American Idol stuff
Ok, out of date again. This as been sitting on a zip drive all week waiting for upload.
I totally admit I'm not very knowledgable about singing. I generally have no idea what Randy means when he describes a performance as "pitchy." But Tuesday was a rare time when I could clearly delineate everyone according to performance:
Syesha and Carly - Clearly the top two. Both were fantastic, and both earned high praises from the judges as well as from Lord Andrew. Brownie points to Carly for her "Simon Loves Me (This Week)" T-shirt, which got a laugh from everyone, including Simon.
Brooke and Jason - Clearly the bottom two. Jason, in particular was describes as a "train wreck"... and that was BEFORE Simon got to comment! Jason's performance should have earned him the boot except that Brooke had a bad start (for the second time on the show) and has been struggling in the votes for weeks. Brooke should have gone home before Kristy. She definitely should have gone home before Michael Johns. Surely this would be her week.
(BTW, I wish they would stop harping about her stopping and starting. It was a big gaff, but you'd think she shot someone's mother on stage with all the hype about it. The error wasn't the stop and start: the error was forgetting her lines, which led to the stop and start. I agree with Simon that considering she had forgotten her lines, there was nothing wrong in stopping and starting to get her head together. She made the best of a bad mistake.)
David and David - Very middling. Archuleta once gain was technically great and willing to make the song his own, but yet again the result was boring and unmemorable. I can't say anything about Cook. It was Ok, not great, more interesting than Archuleta (IMHO) but certainly not memorable. I was expecting for the bottom three to still be singled out because I wanted to see if one of the David's would finally spend a week there or whether their fan base would save them and throw either Syesha or Carly to the wolves. Either way, it seemed obvious who was going home: Brooke, with Jason deserving but saved by a fan base and a performance that was perhaps not quite as terrible as Brooke.
Instead, this was the week that reminded us all that American Idol works like high school cliques. Clearly this week it was a popularity contest, suggesting that all contestants might as well just sing "Mary Had a Little Lamb," badly, for all the good it does them. Because who ends up in the bottom two? Syesha and Carly.
I'm just dumbstruck. The two of them were heads and shoulders above anyone else (and yes, that includes personal fav David Cook). And not just one of them, but both of them?
It's a statistical fact that the singer who goes first each week on Americal Idol has a far higher chance of getting voted off. Is that what did Syesha in? Surely that indicated Syesha would be saying goodbye. But no, even that prediction was wrong as Carly was voted off.
And that just pisses me off. The votes have certainly not fallen in line with my hopes before, but never so utterly and completely. Brooke is living on borrowed time, although she doesn't annoy me like Jason. Jason's apparent schtick is come out stoned every week. I don't find him interesting in the least either as a singer or as a person. And he lost my final scrap of respect when, after choosing to sing "Memory," he confessed he didn't realize the song was song by a Cat. Which part of "Cats: the Musical" did you miss? How can you be a singer and be THAT unfamiliar with the longest running show on broadway?
On the brightside, Lord Andrew Lloyd Weber was awesome. I normally forward through the behind the scenes clips, because the guests generally have little of interest to say. It was really strange: when Andrew's mouth opened, actual meanings came out instead of just random words like Mariah. And it was interesting to boot. Could we possibly replace Paula with Andrew next season? That way all of the judges will actually have something worth saying? (Is that too much to expect from judges?) On top of which, he was really dead on with all of his reflections on the contestants. He's like a nice Simon: he says what he actually feels, but he does so politely. Describing Jason's song choice as the most curious he's ever seen had me in stitches.