Okay, so: Diana Ross and Donna Summer are two totally different people. Diana Ross is the not-dumb one that is the black Stevie Nicks, but she'll slap you. Upstaged here by RYAN SEACREST'S NANA! My favorite Nana of my favorite boy! Ahem. So the Janay-amounts-of-terrified Brandon continues to be beautiful, screwing around on "Can't Hurry Love" like a clichéd mess, which is like his entire thing. Doolittle rocks "Home," from The Wiz, into something resembling a song that might hold your interest, then bends over backwards to make it amazing, and the judges cry about how awesome she is. Sligh ruins "Endless Love" into Coldplay, which is what happens when you're a douchebag trying to out-Blake Blake. Yes, that's hostility: when the judges tell him the arrangement was pathetic, he indicts them for ignoring his vocals, boringly good, and then gets sulky and whiny about how week he's going to sing a better-arranged song since the vocals don't matter anyway. Gina "pronunciates," per Miss Ross, "Love Child": she's the female Sligh and only slightly hanging on because of her less egregious but more fake charmer personality. Lot Lizard Sanjaya sings "I'm Coming Out" while wearing chandelier earrings and scaring the bejesus out of everybody in the room, the viewing audience, the world. His lack of ability goes crazy all over his draining charisma long enough to remember that it was actually an uninspiring version of "Ain't No Mountain" that he was singing. My bad. Luckily, Simon makes him cry.
Some girl I've never seen before dedicates "Missing You" to her fiancé, which Miss Ross implies is like dancing on Marvin Gaye's grave. Paula tells her it's okay she forgot all the words, because the audience is stupid. Not making that up. Phil finally gives in to his affliction that makes him so hellish to look at, screwing "I'm Gonna Make You Love Me" to the wall, ironically enough. Lakisha sings a "God Bless The Child" created just for her, and rocks it out in her workhorse-like way: doesn't engender much conversation; she's miles above everybody else, yet still hard to care about. Stephanie sings a forgettable but charming song, again: "Love Hangover." The judges totally diss her for leaving out what they openly refer to as "the good part" of the song. OUCH! Blake produces himself up a hot fuss cover of "Keep Me Hanging On" that manages to make Sligh look idiotic and the judges old and incontinent, though they're right: strip off the lights, the beats, the camera, the action, the strings, and the total vivid hotness of Blake, and what you have is a barely passable vocal with some ornamentation. But take those things away, how's life even worth living? As a straight vocal, it's crap; as a performance, it's up there with Doolittle. And therein lies the mystery of this show.
Chris R. sings "The Boss" and does a terrible, awful job of it -- but is so counterintuitively lovable and charming that it barely matters. Which Simon pretty much tells him is a bad thing, and I guess in terms of longevity it may well be, but I certainly never agreed to look at the kid with anything but disdain and lately I find myself looking forward to him, so who knows. Finally, Jordin! sings "If We Hold On Together," from The Land Before Time, a film I hasten to point out is literally titled in her case, because it came out BEFORE SHE WAS BORN. If that doesn't kill you, surely nothing will.
Who should go home: Phil or Haley. Who will go home: Phil, Haley, or Stephanie. Tomorrow: Diana Ross sings live!
Wait, this shit is two hours? Did we know that? Why in hell is it two hours? That's ten minutes per person, including commercials. In which nothing happens. That's bloaty. And then tomorrow is half an hour...FOX, I know you are crafty. And when I figure out your game, I'm blowing it sky high. Mark my words!
Ryan mentions in passing, as always, the award-winning and platinum-selling people that once had to do with this show, and now do not, as though it somehow reflects well on the show that they're succeeding: Kelly's awards, Chris's sales, Carrie's country awards, Fantasia's terrifying scary face, J-Hud's Oscar...do we really need to talk about this? "They eventually overcame the embarrassment of being associated with this show, and fought tooth and nail for recognition, which only took some of them five years. Aren't we a force for good?" As though in agreement, technical goes haywire: his mic drops, the camera's shaky, he starts saying true stuff! He calls the show "the best platform in the history of TV," with which I can't argue with, and asks us to vote. Credits, and then the audience screaming like freaks off the leash, holding posters that say shit like "FRO PATRO." Question: How can something be hilarious and racist at the same time? Answer: It cannot. Only slightly less offensive is Ryan's reminder that this shit is going to be going on for another three months. "Son of a bitch," is what my notes say. He indicates the finals band, and it's huge: horns, and strings, and little Japanese girls in crazy outfits, eight scary robot white ladies in Nagel makeup pretending to play guitars, a man with a banjo, and an otter with a washtub bass and faith in the spirit of Christmas.
Simon and Paula giggle madly as Randy talks around the idea that the boys are on shout now and for all time, and Paula says they're finally "ready to come into their own now," like excellence is something you should hold back until the last possible second, and Simon explains that the guys are fucked because they weighted the Top 24 precisely to fuck the guys, and that "this stage can make you or break you." And then in five years, you'll actually have built up your reputation to the point where your career should have been at the first place, and you can finally start working on getting recognition as an actual musician, and hopefully one day getting your money stolen by labels and A&R reps, instead of this show, as God and Valenti intended.
Speaking of the truths about the industry we prefer to ignore, meet What's Left Of Diana Ross. We see thousands of pictures of her looking dubious and spooky from many decades and -- in case you're young enough to be watching this show without kinda hating yourself, which I honestly hope you are -- we learn about who she is. Long, long ago in the dawn of time, when the value of a dollar meant something and women did what they were told, there was a lady named Diana Ross. At fifteen, she joined a group of singers called the Supremes, and they had 12 #1 hits. Five thousand years later, their story was turned into a mediocre-to-good Broadway show and then a mediocre-to-great film, about which I now know more than I know about actual things that matter to me, despite an utter lack of interest and complete personal media sanction for the last few months, because Dreamgirls is the new Arrested Development, or maybe Jesus: there are people whose love of it means for some reason that you really, really need to love it too, and you risk inducing some super fucking hardcore suspicion if you evince any disinterest, which only increases their determination, in a vicious circle that never, ever ends. So sometime after that, she dumped the bitches, acted spooky some more, and was creepy looking all the time. She played my girl Billie in Lady Sings The Blues, won 279 Tonys and 11,000 Grammy nominations, and all this time, her album covers were terrifying, she made scary faces, and had unique fashion sense. Somebody, I think Joe R, decided she was the Female Entertainer of the Century, and I can't disagree. ["You know, I was all set to take vehement offense to that, but after this week, I kind of love Diana Ross and all that she's done." -- Joe R] American music of the century pretty much pivots on the popping of blues, and she went there with the rest of Motown, and is an icon. And all creepiness aside -- which is an issue you get with every single icon ever, eventually; I'm not singling her out -- you have to admit she's pretty much totally awesome.
