Disappointment mingled with excitement.

We haven’t done a big, celebratory post on here about Nicki Minaj yet, but you might have picked up the hints and tips we’ve left – we ruddy love her. She’s pint-sized, cute, rude, wacky, ridiculously inventive, alternately silly, humorous, sexy and oddly profound… and she’s a female rapper (we do love a female rapper!).

Up til now she hasn’t had any official solo releases of her own, she’s just appeared on a million and one guest raps. This isn’t something we’re complaining about because her guest raps tend to be the highlight of the songs they’re a part of. Whether she’s naming every one of Santa’s reindeer to describe her stable of ‘hoes’, or putting on a hilarious borderline-Australian British accent to describe how she’s like Freddy Kruger, she’s a very clever woman and the most excited we’ve been about a ‘new MC’ (!) for yonks.

We also felt, up until now, that she had HUGE crossover potential. That is to say, with her insanely catchy and ‘rememorable’ intonation, commercial look (she likes to dress crazy but she’s ridiculously pretty), fun and kooky dress sense and seeming confidence and ambition, we thought she would EASILY fill the huge gap in the market for a female rap international crossover superstar, that’s been achingly apparent since Missy and Eve went AWOL.

Anyway, it was with much excitement/trepidation that we listened to her official debut solo release, “Massive Attack” (we’ve embedded it above). Here is why we are just a little bit disappointed with it, despite having had it on repeat for about half an hour:

1. It sounds catchy, but we couldn’t hum or sing you any part of it.
2. There are absolutely no melodic hooks.
3. Nicki doesn’t do her ridiculous British accent, or that thing where her tone of voice escalates so she sounds like she’s having a nervous breakdown or something.
4. She doesn’t sing/rap/intone the ‘chorus’.
5. It doesn’t sound like a hit.
6. It doesn’t play off her whole cutesy, bad-Barbie-turned-horror-movie-villain vibe.
7. It probably won’t even see a release outside of the US.

We’d love to be proven wrong. We’d love the potentially exciting video to lift the song. We’d love it to be a huge surprise hit. We’d love it to be an extremely expensive buzz song and video before the big proper huge unstoppable worldwide smash is unveiled. We’ll see… and we’ll keep you posted.