Paula is dressed like a hot pink wedding cake, and Simon's wearing a sweater. Nothing else on that front to report. Well, I can't believe Sarver will be on the tour and Alexis won't. Does that seem right to you? Ryan asks Kara to define "artistry" for us, and she says that it's taking a song that you've heard a million times and... whatever, it's rehearsed and we already know it. Ryan asks if Paula's got any props under the table, and she gives him the` all clear. And what's Simon looking forward to? Ryan being amazing, he says, and the artists being amazing, need he say more? No, he need not. Ryan agrees.
Harry Hamlin's got his kids and Taylor McBride out in the audience, which would normally earn us a whole thing about Lisa Rinna's face and Harry Hamlin's face and how every second brings them closer into alignment of being the same face, but not tonight. I am too tired for me to care, and Allison has already fucked up too bad.
Anoop is going nerdcore again, which is nice and works for him if you don't look closely at it. Matt I can't see through Megan's high-waisted mom jeans everybody is wearing right now, I guess to make themselves look like moms. Kris looks delightful, Lil looks like a Golden Globes announcer nobody recognizes, Scott's in all black and Adam continues to look disconcertingly male. Allison, man. She is also wearing a hot pink bridal cake, but it's pregnant with stupidity and a crinoline or something, and her heels have wide ballet ribbons, and of course who would you be without black Capri-length tights, and the dress is barfing pearls in strands thick as your wrist, and her hair looks like the hair of a complete asshole. Complete. Asshole.
Standing to Danny Gokey, you may ask how this is possible. How does one make Gokey look sexy and suave, like a soon-to-be-fired substitute teacher? Well, first you need some bright pink stupid-looking hair, that's a must. Maybe some of it is fake, that's at your discretion, but it must look absolutely retarded to start out with. Then you take a feather duster in a nearly-matching but not quite matching shade of idiotic pink, and you tease that fucker up right. I mean, until it looks like you were attacked in a carpet store by a pack of frenzied balloons. Clip that shit to your stupid head with a giant thing -- Is it a bird? Is it a cloisonné bird? A model airplane? A bejeweled clothespin? -- that you can find anywhere, as long as it's stupid and has nothing to do with the look you've decided to perpetrate. Somewhere between teen hooker and mental patient playing dress-up? Great. Now you are cooking.
Ugh. Just looking at her makes me want to punch myself. Anyway, look! Because it's Ryan at work, at the radio station doing the Top 40. The Idols come into the booth and you can tell that he's nervous having them there, because they can't be controlled. He throws some statistics their way, but mostly they're just stuck on how adorable he is at work, and he tells them the theme is... I'm not sure I understand the theme. "Most popular downloads" according to something or another. Like One Night In Paris, maybe, you could sing that somehow. "Tommy Lee Gave Me Diseases On A Yacht With His Mile-Long Penis, Parts I & II."
Anoop is singing "Caught Up" by Usher, through the strategy of "having stage presence." So we're back to that. I hope he dances around and completely forgets to sing. Like Randy told him to, he's going to bring back some high energy performing. The backup singers line up in front of him and go "Hey! Ho!" and then his seems to be commanding the stage mainly with dressing like Janet Jackson in 1812, snarling like Billy Joel, and pointing at the ceiling sometimes. One thing he did not bring is his voice, and so I am checked out. This is ridiculous. You know what snarly-sexy looks like on Anoop? Getting creeped right out. In this bizarre costume that looks normal from far away but has weird chains and shit strapped to it, and his nerds out in the audience and whatever. Who could love this? This is awful. Anoop, you failed us again.
Kara points out that singing Usher is an opportunity to sing well. Anoop informs her that she is wrong, and in fact didn't sing it just like Usher, which is true, because Usher can sing, and you choose not to, but shut up anyway. She goes on to say that he performed it as though he were dared to do so by a fraternity. NICE! That is exactly what I wish I had said. That is amazing, and ever so vicious, and it pisses Anoop right off. But yeah. Just sort of unearned and uncomfortable and weird. Paula liked it because it was "playful," rather than "beautiful," vocally speaking. Then she says to up his stagecraft by, quote, "Instead of like a lot of stuff going back and forth but how create some signature hits or some stabs with the band and create more liberties and tell Rickey maybe I want a breakdown here or this or that."
