This is like the best Top Six ever. I'm pleased. Simon and Ryan spend some time together in Africa listening to Coldplay -- our go-to band for poverty and horror -- feeding kids and being horrified, then Ryan travels the US with the judges being horrified at various injustices; for a normal person it would be disingenuous but the outrageous amount of Hollywood that these people are goes right through sincerity and out the other side, making it actually somewhat touching. The giant hairy Rupert Murdoch octopus reinvents monetizing easy-chair altruism for the tenth time; Ryan's classy about it. I think he's trying to make Anderson Cooper notice him. Simon goes to a food bank and loses it, handing out hugs and learning about money. After Chris's Virginia Tech debacle last week, the kids decide the only way they can combat Phil's weekly onslaught of meaningless sentimentality is raise the comparative level of their own, creating a dull roar of meaningless sentimentality that's so unforgiving all you can really pay attention to is the singing. Imagine that! Luckily, everybody's great. The theme is "songs that inspire," meaning "songs about doing something instead of actually doing something," and everybody rocks it. Chris sings "Change The World" by Eric Clapton in a completely inscrutable suit and intro package, voice reedy and nasal as usual, and then gets awesome at the end so Paula will cry. Melinda sings "There Will Come A Day" by Faith Hill, a wonderful song about doing absolutely nothing until something amazing happens and the angels come and fix everything. She does a great, great job, of course. Blake is wearing probably his most awesome outfit in the history of Blakeology, and sings "Imagine" by John Lennon, because he is a pothead. It's basically a repeat of the Keane performance, but even less dynamic. What it is, is oddly sexy and delivered with sincerity so intense that Simon's heart grows three sizes. Lakisha sings "I Believe" by Fantasia, in the style of Fantasia, and is blasted for it by the judges, who apologize for overshadowing her amazing vocals with this critique. Phil is still around, and dedicates his performance of Garth Brooks's "The Change" to his children and the Oklahoma City bombings, having officially run out of horrible things to dedicate his songs to. He sounds like Peabo Bryson had a baby with Michael McDonald; it's totally rad. Jordin ends the night with a wildly proficient rendition of "You'll Never Walk Alone," a song with which I am not familiar, but we're assured was perfectly performed in every way, by the hyperactive judges, to the point they seem scared she's getting bumped. Tomorrow: two hours of celebrities pretending to care, plus Bono, who invented the concept.
There's two kinds of cynical. There's the Simon Cowell kind that looks at something sincere and says, "That is not genuine, we're all slime," like, that's a cynical person, a negative person. But there's the other kind, the Ani DiFranco kind, that says, "I know you can't tell the difference; so buy my fake sincerity." One thing I've never been able to discern is whether Ryan Seacrest is either of these, and I have thought about it over the years until my brain did a backbend, and I am no closer to figuring it out. This week the show is like a Turing Test of that. The sincerity's sitting in another room doing its nails, while the whole song and dance is distracting you from the fact that five million dollars, which FOX/News Corp will be donating tonight, is not that much money. It has nothing to do with voting, or who votes, because there's a five mil cap on it. So not only does the show want you to vote because this show made you crazy, like every week, but now you get to feel like you're making a difference in some way, by being one of the first 50 million crazy-person votes. I don't remember how many votes the show's been getting lately, but that doesn't seem like an unattainable goal -- add the complete laziness of sitting on your couch and dialing your phone a few times, which you were going to do before you even knew it made you a hero, and everybody wins.
Except for how five million dollars is not ten million dollars, or twenty million dollars, and how no matter how much money you throw at a problem, if the problem exists on the level of national and international policy, as the nebulous "poverty" problem does, the problem itself will not change. You're putting Band-Aids on a cancer victim and calling yourself a hero for doing it, and I really cannot stand that disingenuous self-aggrandizing shit. Doing one cool thing doesn't let you off the hook, no matter how easy or hard it is. You don't get permanent cred for doing something good, because the sun's still going to come up tomorrow, and there's still going to be stuff that needs getting done. The problem isn't that there's not enough money going to the right places, it's that our society is built on keeping that money in the wrong places, and you and I both benefit from that. Deal with it. You eat meat, you deal. You buy clothing, you deal. You get legally married, you deal. Just understand what it says above the fountain you're drinking from.
