Member Since: 8/4/2012
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As 'Idol' shows go live, one woman leads - Nicki Minaj.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/t...eview/1966357/
Quote:
Forget the competition: The winner so far sits on the judges' panel, and her name is Nicki.
You can tell American Idol wants this season to belong to a girl — and it does.
Her name is Nicki Minaj.
As the weeks go by, that could change. The focus on this long-running Fox singing contest could eventually shift to the contestants, as it should, and in particular, to a female contestant, as the show so clearly, fervently hopes. (You can be forgiven for taking Randy Jackson's early announcement Tuesday that this is "a girl's season to lose" as more of a prompt than an opinion.)
It's even possible that the show's other two judging newcomers, Mariah Carey and Keith Urban, will do something to take the spotlight away from Minaj's odd, ever-shifting mix of honesty and artifice. But having gone through weeks of taped programs and now, finally, the first live show Tuesday, how likely does that really seem?
Then again, how likely did it seem before the season started that Minaj would be the breakout? She's not as familiar with Idol's workings as Jackson or as well-known as Urban or Carey, which is one reason some viewed those early reports of a Carey/Minaj feud as an attention-getting stunt. Where Urban seems effortlessly at ease, and Carey seems to be happily ensconced in her own universe, Minaj can look stiff and uncomfortable when she's not speaking, like an actor preparing for a performance.
And then she speaks, and she's riveting. Minaj blends Paula Abdul's mothering, Stephen Tyler's sometimes inappropriate quirkiness and — at her best — Simon Cowell's directness into a judging style that is all her own and almost always unexpected. One minute she's commenting on a singer's breasts or calling another one her "wife"; the next, she's being as precise, insightful and constructive as any Idol judge has ever been. She sometimes lets her mannerisms (the eye rolling, the accents, the obsessions) run away with her. But she's surprising, and so far, she's the only person on Idol who is.
Stationed at the end of the table, Urban is handsome, likable and reliably charming, the kind of man who can praise a teenage girl's looks without coming across as creepy. He's nice, but on this show, nice is not enough. While he'll occasionally say something pointed (when he told a singer not to smile during a sad song, thousand of Idol viewers surely cheered), he generally prefers to discuss song choices, the mark of a judge who is either too easily pleased, or too eager to please.
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QUEEN!
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