"Our first musical mentor is a Legend Supreme," Ryan manages not to gag, and then we see her walking in on the Idols singing "Postman" at the piano, like that just happened. She acts wild and crazy on them, and in interview she tells us about the etymology of the word "mentor," and also everything that the word makes her think of: mostly her mom, and Berry Gordy, who "believed in [her] even when [she] didn't believe in [herself]," which is kind of a major thing to say. Out in the "real" world, Blake gets more and less gay depending on where she's located in the room, like a diva tuning fork, and she Stevie Nickses at them about how she's not a critic, she's their "trusting voice" and hopefully their "supporting voice" and occasionally maybe their "crazy drunk aunt voice." She wants them to have her longevity -- both Blake and I feel her on this point -- and then she makes the point they most need to hear, and will never comprehend until it's too late: This show is stupid, it's about their careers and using this stupid show to move forward, not to focus on this show, not to think that the effed-up voting system matters, not to think that anybody but Simon and sometimes Ryan knows what the hell they're talking about, and that only Simon is capable of speaking to them about both things, the show and their real lives, at the same time. I mean, that's not literally what she says, but if they were listening this is what they should be taking away from the experience. She tells them that she's enjoyed working with them, and she means most of them and not all of them, as we'll see, and then tells us that A) she feels "deep in her heart" like she's a parent or something, and that B) "mentoring is part of parenting," so that in some way C) she feels parentally toward them. Or something, it's kind of a blur. Maybe she's doing a spell.
Ryan tells us that Diana Ross is powerful, and wants the best for the Idols, but she's not powerful as we are: we're the ones in control. Our votes matter. Keep watching, keep voting, keep talking about the show. All the time. Keep getting rude with people who prefer other Idols, keep repeating the awesomeness of your chosen pony as loudly as possible, keep reviving old idiotic fights from five years ago as though one person's performance quality is comparable to another person's performance, much less our subjective enjoyment of them. Keep going crazy, because that's what this show is designed to do for you.
Brandon's going first, so he takes up his allotted gross of ten minutes, less the ubiquitous commercials, to tell us about how Diana Ross is awesome. How is she awesome? Through the lens of Brandon, of course. Like anything that has to do with Brandon, it's all about Brandon: He's been exposed to a lot of celebrities, doing what he does...the end. Just wanted to remind you, one more time, in case you had not heard. But shit, he's so pretty. He describes Miss Ross as the one star you compare yourself to, if I guess you're a drag queen or a thousand years old, both of which he could be for all I know or care, and when they meet he's nervous. She tells him to choose first from the following list of options: sit down, or stand up. It does not matter to her. He sings "You Can't Hurry Love" for her, and she calls him a possessor of the "Motown Sound," and he's overjoyed and glowing in the interview, and at least that part's real, and awesome. She tells him that being a singer is going to kill him through work and stress and getting fucked over all the time, but that's the life, and he asks about what she does with nerves, and she doesn't really answer him because she's been doing this since she was 15, those parts of her spirit got burned off with a cigarette about fifty years ago, but she does color it all up with Paula about how he needs to go to his "center," his "heart place," and they are awkward and very sweet. Ryan's violently jealous of all this, for about six different confusing-yet-compelling reasons.
So Brandon's taking us back to 1966 for the number one smash "You Can't Hurry Love," and I do believe somebody mentioned to him that his badunk is pretty awesome, and that he took this news to heart, because that's the majority of his performance, like your cat first thing in the first morning: "Look at my ass." Speaking of ass: the singing. He starts low in his register, usually a good if painful sign, and his voice is quavery-nervous, and he's got his little moves he's doing, but his eyes are blank with terror. He's ahead of the music, as usual, pretty much the whole time, which makes me feel, as usual, pretty fucking insane. There's a cracked note he didn't actually mean to sing, and some nicely screaming parts, but the Janay Castine of him cannot be denied any more than the hips and sexiness on display...and then he forgets the lyrics. Forgets them utterly. You can hear them clattering to the stage at his feet. Now, does he forge ahead, or show any strength or adaptability, or act like an adult in any way? No, of course he does not. He blushes and giggles and wiggles and shrugs and acts like an idiot with no maturity or reason to be here any longer, for the remainder of the song. Like it's fucking cute that he's this unprofessional. Like we should be sympathizing with his ass instead of sending him back to kindergarten where he belongs.
Randy calls this moment the first "start of the future for everybody" in a series, and calls Brandon out for being a boring, uninteresting backup singer. The last two notes were powerful, and that's true, but the rest of it was unimpressive at best. Plus the forgetting of the words. Paula starts out: "It's not easy." Ouch. She calls him out on his first-night jitters, and mentions how they're in a big concert hall. "We don't need to tell you what you did wrong," also correct hopefully, and she notes that there are "many things" that he didn't utterly fuck up. Even Simon smiles at this, and then she sets him loose: a complete letdown, a very predictable version and arrangement, "terrible" dancing, forgetting the words..."You came over as a background singer for a background singer." Randy agrees. Simon notes his lack of star quality and originality, which is basically what I was saying, and then Ryan runs in with not-entirely-unconditional love for Brandon. "Let's talk: did you feel like it was going your way?" Brandon says he was doing great until he flubbed the lyrics, proving that he wasn't listening at all. "Then you said...oops?" Yeah he did: out loud, idiotically, like a Katzenjammer Kid caught in a hilarious scrape. He talks at length about how the stage is throwing him off, with the crowd cheering and everything. Which is boring because his whole deal is how over all this aspect of it he is. But the thing he says, that he got caught up in the crowd and enjoyed the attention too much, is both understandable and kind of a death knell. He hopes for the future opportunity to not fuck up, going forward, which is not operating from the best possible position, and I'm kind of over Brandon Davis altogether.
