment. (Minaj’s mother, Carol, and her younger brother now live in a Long Island mansion she bought for them.) She has said that she used to lock herself in her room and write to escape her parents’ squabbling.

“Fantasy was my reality,” she told New York magazine. Her first rhyme, which she reportedly wrote at age 12, went, “Cookie’s the name, chocolate chip is the flavor/Suck up my style like a cherry Life Saver.”

One of the first professionals to work with Minaj was Bowlegged Lou, a member of Brooklyn-based R&B group Full Force, who has produced records for James Brown and Britney Spears, among others. In 2002, deejay Neil Grant played a song of Minaj’s for Lou, and he was blown away by her vocal style and stagecraft. Minaj has a Caribbean dancehall influence in her vocals, and she often deploys different voices and characters on tracks, from the angry “Roman Zolanski” to a squeaky voiced “Barbie.”

“Even when she first came to my house in Brooklyn, she was doing her dialects back then — her English dialect,” says Lou, who teamed her with an emcee named Svn-Up, Lou’s son Lou$star and Minaj’s friend Safaree Samuels (more on him later). They called themselves the Hoodstars, and they played local venues and label showcases, trying to land a deal.

None materialized, so Bowlegged Lou began recording Minaj as a solo act, producing early tracks such as “The Autobiography of Nicki Maraj” — back when she was still using her real last name. The song is a brutally honest catalog of her painful childhood: “Daddy was a crack fiend/Two in the morning, had us running down the street like a track team.”

“She was always very confident. She was a stickler on writing her own raps,” Lou says. “A lot of times in the rap game, people say, ‘Get a ghostwriter.’ She never, ever, ever wanted to hear any of that ghostwriting stuff.”

The recordings were shopped to labels, including G-Unit and Roc-A-Fella Records. All passed.

“We even had a face-to-face meeting with [former Def Jam president] Kevin Liles at Warner Bros.” Lou says. “He just loved her rapping voice, but at that time people didn’t want to take a chance with female rappers.”

Minaj and Full Force parted ways in 2006, and so began a few turbulent years in which Minaj hired and fired multiple managers. She also took on various personas, including a period in which she played the sexpot and released mixtapes full of explicit lyrics. The phase produced a feud with Lil’ Kim, the sexpot rapper from Brooklyn, who recently released a Minaj diss record, “Black Friday.” Its cover shows Kim holding a bloody sword and sitting next to a decapitated head wearing a pink wig.

Today, Minaj is handled by Diddy’s right-hand man, James Cruz. Insiders say she’s involved in every career decision, no matter how trivial.

“She had a vision for herself, and once people started accepting her, she went full steam ahead,” says Stephen Hacker, a manager who helped land Minaj her first paycheck, for guesting on a 2008 song called “Ucci Ucci” by Enur. “People in the music business go with the flow and what their label is telling them to do. She’s in total control of her career.”

Even in the studio, Minaj knows exactly what she wants.

“I heard she went through 16 different recording engineers before she found the right one,” says Drew Money, who produced Minaj’s hit “Right Thru Me.”

Minaj also demands that no unnecessary people be in the studio, making her that rarest of things: a rapper without an entourage. “In her words, she didn’t want any ‘extraterrestrials’ in the studio,” Money says.

Minaj rarely drinks and doesn’t party, says Niki Schwan, one of Minaj’s stylists. Her only vice seems to be the almonds and cranberries she munches in the studio. She focuses almost exclusively on work and building her unique brand.

“I look at it like, even the things that I do in being sexual and all that s – – t are very strategic because it’s almost like I’m interviewing for a particular job, like this is my resumé and it’s kind of like you give all the different facets of who you are to get the job,” Minaj told XXL magazine. “The job that I’m going for is someone that relates to every girl in the whole world.”

Part of that world-conquering image involves her style. Those pink wigs, bright lip shades and colorful costumes have made her a fashion icon. For a BET show, she paired a green bob wig with knee-high Versace python boots. She turned up at the Grammys in a leopard-print dress and leggings and a tall, “Bride of Frankenstein,” white beehive wig.

“Her clothes are a huge part of her image, and it shows,” stylist Schwan says. “She’s always willing to take risks. She doesn’t really care what anyone thinks.”

Like Gaga, Minaj’s outrageous looks and hilarious rhymes have earned her a large gay following. She has hinted in the past that she’s bisexual, but now suggests she’s asexual — just like one of those plastic Barbie dolls she loves.

“I don’t date women . . . but I don’t date men either,” she told Out last year. Minaj does, however, seem to have a man in her life. Safaree Samuels, who she has known since she was a teenager, is with her constantly and now serves as the rapper’s onstage “hype man.” And maybe more.

Bowlegged Lou says Samuels was introduced as Minaj’s fiancé years ago, and the couple, records show, shared a suburban Atlanta apartment as recently as last year.

“I’m not gonna comment on that one,” Schwan says when asked about Samuels. So maybe they’re just friends. Or maybe they’re something more, and Minaj is just playing coy.

Minaj, of course, resolutely claims she doesn’t need a man to conquer the world.

“Ladies, don’t depend on a man for anything,” Minaj told a concert audience recently. “Get your own!”

She’s definitely getting hers, boasting of making $50,000 for every verse she contributes to hit singles and now living — at least part-time — in a luxury Los Angeles high rise.

Lady Gaga, watch your back.