Anyway, so tonight is all about the live performances and how tonight's a very special show, with the same three judges and the same six finalists we've come to expect, but with one huge difference: the calls you make can save your contestants...and also save LIVES. This is Idol Gives Back. This is also a lie. There's a $5M cap on the donations NewsCorp's willing to make on behalf of IGB, which means that if they donate 10 cents per call, that's 50 million calls, and then the Giving Back stops. So...your vote means less to those people than usual; usually they want you to vote so they can brag about it (and in order to appease Cingular, "the new AT&T," who benefits every week along with the rest of the cell networks, who gets the public handjob every week) but this week they want you not only to brag about it, but so that you'll brag about it too. Because you found the one way to sacrifice and give of yourself in a way that demands neither sacrifice nor giving of yourself. Because they found a way to leverage even the meaningless bullshit of this show against your own sense of well-being. Since apparently I need to explain these things now, I want to be clear: this recap is not tomorrow's recap, and I'm not going to talk about tomorrow or the ultimate result of this shit, because that's not what's going on now, in this episode we're talking about now. Tomorrow night, I'm going to wuss out and cry and donate money, but we're not talking about Wednesday, we're talking about Tuesday, and Tuesday is one million times more bullshit than Wednesday night's amazing amount of bullshit.
Ryan's tie...is it made of shark? He's gone all awesomely stubbly, which is always going to get my vote, and what he's saying is that AI is tonight "launching" a new charity "project" in which you're asked to do nothing but do what you were going to do anyway -- vote like crazy for the person that this show has trained your specific demographic to vote for, like crazy -- but that simply doing this thing you were already going to do makes you a hero. Other heroes doing everything they were already doing include Ford, Coca-Cola, and AT&T, the new Cingular. Even Bono -- a person who never did anything for anybody else, a person who hasn't made a career of constant "giving back" and all the cachet it represents -- will be "giving back" in some undefined way: how can we do less? Better pick up that phone and do what we were going to do anyway. Paula looks really great tonight, which is especially nice given the fact that Ryan's mic goes out just as he's saying her name. But what causes are to be benefited by these calls we were already going to be making, if we were given to making calls? Why, nobody's willing to say. They have to do with America and Africa, which are the two most fucked countries in the globe, in terms of homelessness and the suppression of human rights, not mentioning Iraq and the Middle East. And let me tell you that "not mentioning Iraq and the Middle East" is...pretty much the point of everything that's going to happen from here on out. It's great to feel good about yourself donating to those causes to which you never felt like donating before, when your country -- for whom the SHOW is NAMED -- is carrying out a vastly worse military action for nothing more than financial interest in a place where apparently nothing bad happens. Where nothing bad is happening right now. Of the many disgusting backbends you're asked to perform this week, perhaps the worst, is returning to the clichéd and mysterious "badness" in America and Africa, when the worst human rights abuses and war crimes are still being carried out on Middle East and American soil by your own government, as you're making that call.
To the sounds of Coldplay, our go-to band for sad, cynical, meaningless, vile sentiment, Ryan and Simon took a little trip to Africa. Africa, whose starvation, malaria, and HIV are the Godwin's Law Nazi Party of progressive thought. America doing something wrong? Americans apathetic, Americans living on the streets or in inadequate temporary housing or in mortal danger? At least it's not Africa. Those freaks got AIDS. And look how helpful we're being there! Whew! It's not that I blame anybody in particular -- I'm coming off a lot less conservative than I actually am -- but I do get really creeped out when people clap themselves on the back for "helping" with a problem, or set of problems, for which we as Americans are secondarily responsible, and from which we benefit more directly, than the problems we're -- as Americans -- helping to cause. You define the level of your responsibility: which humans you are meant to save, and which you aren't. How you draw those lines is personal and specific, but how you draw those lines depends a great deal on what you omit, and on the amount of satisfaction you derive. Helping Africa in some way -- a way which is, for the entirety of tonight, left almost entirely up to your imagination -- in a way which demands nothing of you except sitting on the couch, feeling like a hero for watching this shitty show, is a lot different from doing anything to protest the ugly war your country is carrying out for the interests of a few giant corporations, most of which have very little to do with your life in any way, and certainly donât add to its quality in any realistic way. But Coldplay keeps singing, and feeling great about it.
