That's when, Ryan says, everything went to hell. Screaming annoying Jayson Wilson (19, Seattle) has a giant creepy Carly Simon mouth that could swallow a football whole, and doesn't mean it at all. Some guy does some kind of William Hung bullshit. These fuckers aren't even trying. Come on. A hot dude that can't sing and has a bunch of '50s junk in his hair bores everybody with his leather jacket and whatever, and whatever.
Chinless sandwich-maker middle manager-looking dude Damien Lefavor (26, Seattle) talks like a nerdier James Cameron about his martial arts and complete lack of shame. I mean, I would hit that, but I don't want to see it on TV. Randy says he's funny, which of course means that he is not funny. How he sings is also not funny, it's just rampantly uncomfortable to watch. It was better when he was explaining what pacifism is while playing the dojo flute. Then he almost starts crying and Aspergering out and Simon's like, "Just go, please," and he Other Doors himself, and gets weird and repetitive and scary and horrible some more. These people are fucking freaking me out. I think that whole Silicon Valley thing has been true for a while now.
Much talk and footage of obnoxious children leading into the obnoxious child of the worst goddamn person I have ever seen in my life. Mary Powers (28, Burbank) is like... Take the misplaced self-enthusiasm of a Jackie Tohn plus righteous single motherhood, toss in the whiskey-garble and sickening fashion of Amanda Overmyer, tie something retarded around that head of hers like she's in an elven tribe of dickheads, set your makeup gun to raccoon whore, add about a billion necklaces and one more goddamn vest, if you got a chain wallet toss that shit in there, and then when she says she's singing Pat Benatar pretend she's just blown your mind. Because that is her aim.
She stares them in the eyes and dramatically pauses and waits for them to burst into tears. Avril is like, "I want to be something like this girl when I grow up." Simon makes fun of her clichéd horror but likes her voice, which is fair. Avril likes the character and tone of her voice because it is punk rock. She actually says that. And fucking Mary is like, "thanks" and totally distracted and ignores her because hating Avril Lavigne is most of her personality. Avril, used to this, wishes she'd never called the bitch "punk rock." Me too. Then the horrible daughter comes in and pretends to give a shit about Simon. Mary Powers is the fakest fucking asshole I have ever seen in my life. I can't imagine a single conversation with her that wouldn't make me jump out of a moving car.
Randy wants to bareknuckle fight him, Simon rolls his eyes because he and Avril have formed an unbeatable team of wonder, Avril's fucking loving every second of this because it's so horrific, and the kid is just wonderful once he's done singing and you forget how offensive his singing was, and they cut him loose. Avril goes, "Absolutely not, are you kidding me?" The kid is surprised that they hated him, and his face goes hot-ugly-hot-ugly over and over and then he goes away again. I would have him in my Avril Army no question.
One of my favorite things of Avril is her army of teenage boys that never gets older and they go everywhere and take part in all of her total mayhem. They're like droogs except they never talk and they smell like cotton candy. My favorite is the blonde one that sings backup, I like to pretend that all the songs are about their secret love even or especially the sad ones, but really I like all of the boys the same, because they are like the flight attendants of life: They never get older, they never have to shave, and they make you feel like maybe there are no real consequences to anything.
up: Fucking Katy Perry and her entire Ryder truck of bullshit that she carries everywhere. No, you know what? We're not doing Katy. Unless she does something particularly awesome, we're going to pretend that Avril is still with us. Which is a bet that I will win, because I have cleverly stacked the deck through syntax, because Katy Perry has done one awesome thing in her entire life: That cover of "Electric Feel" that said, "Turns out I can sing like an angel and sound like a human being, which makes my decision to become a cardboard anal probe all the more disconcerting." And then she went right back to being the bona fide worst.