Doolittle: a viewer has asked Ryan to ask her what the hardest part of the contest is, for her. Who knows if that person exists, but she replies cutely that it's the high heels and tight dresses. Her dress is totally cute, by the way. She laughs about how she prefers her tennis shoes and sweat pants, and the crowd cheers insanely for this. "YEAH! SWEAT PANTS! I HATE WHEN I'M ON TV WEARING GROWNUP CLOTHES TOO! OR I WOULD, IF I WERE EVER ON TV! YOU'RE JUST LIKE US! JUST LIKE US! JUST LIKE US!" Then things go rapidly to shit as Ryan asks Simon if he has any advice about wearing high heels, and Simon tells him he should know, and Ryan just hands it over to him, like a cat burglar who wants to get caught: "Stay out of my closet!" I'm so sure, you guys. Just stop. Simon tells him to come out of the closet, of course, and Melinda covers a fraction of her giant face with her tiny hands, and Ryan tells him we're all here about the Top Twelve, not Simon's gay fantasies. And I don't remember writing this, and I'm not at all sure how I feel about it, but there it is right in my notes: "Dude, Simon is going to fuck him so hard later."
People like Diana Ross are just huge to Melinda Doolittle, she tells us, which makes Diana Ross's welcome -- "I've heard so much about you!" -- almost terrifying in its sweetness. I always kind of worry that Doolittle's going to drop dead if you're too nice to her because she takes everything so much to heart. Her tender, beautiful, amazing little heart. She has me so bad. She recovers from her near death experience of approval and sings "Home," from The Wiz, for Diana Ross, explaining that its lyrics are very meaningful to her right now, in the Merry Old Land of this show, with its kind little Munchkins and evil witches. Ryan represents the Lollipop Guild so hardcore, man. Miss Ross tells her to believe the words, which she just said she did, and that in fact she, like the future audience will do, truly "felt that," when she was singing. Miss Ross looooves Doolittle, of course, because Doolittle is made of magic. "When you sing, I get goosebumps," she says. Aww! Doolittle giggles and hugs her, and it's so sweet. "I assume goosebumps are good?" Yes, honey. Nobody is ever going to say anything mean to you in the context of this show. Please just breathe for me, because either you're being disingenuous or you've had bad things happen to you that we don't know about, and both of those concepts make me want to punch somebody really hard.
So she sings the song. The most boring tuneless song in the history of the world. People get attached to songs from musicals really hardcore. I don't understand it, but I know it happens. I can't imagine that anyone would ever feel strongly about this song. Until, like, today, with Doolittle being just so...professional. Just taking Brandon's entire life in her hands and squeezing the shit out of it. It's amazing. The vibrato is either a little nervous or totally on purpose, and I'm not sure but I can guess, and if it's the latter, it's amazing? She's...writing about this show is dancing about architecture on the best day, that's always been true, because music goes in your earholes while these words go in your eyeballs. So I don't know how to talk about the singing when I actually want to talk about the singing, because the scant few words we do have, the limitless vocabulary of music and technique and performance, I don't even know those words, and this would require more. Can she just actually win already? I am not throwing reverse mojo, she's just the best thing in the world. She fits in your pocket, she's got these huge awesome sounds coming out of her, and she's wearing a dress from the distressed-denim future of the 1940s in reverse. I would joke that she hits the longest note in the world, except I still get hatemail from Claymates for joking about that, so I won't.
Randy is, of course, blown away, but admits it's not the greatest thing she's ever done. Which takes a lot more than it gives, or means to, but words have never been his best friend. And then Paula is just shivering and crying, and it's totally neat. "I feel your joy...I'm one big goosebump. This is it for you, you're sailing through." I feel Paula, dude. Doolittle of course starts crying, and I think Simon gets a little choked up, somewhere Ryan's doing whatever he does instead of crying, I'm choking up, which is my default reaction to everything that happens in this world, but not usually on this show. And the couple times it has, we don't talk about. "Why are you crying, Melinda?" he asks, and she smiles through the tears: "I've never heard anything like that." Aww, man. Paula makes no sense, Simon makes no sense, adores Paula, it's like Melinda just shot a rainbow out her ass. He compares her to a young Gladys Knight, which is totally valid. "You made a boring song wonderful. Very, very good. Very good." Paula's still crying, dude. Ryan finally runs over to prop up the quickly fading Doolittle, and she can't say anything beyond "Oh my gosh, oh my gosh." He tries to get something useful out of her -- "What did you feel when you were singing? Moments ago?" -- but she's got nothing. She doesn't even remember it. She is losing her mind. "Paula," he says with either very well-disguised irony or none at all, "You're an artist. What did she feel?" Paula compares it to an out of body experience, and both Ryan and Doolittle kind of shrug like, "We'll go with that, I guess." Ryan and Doolittle are adorable and very small some more. I want to marry her. I want to get down on one knee and marry that girl. Either one of them.
Sligh tells us that he does not get nervous around celebrities; this is true, because the word for what he gets is "smarmy." Or possibly, "abrupt and weird." Which lots of us can tell you is what "nervous" looks like, for some people. I'm definitely a smarm-side, and I have friends very autistically on the abrupt-side. Chris Sligh is in no motherfucking way my friend, though. She says she's sure to like his song, and he sings "Endless Love" for her, and mostly sounds like Neil Young, which is to say mournfully shouty, or possibly whiny. Miss Ross is not amused by his rearrangement of the song, which basically screws the chords down to a surfboard called "Coldplay" and then sets them adrift on an endlessly repetitive sea. She begs him to find the melody and the heart of the song, to hold onto the hook and sell the song, and he declines. He's looking for the Blake of the song, because he's a pisher and he wants to be the cool kid in the class. And since he is not, he is going to suck.