In Africa there are lots of kids, and a lot of them have dead parents. We're all aware of this in the abstract, because that's how tragedy works, but it's a sad day indeed when Ryan Seacrest sees it face-to-face, smells it, watches it happening. It's a curious telescope: what becomes real for Ryan, standing in the middle of it, becomes real for us, watching Ryan see it happening. There's a twelve year old boy in Africa who is the head of his family, raising sons and daughters nearly his own age, keeping it together. Ryan falls in love. Simon loses his shit entirely, stomping around that tiny dirty room and pronouncing it "horrible," "intolerable," "terrible." He walks out of the room in the middle of a woman telling her story; maybe you did too. This is how tragedy works. Ryan sits in the middle of malaria, and they're dying, and somewhere Simon Cowell's kind of losing his damn mind. And then more Coldplay. Simon walks through a pile of abandoned trash, calling this "quite literally hell on earth"; Ryan looks desperately for some kind of hope. It's a trip that changed his life. And not only this accumulated palimpsest of tragedy a world away, but at home too. Things suck in America as well. The theme tonight proves it: "Songs That Inspire." Oh Christ.
First up is Chris, fresh from watching his own Virginia Tech grief on the big screen. He'll be singing a song called "Change The World," by Eric Clapton and, like, Babyface. Barf. That's something, he says -- and he's right, but wrong -- that defines the show this week: "It's about how one person has the will to change someone's life, so just imagine what millions could do." You tell me what this actually means, I'll donate a hamburger to you. He looks quite nice, though his voice is continuing to get more nervous and reedy; he shoves his Scott Savol Secret Squirrel fakeness right to you, just kinda shoving it in your face. I don't know. As I've been getting more and more irritatingly sincere, not to say earnest, in the last year, the show has been getting worse and more aggressive at being cynical and disingenuous, resulting in a bizarre kind of alchemy which ends in nothing quite so much as anger. His performance gets better toward the end, so the judges will love it. There's nothing wrong with it. Randy loves it well above and beyond the love it deserves, as usual; Paula's excited by his journey. Simon's shirt is open so low that you can see the ghosts of every shirt he's ever worn: he thinks Chris finally started the competition tonight, and is finally proving the potential they all presumed he showed at some point. I don't get Chris's jacket: there's like half a necktie peeking out from under the lapel, pointing off to the side, like a trenchcoat belt gone horribly wrong, or a clip-on tie that went rogue. Simon calls Chris "sexy"; I can neither confirm nor deny. Ryan loved it, and lets us know that they're doubling the time limits on voting; it doesn't matter because of the five million cap, but it's nice of them regardless.
Melinda waves, daisies sprouting in her footsteps, looking eerily like Andre the Giant for a sec, smiling and waving. Ivanka's there. Aww! Myspace is the eighth mutant finger on Rupert Murdoch's godlike hand. Ryan walks around in the slums all over the country; he wants to be a serious journalist one day like Lisa Ling, so that when he and Anderson finally tie the knot Simon won't be able to say nasty awkward things about their jobs. It's important to Ryan that you never go to bed angry, so it's good to start out on an even playing field. Anderson Cooper doesn't even remember his name yet, but maybe this Africa thing will help. He drips sincerity; Randy goes back to Louisiana and hugs a woman so tired you can't even imagine how she's continuing to stand. It's enough that she's continuing to stand. In Kentucky, education is not the norm, because they're too busy continuing to stand. The Navajo are out of sight and out of mind, castoffs of the castoffs of a murdered nation. Atlanta gave birth to Ryan Seacrest and that was the last good thing she ever did. Everywhere and nowhere at once, there's a mobile health unit in which a girl with blue hair gets her vitals taken. Suri Cruise is caressed by Randy Jackson.
Melinda sings "There Will Come A Day," by Faith Hill. Her hair and makeup looks really cute; her empty sentiments even more so. It's a song about the problems that exist in our country -- "and even the world" -- today, but it's also about hope for tomorrow, "which is what tonight's all about." She's right but she's wrong. In the song, there are wars raging, lives are "scattered," innocence is lost, hope is shattered. She goes for the crazy vocal Olympics right away, but I think it's mostly the band and backup singers doing that; she's just being Melinda. She instructs us to "hold on" to our faith, because "there will come a day." So what, we just wait for it? And the angels will sing or something? Somebody else will take care of it, if you just sit quietly and have hope. Won't that be a great fucking day? I said a silent thanks at this point that Phil had already been eliminated, because I haven't seen the show in two weeks and just sort of assumed. I remembered Sanjaya got eliminated instead, and I was so close to tears already.