Katy says something awful and pointless. Meanwhile Avril's like, "I kissed a fucking bichon friese and I liked it! And then I spit on it!"Katy talks shit about the judges arriving on a helicopter in her disgusting upspeak and Avril's like, "I didn't obey traffic laws on my way to the studio when I was there. Right on red, motherfucker! That's how you do it when you're punk rock!" Avril needs a dollar sign somewhere up in her name to show how wonderful she is. Avril £avigne. What kind of money do they have in Canada? Do they even have money, or is it just like a crude barter system/otter-pelt economy? Avril's like, "I don't need money! I am too punk rock for that! Your payment is I don't fuck up your car! l8rboi!"
Tasha Layton (26, Granada Hills CA) is a pastor by night, personal assistant by day. That is awesome! That is my fucking dream job. That's better than Macy's giftwrapper even. She has a little bit of an accent but it's cute, and she sings a Joss Stone song, or a song Joss Stone sang I guess, and looks very put together and pretty. If I tell you she's singing a Joss Stone song, you know the kind of voice we're talking about and generally what her flavor is, and the only question is whether she's good at it. I'm not the person to ask, because I find that whole thing annoying, but the judges like it, so I guess it's good. She snaps along with herself, which is rather dramatic. Simon tells everybody that she is going to be a fan favorite, and that he's going to make her do an "O Happy Day" medley, and Tasha gets through. I love her. I am in on that.
Katy Perry looks exactly like Chrissy Seaver shitting herself. Just for a second. Avril's like, "I don't even get that joke! You're too fucking old! Get younger! I said younger, motherfucker! Leonardo DiCaprio is a gross old man!"
Hey speaking of gross, remember the lotion in the basket? Okay, and remember that Mapplethorpe picture of Patti Smith where she looks like a guy -- even more than usual -- and that guy happens to be a chronic masturbator? Good. Now put those two things together in your mind and get ready for the total creepiness of Jason Greene (21, LA). He looks like a supervillain whose main power is being a gross dude and a terrible woman at the same time. It's like one of those optical illusions where is it a bunny or an old lady or a Spanish dancer, or a vase or whatever, but instead it's which way you're going to be raped and murdered: Lady, or man-lady?
In fact, he's is so perfectly awful, in an episode full of seriously creepy creepsters, that it's almost amazing. Like he took a look in the mirror and was like, "I have a pedophile thing happening and I can't seem to escape it. Therefore, we are going to hit turbonium on that and I am going to be the most pedophile guy in the universe." Which, I respect that in a way. But that's a very NYC thing to do, like pretending mustaches and pot bellies are a choice you made. In LA, that's just you being gross.
The doom piano is like, "Get ready to feel gross about some things," and he walks in and threatens to sing "I Touch Myself" for them while smarming around like a drag queen who doesn't know she's in her civvies. His long creepy hair, his terrible skin, his balls-out grossness, they are all happening at once in your face. And now he's going to be singing about masturbating, like you didn't already have that insight into his inner monologue. He sings it slow and he points his fingers, and the ladies hide behind the fellas, and Kara and Randy sing the song to each other which makes me want to fucking puke, and then the guy invites Simon to fuck him -- by implication, not by explicitly asking him -- and he rolls around on the floor and crawls around on his knees like a pussycat and then he really just absolutely... Offers to suck Simon Cowell off.
I don't... That's what happened. Usually that's a metaphor, like, "Was very flattering" or "Tried to sway the judges." But nope, not this time. This time, the creepiest kid in the universe thought crawling around like an alley cat on the floor and offering to give Simon a blow job was, you know, the right choice to make. On TV. He's like, "You've got me on my knees!" And Simon goes, "I knew you'd get there eventually." Which is the most awesome thing Simon has ever done, in a lifetime of doing awesome things. Jason poses and writhes and wriggles and acts totally yucky and Simon eventually gets bored, and then it's over. Katy Perry is like, "You know how I'm utterly disgusting? You're more so. Like, you have to get up pretty early in the morning to gross me out."