Ryan: "They share the hair, can he make this song his own?" First of all, I wish he wouldn't. And second of all, Diana Ross's hair and Chris Sligh's hair are alike in certain ways, but I wish that you would not compare them. I don't mind the arrangement in and of itself -- I try to adjust for my hatred of repetitive songs like the one Sligh has created, because I know that part of it is personal, just as wanting to snatch Alicia Keys bald to stop her from falling in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out of love with me is personal -- but I also know that I have no idea what this song is supposed to sound like, and I'm likely to side with Miss Ross anyway, but especially against the monster that Chris Sligh has become. The song I noted that it sounds like is "Clocks"; the fact that in a minute Randy's going to name a completely different Coldplay song speaks volumes, I think, about both Chris Sligh and Coldplay. Sligh's hair looks particularly gross tonight, his moves amateurish and off-putting as usual, and he takes big obese breaths before every big note in a very unprofessional way, and the arrangement is doing all of the work, which was the sad consequence of this poor decision. His voice is powerful enough, and I really like the specific and particular sound and tone of it, but here, the overall effect is not that interesting. There's falsetto and lisping and whatever. I wouldn't download it, I mean to say. I don't need to hear it again.
Randy calls him a new Chris Sligh for the new Top 12. I defy you to tell me how that is true. Ah, he's not wearing glasses. So there's that. The smugness and weird priorities and sense of entitlement can now come shooting directly at you without the mediation of plastic lenses. I see. Randy likens the crummy song to "Speed Of Sound," which is a less-good cover of "Clocks" anyway, and then tells him that his ruination of the song was "weird," and that the whole thing was a mess. Paula complains about how classic and recognizable "Endless Love" is, as a love song. Sometimes, she worries, Sligh tries "ultra-hard" to be "ultra-hip and cool." And you know me well enough to know that I don't care about that. If I didn't have ultra-hip and ultra-cool to constantly shoot for, I'd be a completely different person. My problem is the ultra-failure of Chris Sligh to be these things. "Sometimes you can just let the melody play," she says, and tells him to stop worrying about being contemporary. Which I don't technically agree with, and besides: she just said they're going to bitch at Blake when he sings, no matter what, that's what that means. You can tell Sligh is itching to interrupt after every sentence but I will give him props for keeping his trap shut this week. For once.
Simon, of course: "You murdered the arrangement. You turned a beautiful song into a complete and utter drone." The boos are nearly nonexistent, and he laughs about this, pointing out that not even the people who would boo Simon for saying the sky was blue are taking up Sligh's cause. But then he goes professional and stops dicking around: "It was just unemotional, uninspiring, and I would keep your glasses on," he adds, because at his worst he still has the show and kids on his mind. Ryan asks Sligh if he thought, as a little boy, as Ryan himself often did, that he'd one day be singing Diana Ross songs on stage. Sligh starts off pleasant and appropriate, how he certainly didn't intend any disrespect for Miss Ross, and that he honestly thought it was a quality arrangement, on which he found the judging to be unduly focused. In the audience, Paula nearly pulls out a gun, such is the rage on her face. Or who knows what she's thinking, when have her faces made sense with her words or either of them with reality, maybe I'm projecting. "I guess I'll do something week that's arranged a little bit better," he whines, having built a whiny case about how could they ignore his wonderful, powerful, bliss-inducing vocals just because they're behind the times and hung up on the arrangement and tied it with a gross little bow. Dick. The singing was nothing special, but thanks for confirming that you have no idea what's going on here. If the other more dramatic or interesting contestants were relying on that half-assed blow ya mind shit, they'd be getting this crap from the judges too. As they have been: when Blake coasts, they call him on it too. That's what they do. Judges: they judge. You stupid child. I don't think I've ever seen a shit-fit that egregious on this show, at least from the contestants, and that's saying something. Luckily, he says it in a complicated enough way that I'm sure it'll sail over a lot of heads, probably Randy and Paula's for starters, but: the body doesn't lie.
Gina wigs out and charmingly kisses the ass of Ross, but it's so sweet and funny that I don't mind. She interviews how Miss Ross is a legend, and reveals that she'll be singing "Love Child," which actually excited me in that it seems like Gina knows damn well what they mean by song choice, because they're always random and they always make total sense. Sadly, they're also usually the most interesting thing about her performance. Miss Ross describes Gina's vocal ability as "incredible," but worries about her, um, "pronunciation." "You must pronunciate everything," she says, compounding the issue. Gina tells us that clearly the song is a story, and she can't do her rockstar thing where she elides and gets breathy, because this isn't a rockstar song, it's an old-fashioned ballad. Diana Ross says "pronounciate" yet one more time. I...don't know what to do with that. She can use whatever words she feels are appropriate to the decision, making them up as she goes. She's Diana Ross. What bothers me is that I can call her a hag-haired sea-witch of a freak, the black Kate Bush, a sorceress, and that doesn't bother me, but now she's handing me this joke and I cannot talk about it. My only option is adding the word to the dictionary, which I will get started on this week. I don't really know what the process is there.
Gina strides out onto stage, confident and weird as ever, as the background voices are already going nutty awesome. She looks neat, very pretty and put together. That's highly important to me. Her moves are pretty cool, if a little Pink inspired, but A) she's not exactly the same beast as Pink because 1A) she does not have a penis, but 1B) she's capable of thinking complicated thoughts, and B) at least Pink is interesting to watch, even if it's only due to that fight-or-flight response of which science has told us. Her voice is reedy -- I had her picked as one of the nerve girls for the first night, I am sad to be right. She's got no breath, she's not pronunciating anything at all, which is especially bad with the hyperactive background vocals. Which is on top of that bad because the countermelody part is the only cool part, and it's mostly yelling parts of words while the five hundred musicians and sixteen backup singers and the banjo guy and the otter family are all rocking the shit out of themselves. Oh, Gina. Neither inspiring or interesting, but at least...energetic? There's something I still like about her.
Randy admits that he's saying the same stuff to everybody, but that this was not the best she's done: pitchy, unexcited, boring. Paula calls it "such an exciting song," and describes it as "feel good" and "can't help yourself" and "wanna get up." Time the hell out and slow the hell up. "Love Child" is a FEEL-GOOD SONG? Are we talking about '90s German hardcore band Accept suddenly? Because the version we're talking about is not about that German sex stuff at all; though I will admit it's a damn sight more "feel-good" and "wanna get up" and "can't help yourself" than this one, in that it makes me feel like Ellen Barkin in one of those eighteen movies she and Linda Fiorentino made in the '90s where they infiltrate the sex clubs of the elite lesbian underworld only to find that they themselves are sketchy lesbians. Which is at least a change of pace. But no, the one we're talking about is from that same White Man Songbook about how rough things are in the ghetto that we've talked about before. It's about the suicidal self-hatred of the cycle of poverty, the breakdown of the American family, the people that fall through the cracks in the slums, the stigmatization of single mothers, the self-extinguishing shame of having no paternal name in a society that privileges men and fathers to such an extent that you end up with internalized self-hatred for being a bastard, the sluttiness resulting from absent fathers, wearing clothes you pulled out of the fucking trash, and then giving up your child for adoption while still in high school, with no apparent way out. What are you talking about? I feel GREAT!