Randy is speechless again, but that doesn't stop the tide of words; Paula calls her "magical"; Simon once again calls her disingenuous and makes her promise not to dick it up when he praises her. She blushes and agrees, and he commends her on not sounding copycat: it sounded like she recorded it originally. She nearly cries but keeps it together; out in the audience there's a sign: THAT WAS DA BOMB! It's like a subliminal commercial for Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader. Ryan asks Simon where all his shirt buttons have gone; Simon tells him to stop looking at his chest, and Ryan ignores him. Like that will stop Simon Cowell. Ryan lies: "Remember to vote! You'll save your favorite contestant, and best of all you'll be saving a life." There's something almost sexually dysfunctional about the telethon concept: punishment and reward, punishment and reward. Guilt and then the carrot: "You are awful for not caring/you are wonderful for caring. You are awful for not caring/you are wonderful for caring."
Blake's like, Jacob, hi. It's been a while. I'm gonna play it cool, though. Who am I kidding? He's dressed like he's AWOL from the Army of Awesome, and had to fight to get away. I don't like the fashion world's appropriation of "deconstruction" as a gormless adjective, but in this case it would be appropriate. Flak jacket lines, taken apart and made soft and progressive and nothing to do with death. Viewer Q is unprintable but does involve some pretty sophisticated graphic sexual imagery; he responds that the biggest sacrifice -- other than his dignity, which joke he swallows -- being on this show is missing his friends and family at home. Ryan looks at Blake dreamily, topping off his glass of wine again without Blake noticing: "This is a really special night. There's a really special energy tonight." I think it's amber-colored.
Blake will be singing "Imagine," by John Lennon. He will be doing this because he is a pot-head, because he may well be the future Paul McCartney to an as-yet undiscovered John Lennon. (Blakes and Jordins again: Blake's the Paul, Jordin's the...well, she's kind of the Ringo. Never mind.) Because at the beginning of the war it was subversive to strap on some war gear and sing an Alanis-ironic cover of "What's Going On" but now that's not enough, you have to start over again and the beginning, and sing "Imagine" in an army jacket that's been torn apart. Because it's "about coming together as one, in an ideal world." Blake admits that maybe they won't accomplish that -- or even come close, or even try, or even comprehend what those words actually mean -- tonight, but maybe at least they can start. That part's true, and that part's enough. He sings under a spot, back to the Keane vibe, and he looks fucking...man. Good old Blake. Now, this is maybe his most polished performance to date, but also kind of very boring to just watch if you're hung over, as I am. I will say this: he manages to hit the exact right note of sincerity in this miasma of bullshit fakeness, which is like impossible to do? So props for that. It's perfectly passable, but this song is kind of worn out in some ways. It's hard to even imagine how revolutionary these words were once; it's hard to remember what happened when you listened to it the first time and felt something crack open and be free, because you were so young. Blake's still there, I think. His friends, down in the audience, are the proof. The crowd applauds forever and ever. I think this might be my second most Kryptonite song after "Somewhere Over The Rainbow," w/r/t to the fact that once you hear something enough times it just becomes white noise. There's nothing more beautiful than a violent poet; there's nothing harder than watching it go soft. How there's no applicable key yet discovered by science that can ensure you'll get the same emotional hit off something no matter how many times you hear it. Or see it. There's no way to stop something from getting the edges rubbed off, whether it's a revolution song like this, or some hungry kid over in Africa, starving, HIV positive, orphaned: you see it once you've seen a million times. It doesn't hurt anymore. This song doesn't mean anything anymore.
