SOURCE:http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollyw...ge-since-simon
One
Is Nicki Minaj the best non-Simon judge the show's ever had? As a reminder, the following other individuals have been full-time judges: Randy Jackson (12 seasons), Paula Abdul (8), Kara DioGuardi (2), Ellen DeGeneres (1), Jennifer "Jen-Lop" Lopez (2), a horny microphone stand draped in silk scarves (2), Mariah Carey (1), and Keith Urban (1).
Kang: My mother called last night to talk about how much she enjoyed this Nicki Manga character and all her wack-a-doo expressions, confectionary wigs, and spontaneous accents.
She also praised Minaj’s “good heart,” and the backbone Nicki displayed when she walked off the stage because Randy and Mariah wouldn’t stop shooing that poor “soulful country” girl back to her trailer park because Lord knows it ain’t decent for a nice white girl from the South to sing about anything but her boyfriend’s truck, her father’s drinking problem, and the poor girl from across the tracks who later turned into a serial arsonist.
I agree: Minaj has been a revelation. All her antics fall into a logical order — the wigs, the Moneypenny accents, the kabuki theatrics.
Somehow, the girl in the wig and the girdle who keeps speaking in different accents feels like the only person on the panel who isn’t puffing himself/herself up for more attention (I’m looking at you, Keith Urban’s partially concealed chest tattoo). I’m even enjoying her allegedly staged bouts with Mariah, mostly because Mariah reminds me so much of that really bitchy, really hot girl at your high school who would terrorize her classmates with a litany of bored, sarcastic “Oh really”s and “Is that what you were saying, because I couldn’t tell”s. And just as that girl’s lack of wit never really mattered because she was hot, the clumsiness of Mariah’s comebacks don’t matter much because 80 percent of the contestants still swoon when they realize they are in the presence of the great Mimi.
I just convinced myself to add a new category to the Diva Scale. SWOOOOON factor. Mariah’s got it. Nicki Minaj doesn’t. #REALTALK
Lisanti: Coming into the season, I think we all would have put our money on Mariah taking charge of the panel; she's the Living Legend hire, and Nicki was obviously picked for the Insane Sideshow slot — so much so that by October, the producers were already leaking "news" of the "expletive-filled death threats" resulting from the dangerously unstable diva/antidiva reactions they were so carelessly fomenting. (From those early videos, it would have been a safe assumption that the peacemaking Keith Urban didn't make it out of the third week of auditions alive, having been killed by Mariah's Minaj-targeted side-eye lasers.) But here we are, some 400 hours into Season 12, and Nicki's our breakout star. No one saw this happening. She's somehow the Entertainer, the Voice of Reason, the Nurturer, and the ****-Stirrer all in one. And she's juggling all that with the most impressive wardrobe work televised singing competitions have ever seen. After each commercial break, you don't know if you're going to see the Magical Chauffeur, the Cotton-Candy-Headed Princess of the Peppermint Forest, the The-****-You-Looking-At Spacebus Driver, or the Kaleidoscope Snapping-Turtle Lurking Underneath the Blanket Fort. But you do know you're going to see something special. I hope her costume designer never kicks that peyote habit.
Is this coronation premature? Perhaps. Steven Tyler also burst out of the gate strong, a nonsense-spewing, pashmina-swaddled leathermummy firing jailbait-seeking missiles at every 16-year-old unlucky enough to make eye contact. That lasted what, two weeks? Eventually, apathy comes for them all. Let's see if Nicki's got any gas left in the tank by the time we get to Hollywood. (If she does, she can use it to incinerate the caged doves in Mariah's dressing room and keep the tension hot.)
Yoshida:
Yes, Nicki Minaj is the best American Idol judge since Simon Cowell at his peak, and I would go so far as to say that she is better than present-day Cowell. I had a thought as I drifted off to sleep last night (this show gets real estate in my brain like few other shows do) that Nicki may very well be conducting a secret grassroots image-stabilization campaign through hundreds of close-range interactions with the young people of Middle America, many of whom might be outside her core audience. Think about it; you’re a show-choir geek from North Carolina with a Facebook page that proudly declares you like “pretty much everything, except rap and country.” You walk into your Idol audition shaking from nerves, the lights hit your eyes, and before you realize what’s happening, the Devil Herself Nicki Minaj greets you with a wide, Day-Glo grin and a bat of the fake eyelashes, disarmingly weird and warm at the same time. And promptly christens you “Doorknob.” You have a connection now. And you can bet that the second thing you do after Instagramming the golden ticket she so generously bestowed upon you is Liking Nicki Minaj on Facebook and spending the subsequent weeks evangelizing to all your non-Barbz chorus mates.
You can read the rest on the website, too much info to put on one post.