Oh dear...

Quite often when artists debut, you form a very quick opinion and decide almost immediately if you're going to like them or not. If you decide you're going to like them, you form a picture of what sort of artist you think they are and the specific reasons you think they're going to appeal to you in the long term. If an artist is very special, they'll live up to your expectations or exceed them and you'll end up making good on your decision to become a fan. Most of the time, however, artists go on to disappoint. Even if they release middling to fair quality work, if it doesn't pan out the way you expected, it can be a source of angst anyway.

Nicki Minaj is one of those artists.

When she arrived 'on the scene', we first became aware of her guest-rapping on that Mariah Carey single that was quite good but completely flopped. We decided we liked her a lot IMMEDIATELY for the following reasons:

• She was female (at the time there was a dearth of quality big budget female rappers... most were underground, niche or missing in action).
• She was witty. Let us not forget that those early Minaj guest raps were some of the funniest, cleverest most memorable guest raps we could remember hearing in years.
• She seemed different. Prior to Minaj's arrival on the scene, in the UK at least, rap and hip hop, specifically the all-guns-blazing, tits-and-ass and icy bling gangsta hip hop that had been hugely popular and lucrative in the early-to-mid 00s, had gone out of fashion. There wasn't that much of it in the chart, and what did exist wasn't of particularly mind-blowing quality. The fact that Nicki Minaj was alluding to a gay affair in the rap we first heard her spit, coupled with her quite-demure-by-comparison mode of presentation, led us to foolishly believe that this would be an artist we could fully get behind.

Fast forward to 2012 and for a variety of reasons too numerous to go into, Minaj seems to have developed into a juggernaut superstar rapper quite different to what we expected. Her raps seem to have decreased in quality, catchiness and cleverness (whilst repetition is inevitable in a full song as opposed to a short guest rap, they border on parody). Plus, the kind of strippa-ass-in-the-air, gratuitous faux-lesbo groping that we were stupidly hoping Minaj would avoid as an artist is being thrust forward and centre.

During 2 Chainz rap, Nicki doesn't even face the camera, instead choosing to serve her surgically-enhanced ass up on a plate, jiggling 'enticingly' as if she is a disembodied booty, similarly to in Nelly's revolting "Tip Drill" video, a video so exploitative of and disrespectful to females in general, that it single-handedly set women's rights back 10000000000 years.

We never expected Nicki Minaj to be a staunch feminist, but this is disappointing.