Jorge Nuñez (20, Carolina, Puerto Rico) doesn't really have the look, and his voice is breathy and tryhard that becomes screamy over the top yelling. It's on key and whatnot, but dang. It's not like you're actually trying to sing the world out of turning, dude. Paula asks him how his English singing is, so he sings "What A Wonderful World," and then sings a song that has nothing to do with that song. She thanks him, they agree that he has a nice voice, even if it was loud as heck. Simon points out that the pronunciation issues aren't that big a deal, because why come to Puerto Rico if you're not looking for an impenetrably thick accent. Which is true at this point, but let me tell you about Top 36 and what's going to fly with Walmart America.
And I'm not saying that as some kind of Blue State/Red State thing, because you know I don't roll like that: I'm talking about people who actually buy physical albums using money, a nation that is dwindling at an alarming rate and should be protected by state and federal laws. That's either hipster record store dudes -- who don't watch this show -- or Walmart shoppers -- who overwhelmingly watch this show in numbers too big to comprehend, much less ignore -- and they are not every going to be feeling your weird ass. He comes out and gays around for a bit, and it's time for a commercial.
Jessika Baier (20, Jackson, MI, '50s Café Waitress) won some Most Beautiful Baby contest at some point when she was beautiful, and she's still talking about it. She has a sign that says I'M THEE (sic) JESSIKA (sic) BAIER, and here are the trips she's won in various contests that are not relevant: Virginia Beach, Pasadena CA, the Jackson County fair. She also met Jessica Simpson once in the airport. Now she's just naming things. "I found two M&M's stuck together one time, like Siamese twins. Right in the bag! I beat Joe Rogan at rock-paper-scissors at the Biba's One's-A-Meal on West Gray in Houston one time. My mom can make her left eye go like this."
The judges ask her what on Earth she was thinking in her 700 singing contests. It's her income, it paid for her guitar and car, et cetera. She is going to sing Celine Dion's "I Surrender," and she is not going to do it well. What we learn from Jessika is that we should be entering more contests, because it's easier to win shit than you might think. She acts totally annoying no matter what, and they play it out way too long, and Simon is not having it; finally he assures Paula that she will not listen to a word that they say, so who cares. Not any of us. Then a montage of people who also don't know what the eff they're talking about, whining and crying and acting like giant babies about how untalented they are and how that's Simon Cowell's fault. Good, let's get it out of the way.
Then comes "Age Of Aquarius," introducing us to Melinda Camille (21, Stratford, CT, unemployed), who dances naked in her room for the good of America. See, America is changing and her naked dancing -- which is pretty much a grande mal seizure in a pink dress -- adds to the overall energy of wonderfulness. It's not that I disagree that niceness is coming into vogue in the post-ironic, because you know I believe very strongly that this is true, but the trick is to not sound totally dumb when you do it. Frankly, you shouldn't talk about it at all. Just do your thing. The fact that you're unemployed at 21 and still talking like a fucking unicorn from Planet Babyweird only proves you're from Connecticut, nothing more. Get it together.
But not this girl, no, she walks right in there talking about how her singing and dancing will bring enlightenment to everybody and herself and whatnot, "uplift humanity," and Simon's like, "Paula's been saying this shit for years," and you know she's screwed -- even being a seriously beautiful young woman -- at that point. Her voice better be insanely good, or else she's going to be a total joke. Maybe even then. Kara's like, "Maybe you should get naked right now," and she responds, "That would be awesome but only if we all were." Instead of this conversation being a wakeup call to everybody in the room to get the fuck out of the room, the judges are impressed.
Melinda sings "Feeling Good" ("Of course," Simon snarks), and her voice is good but not special. Her face and smile and the culty weirdy glow behind her face are special, but her voice is just really good. "You're a happy little thing, aren't you?" asks Simon. I wish there was more to her, but there won't be. Unanimous, and bland enough that we will end up pretending she has a personality and she might go all the way. Or maybe we'll just see an actual personality at some point, and we will love her. I'm suspending my decision with a slight quiet negative, because that shit is a dime a dozen unless you mean it, and nobody's in a position to say whether or not you mean it, or you're just dumb. It's possible she's a bullshitter with the right idea, like most 21-year-olds; it's equally possible that she's completely empty and just repeating some happy crap somebody told her was easier than the Paxil zaps.
Ryan does an adorable dance with a not-so-adorable person, and the annoying tacky Darkness introduces us to annoying tacky Jackie Tohn (27, Silver Lake, CA), who breathes and eats and sleeps and moisturizes and rappels and grapples and smokes and tokes music, like all of them, but what makes her special is that she has been musicking music for ten years. Silver Lake is like what happens when Melrose Place stops being polite and starts getting real annoying, so I don't doubt that this is true, any more than I doubt that she will say this eleven times in any conversation. Case in point: we've decided to sing Mraz today. Poorly. When I was a kid, all the people that managed to fool themselves into thinking they were especially talented were aimed at the Bay Area and launched, and you just hoped they would stay there, but now it's spread down to where she is. What a tiresome frigging person. She sings and sings at them as though it is her last chance, when in fact her last chance was a long time ago. The quality change between the first half of the first song and the second half, and then the second song, confuses the judges so much that they put her through. God punches in the wall behind the judges' table because she's so obnoxiously hipster, but Simon gives the middle finger to God just like every morning of his life, and puts her through. Enjoy your eyeshadow, jerks. I don't care if she was on Always Sunny, she is tiring. Bad call.
