Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Watergate Still Kind Of Bothers Me
By Jacob Clifton | Season 6 | Episode 4 | Aired on 01.29.2007
Lakia Hill (20, Birmingham AL) has a crazy accent and would like you to know that she's the "total package," I think, and she's pretty cute and pretty nuts. After the obligatory "sweetheart" from Cowell, she sings "How Did You Get Here" by Deborah Cox, many words I don't understand in a row, and it is: bloody awful. Screechy and screamy and all over the place; inducing a fight-or-flight adrenaline response. She does cute crazy stuff while she's singing, but there's a serious Kitty Genovese vibe all over it that makes it hard to relax and take it in. "What," says Simon, "The hell. Was that?" Randy laughs and Simon tries to explain to Lakia the gravity of the fact that she must never sing again on this earth. Randy calls it an "assault on singing," which I quite liked, and Simon takes pains to explain to her that she is one of the worst voices they have heard in the last two days.
She thanks him and leaves quickly, leading to a montage of people saying "thank you" politely and leaving the auditions. The fact that this is worthy of montaging says more about the sad state of American etiquette than anything else, and it goes on quite a while, but there's not much say about it: Simon says something nasty yet true, a person says thank you. Lather, rinse, repeat. The people saying thank you to Simon and the people to whom he is addressing his criticisms, if they exist at all, are probably not the same people. "That's the worst version of that song I've ever heard in my life," he says; a person who may or may not be involved says "thank you." Something is "absolutely useless," somebody says "thank you." Somebody says thank you, somebody says "thank you for your time," some hot dude says "thank you so much," a billion people say "thank you." Randy's amazed by this, because normally people are so blah blah irony reversed expectation-cakes. Point of interest: If you're in a coma, how do you know?
Team Nichole (Gatzmann, 17, Muskogee OK) is I think well smarter than she's letting on, and but also kind of a hollowed-out little pageant thing too. Everybody's wearing TEAM NICHOLE t-shirts in a hideous shade of pink, but most especially wearing the shirt is her scary pageant mom, who looks exactly like a pageant mom: disappointed, poor, and full of rage. While most of Team Nichole sits in a line behind her, trying desperately not to break into howls of laughter, Nichole Actual sits before the camera, telling a stultifying story about how she wanted to "do talents" in a pageant and her mom told her, "No. Nichole, you have no talents," and everybody on Team Nichole snorts and tries to stay calm and pretend they're not listening in to this. I can't tell if they're laughing because Nichole is being purposefully funny, or if they're just used to her being funny by accident because she's kinda dumb. Could go either way. The scariest part, though, is the next thing, where she gets kind of intense about how she ended up singing a song from preschool. So I'm guessing this whole "you have no talent" conversation took place sometime between the ages of 4 and 17? Which means that Nichole has literally no hope. But that's okay! The song she sang at this fuzzy moment in time was "I Am A Promise," which I have to admit sounds kind of shitty, and everybody was amazed by the fact that she did have a talent after all, and Ryan voices over: "Hmmm."