I knew it was Rat Pack night, but seeing them dressed like that is like waking up from a dream where you got fired and then waking up enough to remember that you really did get fired. In fact, I'm worried enough that I'm going to cheat and look at the song list... Oh, that's nice! I like all of these songs! As long as they don't bring out Tony Bennett this should go well. Matt's going to kill! [This is Jacob from the future, pointing and laughing at you for thinking Matt's awesomeness and his song's awesomeness couldn't possibly add up to something stupid.]
Paula's wearing a crazy dress, in a lovely shade of red, that looks like a classroom decoration for Valentine's Day as viewed from a very wrong angle. The band rocks out playing some little jazz tune because of course they're going to both be awesome and enjoy themselves immensely tonight, Kara does a little dance, and then there's the Idols. From this distance, Danny looks fabulous, Allison looks almost properly attired, Matt is wearing an annoying hat and suit like Dick Tracy, Kris is tiny and can wear anything he wants, and Adam's back in all-white, which means drama. Up close, Matt's wearing a blue shirt with a grey suit and has thus redeemed himself away from the swinger ethos he looked like at first glance, and Danny is wearing a hideous chin-beard.
If the surprise mentor is Tony Bennett I'm going to throw a goddamn fit. Is he dead yet? Are there any left that are alive? They play up the suspense by going to the mansion and showing us the makeup lady slathering foundation all over Adam, like they do I guess every second of every day, and Matt's freaking out because if they're taking the "standards" part seriously it could be somebody really atrocious like Rod Stewart or that man with the long hair, and Kris points out that all of those people are, um, dead.
But then it's so very organic that they're all gathered around the piano singing "Georgia On My Mind" when the real mentor comes in, because it's Jamie Foxx. Wait, what? Oh, it's because he -- just like the Rat Pack -- transcends the boundaries of TV and music and movies and space and time and whatever. I vaguely remembered the Oscar he got, because I thought it was ghoulish, and tacky in a whole additional way for giving out Oscars for Best Copycat, but if you think of it that way it makes total sense, him being here.
Besides, what else can you do after kicking off Lil Rounds for being a sound-alike but bring on the most successful sound-alike success story of all time? "Don't be a copycat! You might fuck up and win an Oscar!" ...And apparently, every other award that ever existed, and have a whole bunch of careers of which I wasn't aware. Apparently Jamie Foxx is everywhere right now. Which I didn't, paradoxically, know. Maybe I'm a racist. That would be a real kick in the pants.
Kris is first, to lots of cheers, about which both he and Ryan are suddenly bashful. Kris's constant act like he's the girl who just took off her glasses is starting to get stale, like we past disingenuous a few weeks back, but luckily I couldn't care less about him as a person. I just want him to sing the song and be in front of our eyeballs, and whatever it takes to make that keep happening, go for it. So Kris works their shit for awhile and then blabbers about nothing for awhile, and then there's a commercial.
Between nothing and nothing, there's some nothing, and thank God for commercials about Glee every second, because they do cheer me up. Do you know what they're doing there? It's so stupid. They're doing the pilot in May, and then starting the show in August. I mean, I'm the kind of asshole who empirically knows that Friday Night Lights is the most awesome thing of all time and I still forget to watch it even though the day is right there in the name. How am I supposed to be charmed by Glee long enough for that? Word of mouth doesn't work in the Twitterverse. I won't have to watch Fox two nights a week in August, man, so they won't be gagging me with the commercials by then, and I'll have forgotten all about it, because Adam Lambert will have been the winner for months at that point. I won't even be watching TV in August, I'll have thrown my TV away and be painting bowls of fruit and mentoring inner city kids and like, doing tai chi and shit.
So even Jamie Foxx is a little bit overwhelmed by Kris's tiny, potent presence, and says nothing of value beyond how awesome he thinks Kris is and how he wants to be besties with him and they can paint each other's toenails at Neverland Ranch. Jamie wants to make a record with him; I want to make a record with his very flattering pants. Watching Jamie Foxx be squirrely about Kris Allen is about the coolest way to spend an evening, I've always thought.
"The Way You Look Tonight" is a song that I like. It's not too big-bandy and it's not too oldy-moldy, it's just one of those songs. I prepared for tonight by watching You Were Never Lovelier earlier, with Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth. It's creepy but I recommend it. Anyway, Kris does all kind of Rat Pack faces heading into it, and then forgets what he's up to and slides straight into usual Kris mode. He has this thing where you believe that he believes every word of the song, but simultaneously it seems he's not entirely clear on everything going on around him, so it's sort of a null sum, intellectually.