Paula continues that she shouted and that her enunciation (ahh!) and her pitch were off. "You're much better than how you did tonight." Ouch. Simon calls it not hugely terrible, but not fantastic. The song suits her, the whole image thing suits her -- all true -- but it was "a little bit forgettable" and a "middle-pack performance." All true. She tells Ryan that it's crazy and wonderful to be onstage with everybody cheering and stuff. She has the kind of inoffensive smart-girl affectation that bothers me not at all, and gets tables at restaurants besides, and Ryan likes her, but: No, girl. Always getting better.
Miss Ross hugs Sanjaya immediately to her bosom, and as usual he behaves with the retarded cloudy eyes and jumpy demeanor of an innocently inbred cocker spaniel. "It's like having Van Gogh teach you to paint!" he says, w/r/t Miss Ross's involvement in the process. It's actually more like having Van Gogh watch you paint and then utter platitudes and sprinkling magic fairy dust around the place, but: yeah. Intense. This is going to suck so, so bad. "Ain't No Mountain High Enough." If it was ever featured on Designing Women, it's gay enough for Sanjaya Malakar. Diana Ross is horrified by the way he starts it, without a beat or anything to get revved up, and simply tells him -- in a deathly tone he doesn't notice -- that this is "one of my favorite ones," and asks if he's even capable of tapping his feet. "She told me to have fun, and to feel it in my body," he says, which is pointless; she screams at him to "get your soul in there!" and begs him once again to dance somehow. Never going to happen. He gets straight A's, he stresses about stuff he doesn't need to stress about, but he's never going to dance. Miss Ross finishes up with many non sequiturs packed inside each other: "He has a winning ingredient...and it's not his hair, ookaaaay?" She's like a neck-swinging Cameron Diaz at that moment, and it's hard to watch.
Down at the stage, this is so boring that Paula and Simon are having a nice little chat. Then it begins. He "dances." It's pretty hellacious. His hair looks like you put all three of Charlie's Angels in a 1979 blender and left it on "puree" until there were stiff peaks forming. He looks so...stupid. He looks like a real-life equivalent of the scarecrow in The Wiz, funnily enough. And I mean, while we've got a minute, let's just get real. I want to punch him in his sweet little face every time I see him. I know it's horrible, but I can't help it. He's the anti-A-Fed. Whatever it was that made me love A-Fed, he's got it, but it's like the evil version of it, like it has a goatee in a parallel universe, and it makes me really angry and hateful instead of happy and chuckly. I know that's irrational and kind of vile, so that just makes me angry at myself, more than I am at him, but then you look up, and he's still fucking doing it. Whatever it is that he's doing that makes me upset, he's always doing it, at all times, at varying frequencies. I can feel him doing it right now, as I am typing these words: somewhere Sanjaya is asking to get beat up. But he's a baby, he's all of sixteen months old, and you can't punch babies. So what does that make me? A bad man. But like, look: He's wearing chandelier earrings. That's not my fault, I didn't do that to him. He makes these fucked up faces, with this terrified grin pulling them off-kilter so he looks like he's deranged, and then he rethinks everything he's doing every five seconds and abruptly switches everything, and...if this is him unrehearsed, I want him to go back to the pageant. He looks like one of those creepy background eunuchs from Alexander, on the edge of death. Stacey: "You said you wanted him to sing 'I'm Coming Out,' right? And he...just did? So that's a win?" Not a win. Nobody wins when Sanjaya takes the stage.
Randy: "Wow. I...I...I...I...am really...I...I don't even...know what to say. Dude, it wasn't...very good, it really wasn't. It really wasn't." The speechless craziness of that is exactly how I was feeling the whole time. Like asking why this was happening to us. Randy laughs and thanks God for the background singers. "It was painful." Sanjaya literally starts coming apart at the seams. You can see suckiness gleaming out through the cracks. Then the tears start. Randy tells him maybe his hair will qualify him for a show about people with amazing hair. Paula -- Simon flirting with off-camera Ryan the entire time -- tells him that on the upside, he is capable of smiling. She begs him to do a bunch of shit that I do not want to see him doing: "explode with your vocals now!" and "jump out with reckless abandon!" and "go!" You know what's reckless? Saying shit like that to Sanjaya, a kid who is clearly rigged to blow. Simon chastens her that first of all, he simply can't. So true. He then says that somewhere a wail has gone up to the sky over Beverly Hills: the horrified, bloodcurdling scream of Diana Ross's entire life and back catalogue getting shit on by a tiny little lot lizard. Randy and Paula laugh their asses off, over the booing, and Sanjaya doesn't get it, because he thinks Simon said "whale," and just like that we descend into a shambolic conversation where nobody knows what anybody else means by what they say and everybody is trying to explain everything to everybody else, and no matter what, Sanjaya's not getting it. He's seventeen, which means he's steadfast and a little uppity about not getting it at this point, and finally Simon's like, "Look. You're very brave. I'll give you that." And somehow he avoids mentioning once more that Ryan needs to come out of the closet, but that's...what he's doing, in effect. Simon and Ryan giggle at the mess of a conversation and the bloody tatters of it that they're left standing in. This is fucked. Simon is grinning so hard that he looks like a serial killer, and then we're off to the numbers. For one shining moment I don't hate Sanjaya, as he bares his pearly whites at the screen and dares you to do something about getting him off the TV for good.