So how do you change it to make it better again? How do you make it real? Three hours on two consecutive nights of shocking bounces back and forth between total surface and the attempt at total disclosure? Five million dollars is around the revenue they get for a single commercial break, I'm guessing. How do you break through all the dirt and useless time and shells around the part that takes these things as they come, that can hear "Imagine" the way it was intended to be heard: as a scream? Or is that you just go the other way, and speak from that part of yourself? Because that's what's remarkable and not at all naïve about Blake here: for the time it takes to sing this song, he believes. Randy calls it a great choice, an amazing song, perfect, but also dude, it was just kind of all right. He enjoins Blake to "do a little bit more" and explains he's just trying to keep it real. Truer words. Paula agreed at the beginning, that Blake was coasting, but it occurred to her that the song itself is beautiful, and simple. She calls it Blake's first "real, sensitive and emotional performance," and gives him ultimate thumbs up. Paula's never been more right, it's a special night indeed. Simon, speaking respectfully as usual, tells Blake it's tricky, because "Imagine" is one of the "big songs" of all time: there's always going to be a comparison, and you can't take the Phil Stacey route or belt it out, because it's not that kind of song. It sounded good, but -- valid -- didn't go anywhere. So I guess I agree with all three judges, even though they don't know they're agreeing with each other. The most important thing is that he sang it with an almost unbelievable amount of sincerity, which was the only option he had, and he did it all the way.
How's Bono even the mentor? And as though that wasn't dumb enough, Carrie Underwood is coming tomorrow, no doubt to sing about Jesus or letting Jesus borrow your car while you have unwed parent bastard babies or whatever the hell. Ryan tells us that in addition to doing the most meaningless possible thing to help, in a way that helps nobody but you, for doing something you were already going to do, in order to somehow coerce FOX into doing something they were already going to do, in addition to these tiny insincere handjob gestures, you can do "simple things" to make a difference. Ryan, for example, handed a banana to an African. Ryan sits down at a mess hall table with a bunch of kids who have no idea what he's on about; it's a food center for orphans, which contains the cutest girl I've ever seen, and the Ryan and Simon honeymoon tour. They call it "one of the most uplifting places" they've yet seen in Africa, which is a very short list, but the food center gives these kids three hot squares a day, and there aren't enough of them. Ryan giggles with a basket of bananas on his head. Some lady talks about love building bridges and whatnot. Ryan wows about how the kids waited for everyone to be served before they started eating; there's not an American left who understands that impulse. To make sure everybody's served before you take your piece and run. It all sounds important and meaningful until you start listening and looking at the bottom line: these kids live on the bottom line. They don't want poetry, they don't want pity, they don't want Carrie Underwood singing to them in her underwear: they want a fucking sandwich. Stop distracting us. The shiniest thing in the world is self-interest; tell me I have the opportunity to be a hero, to be a better person than my neighbor, at no cost or sacrifice or even inconvenience to myself, I'm going to lose focus. Nothing up your sleeves but a scorching case of overhead and corporate logos embroidered on every surface that will sit still, including Phil Stacey. And all I have to do is vote for Blake? I'm actually getting better as a person simply by watching American Idol? Well sure, that's the least you can do. That's literally the least you can do.
Lakisha will be singing "I Believe," by Fantasia, which is literally the only thing I know about Fantasia. Is she going to get ugly? I would love it if she got ugly. LaKisha says it was inspiring, and as though knowing somebody's going to ask her to clarify that bizarre statement -- given that the song is about absolutely nothing, and is merely a handful of trite statements tied together with the thematic interpolation of Melinda's pot o' gold -- that, in her rather subjective interpretation, the song is about how "if we unite together we can make a change." Whatever. It inspires you because you saw Fantasia Barrino sing it, and she won this stupid show, and you opened with a bad note out the box, and then did your best Fantasia Barrino impression. So basically it inspires you to sing along to in your bedroom mirror, and you've invited us all along to watch. It's pretty -- not ugly, we note -- and when it starts that low you know it's going to get nuts at the end. By around the middle, it's actually one of the better performances of the night. It's been a while since I cared. Now, of course, it's all about that one note, that's the only thing that matters, the whole song is a poetry slam cum pub crawl to get to that one note, so you wait, and you wait, and she nails it. Her moves are decisive and confident, as well; she's gotten over that shyness that grabbed her a couple weeks back. She sounds great, the dress is awesome, makeup's amazing. Randy notes the pitch issues but loved it; Randy thinks it was a great song choice but also a stupid choice of song, because of Fantasia. Randy gets less and less crucial as time goes on. Paula calls her "a powerhouse of a vocalist," to much cheering, but likens this attempt to "taking on a monster." You don't sing songs by Whitney, Mariah, Celine...Chaka Khan...or apparently Fantasia. The slipperiness of that slope puts me in mind of Billy Corgan's classic line, "...And God is empty, just like Paula Abdul."