That's like the meanest thing I've ever said. I didn't even really mean it. Maybe it is true. I don't know, but his tone is as usual perfect, and he even gets around the essential boringness of these songs by bumping up the tempo halfway through, and he hits some falsetto and then hops around adorably, and it's lovely. His voice sounds like the radio. I bet they are going to say the word "contemporary" a billion times. All of this, it suits him. I don't know if it's just a good week for him, or the relative simplicity of the music works in his favor or what. Hell, maybe it's the clothes, I can't be trusted, but that ruled. Good start to the night, and one of his best.
Randy agrees, and Kara gives some queer speech about the technical standard or whatever. She does this thing all night that Paula sometimes does, which is not even try to pretend to be speaking extemporaneously. I mean, I'm sure these are her thoughts, her notes or whatever, but girlfriend can't sell it. It just sounds like she's reading off a teleprompter, which would be a little weird given the established format, but is especially weird given her emotional and vehement opinions, like, to the point that it's a little creepy. Paula calls him an "ever-so-handsome sophisticated gentleman," praises his quiet confidence, and says the word "contemporary" a few times, because the other two did. Simon laughs, because he's not sold on it, and calls it "a little bit wet," by which he means... I'm not sure. Ryan's not sure either, but when he asks Simon says, "Not dry." Which, I think, is code for "Ryan, I think you know."
I think he just meant it was soggy and soft and safe, which it sort of was, except it sounded so beautiful that I don't really care. Also on the list of crap I don't care about: Allison turned seventeen yesterday. My hopes that she might suddenly become interesting are dashed, because age is just a number. A number Allison can't add to another number and produce the correct total, but a number just the same. She says it's "scary" being the only girl left in the company of those four guys, and Ryan's sort of startled by that, but then it turns out she was "joking." Somehow. Also, the whole time she's constantly raising the roof, like, more times than a thousand Kelly Clarksons saying "cool beans" for ten thousand years could equal how much time she spends raising the roof. She tells some interminable story about how it was her birthday and nobody said anything but then there was a surprise party. Nice, how was that? "Oh, that's cool." God she's a dullard.
Jamie calls her one to watch, and she prepares "Someone To Watch Over Me," a song I very much enjoy, and not least because of its very weird lyrics. They talk about how in this case the someone to watch over her is her family, because she is too young to know true love or something, and Jamie says about how your family's love flows into you, and thus out into the world, or some shit. But I guess he's speaking her language, unless she's just nodding because she forgot what her head was doing.
She sings the first half in a very Stefani sort of fake-sad moue, but luckily she has that wonderful voice, so there's no sign of the nervousness beyond her eyes. Rat Pack night is interesting, because the very reason I hate this music, its boringness, is what makes Rat Pack night so awesome because it's all about the vocals, and this year especially they all have such wonderful voices that you could almost sit still the whole time and just listen to the sounds coming out of them.
Again Allison picks up the pace a bit toward the middle, and the instruments all kind of converge on a wide-open field so she can toss some glory notes down, and it's awesome. She's actually fairly in control of things at this point, pretty commanding onstage, but it's nothing like a showstopper, and as much as I enjoy this, it's only because I like her voice. I'm not motivated to pick up the phone or anything, and I can't see anybody feeling that way based on this performance alone, no matter how pretty it is. Kara gets ten times creepier talking in some madeup idiom about how she was thinking Allison needed somebody to watch over her, but she ain't nervous for her no more, with a neck snap, because Allison was different, gut-wrenching and emotional. Kara loved it, but in a way that was also gut-wrenching.
Paula and her vaselined scary shiny lips are very impressed, particularly by Allison's "innocent sensibility that was both alluring and very tender," which coming from a man judge would be barfimous, but here is allowable, and also correct. Simon tells her she will never win because she doesn't believe she will win because he doesn't believe she will win, or whatever Simon thing, but he finds this tragic because the performance was so good. But it was also uncommitted and a little mechanical. And here I just thought it was boring and sweet. Kara yells randomly, and Ryan tells Allison to "develop a little ego" and "be confident," and she wonders allowed if her goal shouldn't be to become "likeable." I agree with all of them, but Allison most of all.
Matt Giraud singing "My Funny Valentine" is, on paper, pretty much like My Mystery Date With Seth Rogan. I can't think of anything better than him, or that song, and both of them together should be cake. The only way he's going to fuck it up is by going too far in the Rat Pack direction, and I wish that was baseless but for one thing he keeps snapping his fingers when the camera is on him, which does not inspire confidence, and number two is his outfit, which unlike everybody else's -- even Adam, adjusting for his innate Adamness -- looks like a costume. He looks like that gangster wolf from Mighty Mouse.
