Discussion: Why Nicki Minaj Is A Robot

Nicki Minaj is a character who seemed to emerge pretty much from no where.  One minute, she was just a name that you casually heard on the radio, typically in association with another artist, and next thing you know she's all over television and the Internet, from The Huffington Post to Just Jared to the New York Times.  Even if you are not particularly a fan of her music, it isn't too difficult to admit that she's a talented girl, but does a little talent and a jarring image justify having her big booty plastered all the place?  Nicki Minaj is the perfect example of what Britney Spears was ten to fifteen years ago or what Janelle Monae may be in a year or two.  One could just keep it simple and say that she's the example of an incredible marketing strategy or you can admit, as I have, that she's a robot.

Look at the pictures.  What are you looking at?  You are looking at a woman of indeterminate ethnicity, with a huge badonk-a-donk, a Bride of Frankenstein afro, and six inches worth of makeup gyrating on stage with a massive white plastic phallus.  How does one interpret this bombardment of thought and images?  By admitting that Nicki Minaj is a robot.  She is a combination of a programmer/inventor's desire to create something unique, but without an understanding of what it means to be unique, and the stereotypical result of a malfunctioning machine.  Something about her is truncated or incomplete and the emphasis on the aesthetic is far too great.  Yes, the aesthetic sensory overload works in Nicki Minaj's case, but she doesn't have the personality or the other accoutrements to back it up.  Not to say that Nicki will be disappearing any time soon.  All she needs is to continue to put out tracks turned out by the hottest producers in the industry and, since it seems that America (and the world) continue to crave robots like Minaj, there's no reason to believe that she won't be around and on top of the world in the next five years or so.