Who's that girl in the purple potato sack? Have we seen her before? Getting fugged, perhaps? I don't care who she is, I love her, because unless I'm counting wrong [I am] she means we're half done. Man, she talks crazy and obnoxious. Whiny, nasal, up-speaking, all of it. Every reason that people say they hate people because of their voice, whether it's the Nanny or Rachel Ray, Nicole -- Haley? Who is this girl? -- calls upon them. Whatever. What it's actually like is when somebody who's not very interesting is called upon to speak. Which is what's going on. She's going to sing "Missing You," and Ryan cracks a joke about how if she's thirsty, there's "always Coca-Cola available," high five, and...I don't know. This girl is cute. I do love this song, also, so I have hopes for this mysterious dark horse of a candidate. Miss Ross tells us straight up that she can't sing and will suck -- "she has a recording studio voice," which is not where we are right now -- and that her voice is "too much inside." Then things get real freaking ugly: Miss Ross asks her what she was telling the story of the song about, like what feelings she was plugging in, and Haley grins stupidly and indulgently: "My fiancé." Not wanting to embarrass the girl, Diana Ross tells us in private about how she recorded that song after Marvin Gaye's death, because she and the writing team were broken-hearted to have lost him, and that the song is basically a limitless amount of sadness and pain for her, conceptually. And this is a dicey kind of thing, because on the one hand: who knew? And on the other hand: Scarnato! Read a room, for God's sake. Diana throws up her hands and says it's good to have some kind of emotional framework behind the song and that it'll come across to the audience if she is true to it -- even though the very idea is like pissing on Marvin Gaye's grave. Meanwhile, here's Haley's final word: "My goal is to sing every word, and to have fun." My emphasis.
Haley starts in her own little pitch that is not one, pulling the Kat McPhee vibe as hard as she can, which is not very hard or something she's going to accomplish. And from go, again: terrible. She's having fits, she's singing awful, her purple potato sack is bunching weirdly and she looks like purple Baby Jane wearing a diaper. And she cannot...sing. What is going on here? Did we know that this girl cannot sing? She needs to cut it out! And not only that, but it's the song that nobody knows the words to, the song not even Diana Ross is clear on. Who knows the words of that song? "Tell me why the frnoh fnurns...Ooh ooh ooo oooh, been missing you...Tell me sligh sler blow blurns." You sway back and forth and fake it. Perhaps the reason it's an unintelligible yet ultimate tribute is that it's the sound of grief. Perhaps Miss Ross wrote it with her face buried in a satin pillow. She cried for a week and they just wrote it all down, like the Oracle at Delphi. I don't expect Haley to understand any of that. I don't even trust Diana Ross to explain it properly.
Haley's head drops the second Randy starts speaking: "You already know what I'm going to say, right?" He points out that she screwed up the lyrics, which I didn't even notice due to the issues with the song not having lyrics, but also that she was all pitchy and all over the place. "Usually your pitch is better than that," he adds, a "little shocked." Paula tells her that she's lovely tonight, but has the presence of mind to admit that it's a terrifying thing to say to a little girl. She compares Haley to Brandon and notes that forgetting the words to songs is never a great thing to do. "And your pitch," Paula says: "Ay-ay-ay." And she says it almost like she says it in "Vibeology," the best Paula Abdul song of all time, and I screamed. "You're still adorable. This is hard." And Simon? Didn't think it was that bad. She totally starts crying at this point, hilariously. "To give you credit, Haley, I think we will remember you now. You had real presence up there, you look like a star. Your nerves got the better of you halfway through the song, but if you can hold it together you may be do better than I thought you were going to do. As I said, very very impressed with your presence onstage, and there were...moments...I liked the vocals." I see what he's saying, the camera loves her and she's got charisma, but those were some awful sounds going in my ear, though.
Ryan tells her it's "okay to let it out," and like his repression, she replies that it is not. Ever. She almost faints, and Ryan pops her onto a stool, and then she nearly barfs into the camera. "I feel like such a schmuck!" It's cute. "It is what it is, but...Simon, and everybody, it means so much to get something good from you guys." She explains that she messed up the words -- shut up, girl -- and Paula -- SHUT UP, GIRL -- explains that half the time the audience doesn't notice, because the audience doesn't know shit. She says it like that, like they're having coffee in private and not, you know, talking about the audience in front of the audience. It is AWESOME.
Commercials: apparently Jennifer Love Hewitt's enormous breasts are now on sale from Hanes, because lord knows that's all I can see in this entire ad: the boobs at play, the boobs at rest, the boobs go to the beach, the boobs go to space. The boobs lead a revolution in the bed linens. Back: Some old lady has "chills," and she's boring for a second until you realize it's RYAN'S NANA! My favorite Nana of my favorite boy in the whole world! Fabulous!
Phil loooooves Diana Ross, and his scary, haunted eyes are full of stars. He sings to her, it's great. Diana Ross tells us that she loves the song he chose, "I'm Gonna Make You Love Me," that he brought back memories of singing it with Marvin. When he's done, she yells, "Alll riiight!" It's a nice moment. He asks about how to gather himself for a performance, and she gives what seems to me like really awesome advice in terms of life, all the time, in every way, so like if it calms you down, good. She tells him to look at the audience and remember that they're real, regular people, just like him, with the same feelings and most of the same thoughts. Honestly, I don't have any kind of stage fright, but man does that seem like all you ever need to hear about things, or other people, or anything like that: they're real. So are you. Don't sweat it. Like for example, we're real people that feel bad for you, because of your affliction, whatever it is. He looks like a drag queen with her wig snatched off. That kind of half-decorated Christmas tree look to him. There are a few runs that are good, but I can't say I feel forced into feeling about him one way or the other. Two weeks ago I would have followed him anywhere, as long as I did not have to look upon him. Now? Meh. We had this whole conversation during the boringness of Phil about how Ryan Seacrest is actually the Last Mimsy: small, magical, light years ahead of Rainn Wilson in terms of his technology.
Randy asks if he thinks that was good, and he says yes. He lies. Paula -- what is this tonight -- looks at him hatefully. Randy tells him he was the best of the boys tonight, and that could be true, but I don't care. Paula talks about how his vocals were good, but that he should have done a more up-tempo version of the song. "You have strong vocals, Phil." Simon calls bullshit and says the tempo was fine, and Paula gets super mad at him all, "Don't you touch me" while they're fighting. Always tough to watch. Simon calls him on his shouty tendencies, and says it was middle-ground, again. Randy liked it, Phil in his scary sweaty makeup puddling around his worrisome face...Ryan doesn't even say anything to him.