Which sucks because the reason I hate songs like this is the vocal tics, the way everybody ends up singing like one of three dead men, and this song shouldn't even be an issue since Chet Baker is the required version and he doesn't sing that zoot-suit crappy way, he sings like a scary weird woman-man. And generally it's even more exciting to watch Matt when I like the song, because I like his instincts, like the Underwood song or "Human Nature," which I still listen to on occasion. So hopefully he won't pull some weird daddy-o crap, but I'm unsure.
At least he looks good. When he's not smiling. Ryan asks if this week isn't Matt's specialty, which is also scary to hear. Matt loves Jazz, he got a B in it in college, and is wearing too much makeup. He got a B in jazz back then. When he sings for Jamie it sounds more like Chet, but maybe that's just is voice. I am on pins and needles with this. Jamie gives him the weird advice to have something going on at all times because the song is so big, and gives him no other advice, then brings him back later and tells him to lower the key and not get dramatic with the notes. Jamie talks into the camera at length and can't focus his eyes. Generally Jamie is being really weird right now.
So right out of the box, I'm done. There's all kinds of weird enunciations and swingin' vocal bullshit that has nothing to do with him. It's cartoonish, and not at all with that trademark smoothness and beauty you're looking for. He looks nice, and there are parts where his real voice peeks out between the endless yards of random crap impressions of lots of other people. I like the song and I do love Matt, but this is sort of annoying and a little embarrassing because there's no Matt in it. It's playacting. And no matter how much acrobatic precision or ornamentation you put around the patent bullshit, it's still there, and the phrasing and pronunciation are irritating as hell. It's like the suit took over his brain.
The Judgery found it fumbling and emotionally disconnected, although Paula liked it, and even liked losing the chance to hear his lovely falsetto. I can't believe that there's very much to say about it, because it was so mannered and uncool as to be less than worth talking about, but whatever. I just did too. Simon, surprisingly, says it's the first believable/authentic performance, and that he could tell Matt loved the song, then compares his phrasing to Nat King Cole and says it was absolutely brilliant. Really? Well, Simon isn't allergic to those particular things, so I guess it makes more sense, but man did I hate that more than anything else tonight.
Even Danny Gokey, whose "Come Rain Or Come Shine" is the only song I didn't recognize from the title alone. He sings it to Jamie with his usual desperate need for approval, and even Jamie's ooked out by it and tells him to get real and stop being all weird and cringy, then gets right up in his face and makes weird faces at Danny for the rest of their time together, to the point where Danny physically jumps away from him and they talk about his fresh, Jesusy breath, and the whole thing is weird and pointless. It made me nervous!
Chin-beard and song are both totally Danny: irritatingly perfect, and perfectly irritating. Smug smiles, random lame hand gestures, jacked up teeth, weird pronunciations of words, but I would have to say it's the embarrassing "yeah yeah" in the middle there that's the hardest to take. But then, interestingly, it builds to a certain crazy level, and he goes legitimately crazy on it, neither maudlin nor weird but like, hot and angry. Random, and awesome, and way cooler than anything he's ever done. Even though it was all kinds of fake and poseury I'm still impressed, because I vaguely remember rooting for him back in the beginning, when it was just his cute face and beautiful voice and not his horrible, terrible personality. He finishes up, and then thanks the applauding crowd more times than Celine Dion.
Kara dorks out twice as much as Danny, at this point. I don't even want to talk about it. I'm pretty much over Kara this week, because dealing with her has been really uncomfortable tonight. Paula calls it stellar and says she can tell he sees the finish line in front of hm. That's been true since last summer; he nods as though he doesn't hear the complete dilemma this statement means for him, douchewise. Simon praises his higher confidence and feels he came out to "prove a point." He also gave the best vocal he's given in weeks (at least!) and benefited from a truly jawdropping arrangement -- even among the five numbers, which all gave the band a workout and were all pretty special -- and then because he's swept up in this weird orgy of approval, after a lifetime of holding back, sends some love over to Jamie Foxx, for making Danny seem so lifelike this week.
Adam Lambert was always going to be doing "Feeling Good." There's nothing as dramatic, or creepy, or bombastic, or brassy as that song. It's like five songs, like a whole story about feeling things. He won't even have to do anything to it. I mean, he of course will, but he doesn't necessarily need to. And therein lies the wonder of Adam. Plus, good sign that he's going last, because that means drama plus.
Jamie Foxx treats Adam properly, to a fault, like he took a class in properly responding to Adam. Which I feel like we should all take, because after sixteen weeks I still don't know where to look when he's singing. He just treats him like the most amazing thing he's ever seen, which is exactly how you should treat someone like Adam, because it's what they deal best with, and Jamie does it awesomely, just struck wordless the whole time, and laughing hysterically at the end by how easily Adam made all those sounds in front of him. Him! Oscar winner!