Fantasia, Paula clarifies, has not been around for a long time, but she is "so undeniably and wonderfully and magnificently unique" that -- and Randy chimes in -- you can only really hear Fantasia singing, when you hear the song. Especially when LaKisha's going full boss Rich Little with it, as she did, but they don't say that. Paula screams that this should not take away from or dilute the encomium to her vocals which two of the three judges just dangled in front of her face and then snatched away again; Simon thanks her for eventually shutting up. "Well no it's you know I don't know," Paula clarifies. Simon explains to them that Fantasia is better, and Paula tries to snark but ends up falling on her face some more. Simon calls it shouty and tells the crowd to go fuck themselves; Ryan steps in as usual, prissing about as to how the theme is Songs That Inspire, she's Inspired by that Song, and the rest is TV history, so who cares. He tells her it was a decent shot at the ill-advised, and thanks her. I guess if I'd seen Fantasia sing for twelve weeks I would have more of an opinion about all this, but she sounded good. I don't have a control group. Wait, are we done? No, there's two more. So who's left? Jordin, obviously...oh, fuck. Phil! I have Memento of Phil. But there he is, looking disgusting as usual.
The viewer Q regards what he misses most of all, and he nearly says the Six Million, thinks better of it, and instead plays the baby card. His kids' names are Chloe and Michaela, and I refuse to comment on that at the risk of looking insensitive, but: didn't you kind of know at least one of his kids was named Michaela? On some level? They're right this moment with their grandparents in Oklahoma, where the wind goes rushin' down the bombings, and Ryan goes, "Plus, Daddy's famous." Even Phil is like, "Kinda?"
I have this dream where each Monday, Phil Stacey is summoned to a dark room full of unseen figures, and they cross another tragedy off the white board, and that's what he'll be talking about this week. Given that a yellow ribbon is Phil's voodoo fetish and he derives his power from this stuff on a good week, you'd think that being in the middle of an insincere, mawkish shitstorm like this will be his ultimate godlike revenge on authenticity. He does not disappoint. Phil will be singing "The Change," by Garth Brooks, a man I adore, but a song I don't care about, and he will singing this song on behalf of the Oklahoma City Bombings. I nearly barfed, like: why is that even surprising? "Tonight, each of us are given the opportunity to become heroes, if we get involved and take advantage of this amazing opportunity." To...what? The opportunity to what? Sit on our fat American asses and dial the phone over and over like trained monkeys? For no reason? So that FOX can donate money it was going to donate anyway? The song is very Schindler and he does it up, just ties it up in a big stupid yellow bow and whispers: "What good have you done by saving just this...one?" The song sounds horrible. Does the Garth one sound this bad? It's like Peabo Bryson singing a Garth Brooks song. I don't have any animus against either of those people, as I said, but that doesn't make this suck any less. Is there anything worse than watching Phil Stacey sing a song? I'm dedicating this recap to Sanjaya Malakar, how about that? The opposite of tragedy.
Randy's glad that Phil "came back" again with a strong performance, very nice vocals on a very good song, and that's two times Phil hasn't totally screwed it up. Paula calls it his best performance, and it may well be for all I know, due to the memory loss he provokes in me, and Paula loves how he's found his comfort zone: sucking all the blood out of a randomly chosen tragedy and then barfing it up all over it. Yeah, that's so awesome. Simon cops to "really liking" Phil, and congratulates him on two good weeks and for appearing with a spring in his step. He begs Phil to bring the country back, because all of Phil's embarrassing, showy, breathy, tic-filled business in which he insists on bringing to the stage each week sounds better in the country mode, due to country singers mostly sounding weird when they sing. "If you connect the two elements [bizarre circus-tent showmanship and country twang, I think], you can do well, because people like you." That's not why people like you, Phil. They like you because of the dedication-free and completely undemanding "touching" factor that you add to every performance, whether or not it's appropriate, because there are things we don't want to think about, and then there are things that are so trite and unworrisome that we'd prefer to think about them instead. This whole night should have just been the entire Oprah Book Club Martina McBride sex and spouse abuse songbook. Phil Stacey would be made emperor if that happened.