Some racist bullshitty voice says a bunch of Puerto Rico Spanish shit while "Wicked Game" plays, and a bunch of bad singing happens. Kara tells an insanely hot kid that his version was not believably male, which is hysterical; and then Simon tells a guy about fifty times to stop saying "Please," but the guy refuses 49 times. A giant blonde hoss screams at "It's Raining Men" at them, then a gender-estranged fellow, then a guy, then a stepper does a lackadaisical routine that confuses Kara, then a jackass plays a guitar lick on his boom box and pisses Simon off. Then, two fucking awful dudes.
First Joel Contreras (23, San Juan), who annoys people on the street as apparently his entire life, including screaming at an ice cream vendor and prancing around in a rat costume. God. Oh no! He's that jackass in the iPod costume! The iDouche! He calls himself the "GuyPod," and clicks himself into (awesomely) "Be With You," by Mr. Big, surely one of the best songs ever written. He does not do it justice. Simon, just to be a weirdo, asks for another song, and he kicks his giant iPod costume onto the floor and points at them silently for awhile before screaming some obnoxious thing at them until Simon finally loses patience and kind of loses it: "Okay, I can't listen to this anymore. I really, really can't. It's just awful, it's everything I hate. Everything, I mean the whole act, is excruciatingly bad." The dick pulls out a puppet in response, and Simon's pissed beyond pissed: "What relevance is you, standing there with a lion on your hand, to a singing competition?" He screams "Circle Of Life" at them, and continues to act like a total asshole out the door, down the hall, onto the street, into his fucking superman costume, and into the pool. I wish him such ill.
Ryan sort of can't even believe Norman Gentle (aka Nick Mitchell, 27, Brookfield CT) exists, and Simon hates him on sight. He has those weird lips where you know the guy dresses like a lady on the weekend and performs the hits of Diana Ross. That always creeps me out. And then, in case there's any doubt, he sings "And I Am Telling You," the most annoying song of Broadway ever whose title is not a number, and he does it like a guy with an okay voice who is 40 years old and was born without any sense of self or shame, and thus has no hope at all in this world. I want to kick him where you get kicked sometimes, as Norman/Nick would say, but I want to kick him there forever and ever.
Simon says it was awful, which it was, and he says some weirdo thing about how it hurts him "where you get kicked sometimes," and then implies that Ryan kicks Simon in the nuts sometimes, as though that's titillating. Dude is an amateur, and that's all Simon was trying to say anyway. This episode is like they took all the horrible out of the other two this week and injected it into this hour, making the other two boring and this unbearable. So far, and we're more than halfway through, it's just been like this unending blur of that awful hyperventilating Tatiana girl. It's so amazingly a waste of time that even telling you about it is eating up both our oxygen, so I won't. What an effing loser. So of course to make the Sanjaya point about this show and about America, namely that nothing means anything anymore and you might as well just watch Howie Do It while licking D-cell batteries and setting your genitals on fire for the rest of your life, they send him through. Ryan gets Drinky Crow XX instead of eyeballs and falls through a sudden trapdoor in the floor, when this happens, because WTF. Instead of a number on his golden ticket, it just says NO FUTURE.
Some crazy girl I remember from another year takes way too long acting crazy and then sings a crappy song, and manages to be more annoying and more pathetic than last year when she was acting as cracked out as she is. It goes on for a hundred years, and then she flips them off and goes back to being stupid and crazy, and it's not entertaining any more than it was last year, and we're better than this.
Patricia Lewis Roman (20, Caguas, Puerto Rico) sings "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" after a fairly adorable segment with her mom, and knocks it out of the park. This is one of those songs where the nostalgia and anti-nostalgia beams cross and create an interdimensional space where it doesn't matter, so you can actually listen to her voice, which is good but not that great. Simon tells her it's dumb to sing that song, maybe dumber than even singing a Whitney ballad in certain ways, and Kara agrees. Simon gives her thirty more seconds, because she has a certain specialness, and she sings a song in Spanish. Randy says yes, Paula says no... and she gets through.
It makes me feel like even the show doesn't know whether those urban legends every year about the Hawaii Vote or the Mormon Vote or whatever are true, like their science can't answer that question, so they're like, "Put nine people through from Puerto Rico and see what sticks." So they did, not that we know who they are; meanwhile, 26 went through from NYC.
Sorry if this recap seemed half-assed and disjointed, but I promise it was pretty much straight-up reportage. You might say there weren't any sob stories, and per se you'd be right, but on the other hand: what did we just watch for a goddamn hour? What a weird frigging episode. See you in Hollywood.