Ryan's rocking the black suit/black necktie look tonight, and moving things right along, so I'm sure something crazy is scheduled. Paula looks pretty and slightly nuts in a flowy one-shouldered blue gown, while in the risers Nathaniel looks like he's got a concussion. We revisit the Top 12ers to date, and then remember how blind Scott is, and the terrible clothing and hair choices of Nate. I guess the lack of image consultation notes they've given him mean something horrible, like there's just no hope for him anyway. I suppose that's a kindness, but maybe it's more of a walk-before-you-run deal. I'm looking forward to tonight because it means -- barring Wild Card, which I used to have a handle on and now find completely confusing -- no more Kristen ever.
First up we're going to group sing -- mostly seated, because of the Scott factor -- a Katy Perry song, "Hot & Cold," which is the third Katy Perry single that has to do with boys and girls and boys who like girls who do boys like they're girls and reinforcing gender stereotypes while congratulating itself on not doing that. Let's talk about Katy Perry for a second. I actually heard this cover of "Electric Feel" that she did, and it was totally lovely. She has a wonderful voice under all that bullshit, which makes me hate her more and not less. It's not even the horrific Diablo Cody/Betty Page cute/burlesque crap, although they do contribute to the overall '90s-ness of her, which is admittedly yucky.
The problem is that, just like this show is not so much about selling your soul as speculating against the real estate market of the place your soul would normally be located, Katy Perry took a pretty face and a fantastic voice and leveraged them against this stupid-ass dead-end offensive gender stuff: "You change your mind like a girl changes clothes" tells you everything you need to know about Katyworld, where men have minds and girls have clothes, and girls only kiss girls to impress guys because they are drunk. It's not even a one-trick pony, it's just a trick, and a cautionary tale for these kids, who have not even begun to sell out yet. Katy Perry is to sexuality what Gwen Stefani is to racial equality.
Since there are 12 of these bitches, the recap of last night is like 20,000 years long, but we already did that. I mean, I'm watching it because of the magic of Alex, but I don't think we need to talk about it any more than we already did. Last night's recap was fun to write, but I already lost two hours to this shit. Fast forward.
Ryan asks Nate if he had fun last night or was offended by the criticism, and he says some useless crap about how he's the fun one and can actually secretly sing, but he just likes to have fun and that his lack of headband tonight shows his versatility and how fun he is. Then Ryan serves up a softball to Jorge about how meaningful this is for him, because people in Puerto Rico are so talented and nobody will ever know, so he has feelings or something. Then he says something fairly cute about how it's "freezing" in LA compared to San Juan, and it's funny. Taylor is back dressed like Silver from , so I guess so we know just how awful shopping with her would really be, and then Ju'Not has his 15th medical crisis, which is like all he ever talks about now that he can't carry his kid everywhere on his shoulder like a parrot with the voice of Gilbert Gottfried.
Lil comes down to see Ryan and is of course in the Top 12, despite wearing an entire picnic table tonight. Ryan's overjoyed that he got to just tell her quickly, instead of dicking around and making everybody throw up. She's of course very excited, and continues to work the entire room. Her pretty hair is a bit complicated and makes her mess with it and touch it the whole time. Then she sings the Mary J. song again, which bums me out, because it's one of the few performances I would want to listen to again, so I'm just going to waste some time listening to her sing it again. I love it when people take their faces away from the mic instead of saying a curse word, because when they come back to it they always have this wide-eyed, amazed look on their faces. Do you know what I'm talking about? Everybody does this. People do it even in karaoke: you look away for the duration of the dirty word, and then when you look back at the camera you're always like, "Can you believe that word I didn't say? Swears!"
Taylor, Alex, Kendall, Arianna and Scott stand up. Why? Because one of them is in the Top 12. Ryan's like, "But who is it?" And at least two people in the live audience are like, "Scott, stupid!" After the jump we talk about Arianna's "gloomy" and funereal ABBA song; she says she obviously regrets even trying, and Ryan sends her home. Her parents look murderous. Then comes Taylor, whom Simon found "generic and bland," but whose voice impressed the remainder of the judgery; she is also sent home, unsurprisingly. This one's going to hurt.
Alex Wagner-Trugman "growled and screamed," but was totally fucking awesome. He admits that his heart was kind of broken by their sudden turning on him, which made me really sad last night, but that then he remembered he wanted to fail as himself rather than win as something lame. Then he goes home. Kendall sang Martina and was a serviceable cliché; she calls this "coming into myself as my own artist" and admits trying other stuff before returning to country. Dunzo.
Then there's Scott, who moved mountains, is totally fucking blind, and thus is in the Top 12. (My eternal love to the forum poster who came up with the idea of somebody in Scott's family holding up a photograph of an eyeball with a big X over it and crying into the camera. That is fucking brilliant.) Then we are treated to some more Bruce Hornsby, and it sounds even worse than it did last night, because why even try? I don't want to be cynical about him, himself, because he seems super, but this is such a fucking dog-and-pony show.
I've recapped a lot of science-fiction shows for this site, and I often get hit with the shame of thinking, "What if a person who didn't know this show was good flipped past and saw X idiotic thing?" Like robots or whatever, right? Then this very nice person would say, "Nope, not for me." And Scott's blindness is sort of like that. If you never saw American Idol before, and you flipped by him singing like this, probably you would think Ty Pennington was lurking nearby, or that the act was, like, a girl and a sheep doing hopscotch while singing the Ting Tings, and that's not really what this show, or Scott, are about. I don't know how to resolve that effect though, beyond trusting America to vote his ass out when it's time.
So that's the M and F. Possible Ns include the lost and wandering Kristen, and Nate, whose Meatloaf was lame and karaoke, but didn't earn Simon's hate. Simon shrugs about still liking Nate, and Ryan is like, "I love you so much, Simon" and they agree that Ryan's going to replace his Simon screensaver with him shrugging about Nate. Kristen looks like she's been run over by a truck full of drugs and sex workers, and they are both dunzo. Then Von and Felicia stand up. Felicia is also dressed like Silver. This is not a look, ladies. Von refuses once again to respond to the whole Clay Aiken thing while Felicia did a great job with the Alicia Keys. Both gone.