Ryan's like, "Go for that country market, man, it's proven to be very successful!" I don't know. Country sells on Soundscan, because country fans and Tony Bennett-worshiping old people are the only ones that buy CDs anymore. You go to Walmart and buy the latest PMRC-approved dickless censored country album, and ten cents go to the artist, and the rest goes to egregious overhead, and they never make back their quote, and Metallica pisses their big-girl panties, and meanwhile everybody who lives in this century finds the whole ceremony quaint and a little gross, like churning your own butter. Phil interrupts Ryan's patter to scream, "Everybody vote! Everybody vote!" and Ryan almost backhands him. God, I wish. I wonder if Phil Stacey's blood can even coagulate anymore. That could be a really bad scene. You know, though, as much as I despise Phil Stacey on nearly every level he's got -- which is like three at best -- this is still, including his sickly ass, the best Top Six I can remember. I don't know this show that well, though. Let me check. Yep, it's the best. This show totally upped its game this season.
"This film," Ryan says, "Comes compliments of [some Frankenfood multinational that eats rain forests for breakfast and BSE for a light snack in the afternoon]." Not really a film, but it's fairly awesome. Simon visits "one of the best places" he's ever been to in America, which is a food bank 20 minutes from where he lives. They do all the food bank stuff, and Simon's like, "I didn't even know these places existed." I mean, he's British: debtors' prison, Little Dorrit, Please Sir Can I Have Some More. I don't know what kind of stuff they have over there these days. I was pretty sure Maggie killed all the poor people, just lined 'em up and shot 'em, and brought their heads to Reagan like a poorly trained housecat. Probably though that bastard poverty found its way back in, in the last thirty years. This lady's like, "Simon, people totally starve in this country America. The streets are not paved with cheese so much as the bodies of people failed by social works and an incomplete medical economy that exists only to serve the interests of the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies, sooo..." There are four people salaried, the rest are volunteers. Simon peeks into a cardboard box and discovers several infants. I guess that's the daycare center. Simon loses it some more and starts hugging random people and actually openly admits they're the first nice people he's ever met in his life. There are two kinds of cynicism and Simon's never demonstrated either, but you can't explain that to the selfish. Simon holds up a can of tuna (or is it chicken?) and says it costs a dollar. Or, you can turn that dollar into an entire table heaped with like ten meals' worth of food. It's a miracle, he says. It is. It's the only kind of miracle I understand. "I genuinely had no idea this existed in LA, or that there are millions of people -- mainly kids -- who don't have enough to eat." It's like America's reality differs wildly from its own propaganda or something! The whole globe is like, "You can't even feed your own? ...Then like, why the fuck are you over here telling us what to do?"
Ryan glows, a tiny lovely sun, down at Simon: "We like to see this side of you," he says, touched. Simon shrugs, and offers only that they were nice people, and then watches Ryan work, sucking his teeth and nearly smiling. Jordin will I guess be singing this song that I should have tattooed across my brain, given the outraged and bemused emails of the last week: "You'll Never Walk Alone." It was in Carousel, and Jerry Lewis sings it sometimes, and here are two things I don't know about: musical theater, and Jerry Lewis telethons. Also, this song has no melody as far as I can tell. Jordin's like, exhausted. "There is...so much going on in our country, and the world. I don't even know if...I hope the message is comforting to people. No matter what you're going through, you're not by yourself." She nearly starts crying. How did I know Jordin was going to be the only one that actually sees what's going on here? What's at stake?
Five dollars, twenty dollars, five million, ten million: Band-Aid on a cancer victim. Your life and mine are built on this blood, and you can't take down the whole system, you can't rebuild from scratch without things getting worse than they already are. So the revolution's off the playlist. But this is the opposite of that: words, not action, applied to the wrong wound. They're giving the right answer but it's to the wrong question. The question is not "How can I help?" The question is, "Why is it happening?" It's a question nobody ever wants to ask, because it's too scary: there's nobody driving the bus. We're living on Craphole Island, with the moss growing up and around us, and the hopeful dreams and socialism of the sixties fading out into the hedonism and selfishness of the seventies and the sudden onset of responsibility and emotional lobotomy of the eighties, gears whirling all around us in a machine that lost its central guidance system a long time ago. I think something broke during World War II, or before that, and now it's just the game playing us. Enough bad press and even ExxonMobil can cough up a Band-Aid or two. There's nothing inherently wrong with capitalism, but extended out into infinity, the game of wealth accumulation will crush you between those gears, and what will you do then? Sing a fucking song? Pray for rescue? Maybe there's no room for hope in that story any more. And if that's true, then we need a new story, and if that's true, the most powerful thing you can do is reach across the divide and say, "You're not alone." And that's the story you continue to tell, until we all believe it.