But it's true, and Jamie Foxx is only responding out of what he knows, which is that people usually piss themselves around him because he's intensely famous, so how on earth can anybody be that vulnerable or balls-out in front of him. He thinks it's amazing because he's Jamie Foxx, but if you weren't famous you would still want to ask Adam who the hell he thinks he is, because the thing that's best and worst about Adam is how completely unselfconscious and how completely self-conscious he is at the same time, and it just adds up from both sides to this bizarre epic show right in front of you and you can't look at it because it's too much, but you can't look away because it's so amazing.
And of course meanwhile Adam's like, "Well good, because I was shitting it," because it's been so long since he was uncomfortable or able to feel weird professionally that he honestly doesn't seem to understand the undercurrent of shock that greets him after every song. Which is, I think, what I've been trying to say about him this whole time. It's like I used to say on The Apprentice, how born salesmen are aliens to me because I could never say ad copy in a convincing way, because it would be embarrassing, and Adam's that way with singing all crazy. Just who the hell does he think he is? Adam. That's solid on a level I can barely even imagine.
On the other hand, when I found out the theme I started thinking about Adam, and more generally, about how the best possible, the Blake possibility of this theme each year, is somewhere around that "Ain't No Other Man" album that Xtina put out that I never got into, that double album. And like, if Aguilera can't convince me, I'm not getting convinced, and I never really managed to care about Our Jazz Roots or whatever. And I thought a lot also about Jeff Buckley, and how he was headed in this direction of rehabilitating jazz for our generation before he died, and how somewhere between those two very different people is the optimal way this theme could play out. But of course the things I was leaving out were first that Sarah/Billie/Edith is not the Rat Pack kind of jazz, and also that Adam is canny enough to know that now is not the time for crazy. He's made a decision that "Ring Of Fire" is as far as he's allowed to go, and I think that's the right decision.
All of which is to say that my expectations here were not only unfair, but also unworkable, and I shouldn't have gotten all excited, because what we got was not only serviceable but fairly wonderful. And again, the song has all those Adam elements without him having to answer for having added them, to the point where he could just sing it straight -- which he does, plus that caterwauling thing he's so good at -- and still do an amazing job, because the Adam is built in. And that's what happens. He gets into the falsetto by the third line, and heads downstairs by turns sexy and then just straight up angry, all the way down. In some ways it's more cabaret and intense than before, but if you close your eyes it's just perfect. His voice is amazing. He's harder to look at than usual, between the skin and the puffiness and the scary emotions, but close your eyes and it's so pretty.
There's a breakdown that's just moaning, that way he does, and then a very long, very high screech that pretty much freaks out the whole world, and it ends on a weird echo, and then right when he's done singing, as usual, he goes from a snarling Kenneth Anger movie death goddess person to just like this nice boy. That little moment where his eyes clear and he smiles, that's become my favorite part of the show each week, because you remember you're allowed to breathe and that all of this is just pretend. It was painfully short. I just remembered why I like him so much.
Kara goes completely aphasic, all about how she is constantly asking, as we all are, "Is he really doing that?" He's "shocking -- in a good way -- confusing, shocking, sleazy, superb, way over the top, and ... I don't know! I love you! Craziness!" Kara always goes nuts like this, but even funnier is Paula going, "Like, exactly." She reaches for words, as usual can find none that will do what she wants, and compares him to Michael Phelps. Simon laughs at Randy calling him theatrical, because it's like yelling at a cow for mooing: theatre is what Adam does, and it's awesome. "I LOVE IT!" screams Paula. Simon goes on to say that anybody who thinks winning doesn't matter is kidding themselves, but Adam and two others tonight obviously are intent on winning, and says in a pretty honest way that this -- the excellence, the voices, the striving, the sheer entertainment factor -- is why he loves this show best this year. Me too, Cowell.
So: Kris did fun vocal stuff while looking like a tiny sex jungle gym, both as per usual; Allison took it a little slower this week, to her detriment, and risked being boring in order to engage a whole new style; Matt did some kind of fucking weirdo deal on the best song of the night, to his detriment: Danny was objectively awesome; and Adam did the whole Adam thing. B2 Matt and Allison, for sure, but I have no idea which one will go home, because I feel like it's Matt's time to go, but Allison was pretty disappointing, so it's personal either way and psychic powers don't work if you care.
Playlist this week: I Was A Cub Scout, Ida Maria, Lightspeed Champion, Friska Viljor, and The Blow. See you in the morning.
Does Kris need to win this show more than Danny or Adam? Our vloggers discuss.