Which, those are powerful words. What's worse than the worst? Until today we didn't have a word for it. So then he insults Katy's top and goes to the fag place and everybody laughs and applauds this courageous and original choice, and he's finally gone. Then he does a pirouette and goes outside and gives Ryan Seacrest his number, doubling down on his original grossness by macking on both Ryan and Simon. Both of whom are actually, really, honestly uncomfortable. Which, I'm not personally invested or territorial about the Simon and Ryan parts of this bullshit when I say: Way to help out, guy. Thanks for pushing my gay wedding back a couple more years.
Is this how black people feel about Flavor Flav?
Kara and Katy disagree about cute boy after cute boy while some shitty Katy Perry song plays, and they pull out their songwriting dicks and measure them and it's awful, and Katy gets bitchier and bitchier with Kara, and Kara for her part started that journey long ago -- and is about six thousand times smarter than Katy -- so she's just sort of lapping her, and finally Katy just pisses her off and Kara sings about how she kissed a dolphin and she liked it and Katy offers to throw her soda in Kara's face, and the boys' boners are slowly lifting up the table, because straight men are just horrible. They are just fucking everything up.
Chris Golightly (25, LA) was in 25 foster homes when he was a kid, and it was rough. He has blonde curly Brian Krakow hair and is very beautiful, and seems really broken inside. I'm interested to see where this is headed. He charms Ryan, sings "Stand By Me" quite smoothly and beautifully, when he's not zazzing it up in unpredictable and distracting ways. Also, the chain on his wallet goes down past his knee. I'm seeing the chinks in the armor already.
Kara tells him there is a retroactive wow in his future and a hell of a life story or some shit, it kind of goes nowhere, but then Katy gets super-bitchy with Kara some more, and Kara actually just fucking hates Katy now, which is obviously the right idea but paradoxically doesn't really do it for me. Kara has been such a fucking drag this year that it's going to take more than just catching up to the realization that Katy Perry is a travesty of a human being. Katy and Simon don't love him or his stupid story, Randy and Kara not only love him but continue to climb all over each other. Is this perhaps them trying to create a Paula/Simon chemistry so they appear to have personalities? Is this about how Ellen is better than them and makes them join forces? Whatever it is, looking at it makes me barf.
Some meaningless number of people we never saw in our lives get through to Hollywood. Where, as you know, they already were.
Also: Miley Cyrus. As your triumphant song the first time anything good ever happened to you. That shits on it, I think. And that's The Climb. I wish Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus would just do it and then maybe we could all move on from this particular gross moment in our collective sexuality. Because it doesn't seem like it's going anywhere. I feel even more this way now than I did a year ago, that going all Weetzie Bat on your own sexual trauma is not a competitive sport, but I'm also chiller about it because I realized Twilight isn't about romance, it's about how gross and crazy teenage girls are. Less Titanic, more Flowers In The Attic.
And I fully support going as crazy and gross as you can early in life, even though we don't really have the cultural vocab to talk about why that happens and how it's basically okay, because teenage girls' sexuality is the most important commodity in the entire history of humans, so people being weird about it is obviously not going to go away, because the people in control of everything are the ones in control of it. Like oil, or that stuff from Dune, only it belongs to an actual person who can actually hear and see you being creepy about it, and is getting messed up by that. So instead we don't talk about it at all, because what are you going to say? Anything you could possibly say just sounds like an invitation to a Purity Ball, which is just incest without the sex.
So you get nasty infections like Katy Perry or Miley Cyrus or Twilight popping up all the time, and everybody's coming up with new shapes to shave their pubes and acting like sex is constantly coming out in new flavors and formulations because in order to prove that you are okay with sexuality you have to demonstrate aberrant sexuality, which makes no sense at all, but Madonna re-centered sex in the '90s just like they did the SATs and we grew up thinking that's what sex was like: Weird. Not fun, not awesome, not the easiest and simplest possible activity you could imagine, but something that involves a lot of drugs, to get it up or keep it up or fade your brain out while you're doing it, strange costumes and power play and leather accoutrements and maybe installing a pulley system in your home. A... what's it called, a block and tackle.