When we wake up Thursday morning and mail that check to Ellen Degeneres, and shake off the dust of our slumbers, and go back to the mortgage and dental appointments and road rage and bastard bosses, forget Cryin' Ryan and the twelve year old man of the house, forget AIDS lady, forget the girl with blue hair, this at least will still mean something. We won't be alone. If we're all stuck in the game and nobody can tell us how to get out, then you have to change the level you're playing on. The only thing worth anything is the link between the nation called you and the nation called me: it's the engine where God is made. It's the engine angels must machine. Seems small, but it's a lot bigger than FOX's five million, and it costs nothing. Some dick cuts you off on the highway, and you give yourself the pass to be a dick to the five customers, and your bad mood fades by lunchtime, and you forget the dick on the highway, you forget the color of his car, you forget how he was on the phone with his ex-wife, yelling about custody of their kids, and how he never meant to cut you off in the first place, he was just distracted. Your day continues as planned, and at lunch you check your websites and read a funny recap, and you maybe laugh out loud, and you go home and watch TV. But those five guys give themselves the pass to be dicks to the five -- they're having a bad day, so it's okay just this once, and they're happy again by lunch -- and those twenty-five become six hundred twenty-five, and those six twenty-five become a million, and you've added to the sum total of anger in the world. But it works with love, too, and kindness. Don't ever let Madonna tell you you're not helping, by doing your best. By continuing to stand. She's doing her best too. Even fuckin' Bono's doing what he can, from the place he finds himself standing. Your donation is something tangible, but what it means is something altogether more powerful, and it's that you continue to stand, and you continue to remember that you're not alone, and with reverence for this fact, you can't help but add to joy. Which is your entire job, from the day you're born until the day you die: more joy. Caring Is Creepy, but not as creepy as not caring, or only caring when somebody reminds you to do so. You love your wife every day, not just on Valentine's Day, or else you're not worth marrying.
Sorry. There's two kinds of cynicism. Jordin's wearing a very cute dress. I don't know about this song at all, but I know a cute girl when I see one, and that's Jordin. She's doing that emotional dynamic telling-the-story thing that Paula and I love so much, and I still can't find any place to stand in the song, so I'm content to just watch her go. Randy notes how he always says this, and so he's going to say it again, that she's only seventeen. But more importantly, that was probably the best vocal by any contestant so far in Season Six. He may well be right, it sounded very good even as it was confusing. Jordin is pronounced the hottest tonight, and she begins to cry, and Paula congratulates her. "You're glorious," Paula says. Aww, that's nice. Simon agrees, saying that she was "fantastic," and that even singing a song that's sixty years old, she could have a hit right there. Totally true, although not for really great or interesting reasons. Whatever, it sounded awesome. Ryan hands her his wonderful necktie, to wipe away her tears, but because it's Jordin, she giggles awkwardly, forgets her appendages, and drapes it around her neck instead. God, she's lovely. Ryan is kind of jaw-dropped delightful and wordless with her: "Congratulations, very very cool." They really want her to go far. Me too.
To review: Ryan and Simon went to Africa, other things were horrible too, and then singing. Chris sang one of the all-time inspirational ditties, "Change The World," and he did it without a thought in his tiny little head, but the judges are on his side for now. Melinda sang "There Will Come A Day," and was awesome as usual, sending the judges into hysterics. Blake was dressed like a fantasy come to life, and comatosed his way through "Imagine," a protest that got co-opted like whoa, and even leaving in the atheist Communist parts didn't pep it up at all. LaKisha fucked up once again by singing a past AI song, because it's the only TV show she's ever seen and thus appears to her to be the source of all music. Phil sang a country song without the country part, but at least was mewling and bathetic, and spent all night on Wikipedia looking for fresh tragedies to mention. Jordin got awesome and Jacob went a little nuts, and tomorrow, so very many things will happen. Wonderful things and terrible things, but mostly very confusing and fast-moving things, and individually those crazy things will matter, but taken altogether they won't mean very much, and that's the nature of tragedy, but it's also the nature of life, because nobody's strong enough to stay present for more than a few minutes of that much pain except maybe select high school Goths. It will be the highest-rated show in the history of television, and the day life will go back to the way it always was.