Lakisha is.. "more than a star: she's a superstar," apparently. Miss Ross asks what her momma calls her, and it's Kiki, and they laugh, and Miss Ross maybe starts believing that she's Lakisha's mom in reality, like on Lifetime. She sings "God Bless The Child," wonderfully, and Diana Ross mentions how -- at least in the film version of her life that Diana Ross was in, which is so Hollywood naïve and still that it goes back around to being cute -- Billie wrote that song while on tour. Since the technique is irreproachable, they discuss things like phrasing and mic stand/no mic stand. It's neat to watch pros. Lakisha looks sooo young in her practice footage. "I'm really looking forward to seeing what Kiki decides to do," says Miss Ross, and then -- thinking they've cut -- her eyes dash about madly like she's terrified they are going to steal her purse.
YES! Ryan said it's over after this. This time I believe him. She sings the song kind of like Billie, crossed with the big girl sound, that authoritative Nell Carter vibe, but after awhile she starts sounding like Lakisha again. I would have said mic stand, though. I love that one picture with the jolly old fat microphone and the flower. I don't think I have ever had occasion to tell you how much I love Billie Holiday. I grew up with her. Not literally, of course. So Lakisha has many, many voices, like Jewel or Pee Wee Herman, and all of them are getting a workout tonight. That's always weird and cool. One thing I definitely should not be doing is imagining Maya Rudoplh making fun of Lakisha, and drooling preemptively over the idea. She looks amaaaazing, by the way. Just lovely. The people clapping for her in the audience are super interesting looking.
Randy calls it an "unbelievable" vocal, noting with much glee how she held back from the full power of her voice to make the song more intimate. Paula calls her fat some more: "Beautiful performance, beautiful girl...your heart comes through when you sing, that's the most important thing you can possess..." The audience is undecided behind her. Simon: "You've either got it or you haven't got it. You've got it. There's the difference, I have to say," between Doolittle and Lakisha, and everybody else: "You two are in a different league." He also praises her control, and her stage confidence. Ryan is of course out of his mind delighted by all of this. Everything. "Simon says you've got 'it'. Are you comfortable with 'it'?" She says it's taking a while, and she felt nervous, and he says she didn't show it at all. Even Ryan praises her control, and they thank each other, and it's beautiful.
Wait, we're not done? I thought Ryan said we were done. Sigh. Oh, oh! It's Blake! That's at least something. He tells Ryan that he listens to underground hip-hop and some other words, and explains that "M.J.," of whom he's a fan, stands for "Michael Jackson." Ryan nearly slaps him, annoyed yet flirtatious in equal amounts. Blake shakes hands with Diana Ross and interviews about how he put beats on the song and slowed it down. Miss Ross tries desperately to find a way where she can be okay with this and not punch him in the eye. I love this song, "Keep Me Hangin' On." Remember "Cruel Summer" and like that "Na-Na-Na Hey-Hey-Hey" song? What a great summer. So of course he's done it all up in electric pieces of the future, and of course I love it, and even Diana Ross is looking forward to what he's going to do.
Dear Blake. Please do not suck. Please do not be annoying. Please do not bug me with Diana Ross. Please do not get into the middle of Ryan and Simon's gay thing, or your own extraneous gay thing. Blake: please, please do not have vocal entendres on Diana Ross. I cannot take it, Miss Ross will not have it, Simon will kill everybody. And then...well, he looks amazing. Can't quite dance, but the backup ...it's one or the other, you know? From the first beat, it's either going to go all the way left or all the way right. And I think that much of this depends on your subjective response to the beats themselves, and the way it's been set up, but then whether or not you're buying into the overall thing that he's trying to OH MY GOD! The lights go crazy! Disco strings! Holy crap! Moonwalking! He's a producer! He's producing things in my heart! And in other areas! HOLY CRAP! The intensity of...the whole thing with Sligh was that his production didn't cover up the fact that his voice was being boring, but that was a result of him thinking he could coast on the production. And that is also the case here. But MAN does this shit give you hella room to coast. I am so deeply in love with Blake Lewis. Bottom line: his tricky stuff is magic, vocally and otherwise, but the regular melody vocals are not all that. When he does things with his voice that are awesome, it is awesome, but the plain old singing part, he doesn't devote anything to. Doesn't matter, doesn't matter, doesn't matter, doesn't matter. Same reason Haley was awful but will be super safe: presence. Dear Sligh: the only person that can out-Blake Blake is Blake. You're Frank Grimes. Please get real.
Randy says there were good things about it, but that you shouldn't do that with classic songs. "Check it out though, because you actually sing better than that. Let the vocals do their thing, let the classics be the classics." Yucky. Considering anybody born after 1975 is going to be familiar with a version of the song MUCH closer to what Blake just did than the Supremes one, this ugliness cannot be avoided. Paula agrees to an extent, but both of them are onboard that there's a difference between this and the nightmare that Chris Sligh perpetrated. Paula and I think it could be a radio song; Simon says no. They talk about how one or the other, not both, can be true, but I think they kind of can, which is where the whole concept of subjectivity comes in. Simon catches something on Blake's face that makes him nervous, and he totally jumps in there with a worried face: "You'll be fine, Blake." In this nearly quiet kind of offhand tone. Love that man. Ryan asks if he regrets changing it so much and Blake doesn't regret that, as well he shouldn't. They both agree that his actual singing sucked, though, so we're in the same boat there as well. I think this really comes down to age demographic, whether or not you can see the overall picture of what he was trying to do there. Whether he failed is another question entirely, but I do know that if the performance made no sense to you to start with, there's no way it's going to look good no matter what I say, or anybody else.
Stephanie's adorable as she's singing to Miss Ross, and she tells us that she was told to start sexy, and then build, and then...something nonverbal that seems to indicate an explosion of some kind. Miss Ross is reminded of herself as a child and says that Stephanie's got star quality. Stephanie's like, "Whatever she says, man. She's totally Diana Ross." Then she sings "Love Hangover," another song that is mostly boring with like one good part...which she leaves out. Also, she is wearing an entire Pier One franchise. Also, there is no sexiness. Also, she may have borrowed Sanjaya's earrings. The disco part never comes, never comes, never comes. The whole thing goes in circles and gives you a Song Hangover. I like Stephanie a lot, but she's not going to be here too long. I'm pleasantly surprised she's made it this far, but it's just too much.
