Nicki Minaj on Jay Leno: Porn or Performance?
Does Nicki Minaj have anything else to offer outside of sex and publicity stunts? Judging by her recent performance on Jay Leno, the answer is no.
Dressed in a flesh-colored bodystocking designed to give off the illusion that she was nude from the waist down, complete with white pasties over her nipples because her bra wasn’t big enough to conceal her artificial bust, the Young Money ‘rapper’ took to Leno’s stage to perform her latest forgettable RedOne banger, “Pound The Alarm”.
The showing was big on sex appeal and theatricality, but low on talent. Well, unless you consider yelling half-naked over a loud backing track as talent, then in that case, it was extremely high.
Sporting a Mardis Gras theme, Nicki cocked her legs open repeatedly, shook her inflated derriere, and safely recreated her infamous GMA nipple slip about fifty-seven times. All the choreography, if it could even be called that, was just designed for Nicki to show off her surgically-enhanced curves, although there was a fun conga line that stood out as the one highlight of the otherwise crass spectacle.
Nicki’s sex over substance shtick could possibly get a pass if she had anything of merit to offer musically, but there’s not one part of her manufactured act worth much of anything. Unlike her relatively talentless contemporaries, she doesn’t tickle the critics like Cassie or set trends like Rihanna, and is instead content to build her career off of publicity stunts and the most shamelessly generic top forty fodder that pop has to offer. The derivative eurodance of “Pound the Alarm” (which sounds virtually identical to the derivative eurodance of “Starships”) isn’t the kind of hit that pop’s top tier dance divas like Britney Spears, Lady GaGa, or even Ke$ha would take — it’s the type of slush that Taio Cruz, Usher, and Pitbull live off.
Judging by comments on Twitter and blogs like Rap-Up, there’s been a tonne of praise for Nicki’s Leno showing, with many commenters excitedly exclaiming, “she killed it!” and, “she slayed!“. If all it takes is to walk around with your pussy and tits out shouting over a track of what has to be one of the year’s most unoriginal songs to be considered as ‘slaying’, then the state of the music industry is even worse than we all thought.