Randy tells her to stop forgetting her words and that it was a strong finish, and that it was the perfect choice for her...but where was the Vonzell part? Paula: "Is there a reason you fucked us out of that? As fans of music, and Diana Ross, and that song? Can you justify doing that?" Stephanie's like, "It was too long?" And Paula gives her a rude smile: "That's what arranging is for, moron. You have a beautiful voice." She tells her to strive for better. Damn. She was really looking forward to the disco part, it would seem. Simon calls the arrangement "strange" and agrees: he felt teased with the "good part" (verbatim he says this) and she failed to deliver. It was like an unending intro. He tells her straight up that she's been outsung by Lakisha and Melinda, and takes her to task as well for choosing this song out of the "multitude of amazing Diana Ross songs" available. Damn. He begs her to make a bigger impact at the risk of disrespecting the stage, or something. I tuned out after awhile because it got too...not mean, but just too much. Like, we get it. This isn't a laundry list, it's a nagathon. How about she's dressed like Paisley Zuul? How about that? No? Stephanie explains to Ryan, in a way that makes a lot more sense, that the "good part" also doesn't involve any singing as such, at least not the kind of singing she does best; it's not in her wheelhouse to do that part of the song. And like, I feel you as an artist? But they don't care. They're idiots. Paula Abdul just wants to hear "For The Love Of Money" and "Mustang Sally." If you gave her the disco she craves, no way would she have gotten that mean.
Chris R singing "The Boss": he was starstruck with Miss Ross, and she begged him to chill: "I'm not different from you! Just older!" She's so cool. He talks about "butchering her song in front of her face, waiting for her" to stop him...but she likes him very much. "Find the hook in the song and work the song," she urges us, and tells him to engage the audience as much as possible, and to keep his head in a good place. Why do I love him so much? He is LITERALLY everything I hate. And the performance is not great: he's terribly pitchy the whole time, doing more of that bouncing shit, and grinning weirdly. He sounds horrible, he looks disgusting, he needs to shut up, he sounds awful in my ears, and yet...I love him. I don't know why. I want to trip him so he falls down, yet I also want to give him something as a gift, or help him up after tripping him, and call him "Man." Maybe it's just a hundred wrongs making a right, or something. He's like that mechanic that borrows money and you know he's never going to pay you back, but goshdarn it if there's not something charming about him that makes that okay, like, you just wanna help the guy. You see where he has made bad choices and will continue to do so, but you are merely invested enough to be sad about it, but let him go on being that guy. Except for the part about crushing on psychos, like if you took the gay part out...yep. The best explanation I have at press time is that me and Chris R are a lot like that movie Capote?
He's just so unfortunate. So...People's Court. He's like, maybe he has a baby in another state that he never gets to see, and sometimes when he's had a few beers he cries about it. Randy tells him he overdid it, though the runs that he did "connect" on were "hot," it was "interesting" and "half good, half bad." I'll go with that. Maybe "pitchy" doesn't mean what I've always thought it does. Paula thinks he nailed the blend of contemporary and olden, or something: he took "one of the best dance songs, turned it into that direction, and played with the vocals," which I guess means he did a great job. Simon points out the dreadful vocals and that if you removed his charm (whither?) and his personality (wherefore?), it would be a crappy song everybody hates. And I agree. And yet.
Jordin! Hugging and squealing and bouncing and giggling with Diana Ross and telling us she's "going to be showing [her] softer side." Huh? Like different from the razorblade maniac you've been presenting yourself as up to this point? Diana says her rendition is "absolutely gorgeous, but you need to project a song! Look at the audience and believe! Own the song! Don't lose your way! Tell the story through the song!" She reiterates this for us in interview, and mentions "the glitter, the shine in her eyes, the inner light" of Jordin. She's got an inner something or another. I think it's older than us all. You must never run from anything immortal, Jordin. So she's like, "Yes ma'am I will totally take that to heart!" and then she goes off by herself and has a nice long sitdown and thinks about the song and the feelings that makes her feel, and what it means to her. And the song? Is from the movie The Land Before Time. And if you need more reasons to love Jordin after what I just related to you, I don't know that we can be friends.
"If We Hold On Together," from a movie that is appropriately titled in more ways than one, because it totally came out before she was born. We spend a lot of time trying to figure her out: is she Paris? Vonzell? Somebody else I don't remember? I guess Paris, because she's an efficient machine, but there's a hell of a lot more life and humor in her than Paris. I honestly believed that Paris was that hollowed-out Dakota Fanning person, but Jordin, you know you could hang. So she stares into the camera and has feelings, sitting on a stool, wearing an amazing dress... and then the song proceeds to go on and on forever, and it's amazing, but in that Lakisha way where you're like, "Got it, loved it, don't need to hear it after today." Randy tells her she's made it a "three-girl race," and I try to picture them tying them together, like a three-legged race, how that would look, but all I can think is that would be too dangerous for Stephanie. Paula wigs about how she's "a natural gift," and a breath of fresh air and sings her beautiful heart out, and that even though she's never heard the song, her breath was taken away. Jordin's overjoyed by this.
Simon calls it "a little bit gooey" -- which she awkwardly interpolates that she knew it was coming -- and that he thought it was a "very, very good vocal," and that she has absolutely put herself in good stead for the finals. She squeals and jumps around and is very tall, and Ryan -- rather than calling her a Brobdingnagian monstrosity again -- just twinkles lovingly at her, about how fun it is to watch her grow. And yeah. She's very impressive. I think we forget her because she's young and sweet, but the girl can sing. She can't wipe her smile off her face, she says, and he tells her not to: "Look into the eyes of America, and make them vote." She does her best, he's adorable, they're both awesome. This is the most enjoyable episode in quite a while, for me personally. You know I always wonder if I'm burning out or if my hate is real, but this ... ever since Leslie Hunt left and Sundance left, I've felt full of some kind of love for this show, and Sanjaya, and all of it. It's a whole new day, it's a new life, etc.
Oops! Forget I said that!