Simon's like, "The hell she is talking about, but that was a total fucking mess." Also, it was totally wannabe and embarrassing, and gave him a headache. Anoop is no more impressed with him than with Kara, and you can tell he's about to make an ass of himself because his feelings are hurt, so of course Ryan asks what his issue was with Kara's critique, and says their opinions are just their opinions, and then compounds that fuckup by saying that he is "defining himself as an artist" by singing one of the most popular songs by one of the most popular whatever ever, and that will make him an R&B artist, so go fuck yourself. Kara's like, "Great, you little shit. I'll define your ass all the way back to Nerdsville, NC."
And frankly, I sort of agree, and it pains me to suddenly hate Anoop this hard. Who's going to be impressed by any of that? The voting public? The judges who still have control of all of this? Certainly not me. "That's just your opinion" is about the emptiest, most fucking pointless phrase in the English language, and using it is a shortcut to marking yourself as fairly clueless and more than likely a loser. And you're "defining" yourself as an R&B artist (which: Deluded much? What's the market for that?) by singing an Usher song just like Usher would? How does that help? How does that add to the sum total of human experience in any worthwhile way? Or did you already meet that requirement with your term paper on Barbecue Folklore? Way to set yourself all the hell way back, dude. Between Allison's clothes and your freshman 'tude I'm about this close to rooting for Danny.
...And great, because now Megan will be singing Bob Marley. I'm in a horrible mood already, it's four hours past my bedtime, and you're going to follow Anoop's shitty song and even shittier heel turn with fucking Megan singing fucking Bob Marley? How is that in any way fair? I'm not even drunk. Gross tattoo girls and Bob Marley, to a person from Austin, is like garlic and crosses to a person from LA. This is the National Shame of Texas right here and it's not even started yet. Let's get weird.
Amateurish little-girl singing, with all the beads she won last week flashing her girls, weird "oo" noises, stupid crazy-person hair, glitter paint overload, no discernable melody which may not be her problem... But you know what, the horrible sounds coming out of her body are totally her responsibility. I cannot blame the song for the fact that she sounds like she has all the impairments a person can have. Kara's like, "Dude, you are dunzo." She says the song was a stupid choice, and some jackass who won't stop booing and mooing yells, "Broken record!" As though it's Kara's fault Megan is so horrible. She has chosen the wrong songs every week, and she has sung them in the most unnerving way possible. Broken record indeed, trashy Megan's trashy fan.
Paula says crazy talk that Simon sums up as wanting to see Megan on a stool, and then Simon explains -- while that idiot continues to make both himself and Megan look worse -- that whatever the fuck it was that got her dumb weird ass on this show, it is trickling away. The judges all agree that this was boring as shit, and that she didn't even sing it that great. Ryan's like, "Did you know that you suck?" And she goes, "The audience is feeling it, and my fans are feeling it, and the stupid judges, it's just their opinion, and the song was awesome." Jackass.
Everybody is being a jackass today, and you know what I always say: if everybody in the world is being a dick, check your blood sugar and eat a Kit-Kat because I guarantee you they're not, but in this case it really is them. If one more person gets snotty with the judges I am going to pop off. And then Danny and Allison fake-fight over the microphone. I wish I could look at Danny while Allison's singing, and vice versa, so my heart would line up with my stomach. I wish there were an app for that. Speaking of commercials you have memorized, how awesome does that movie look where you don't want to mess with Beyoncé's man because if you think Beyoncé is crazy she will show you crazy? Oh, Sasha. So very fierce. I wish there were an app for going back to when I believed in Ali Larter. I miss that.
Lots of cheers for Gokey, who's a little less fake-surprised by this each week, and now he will be singing "What Hurts The Most" by Rascal Flatts, whom Danny says everybody likes, in the whole world, because they're so super-diddly-ooper. And you know what, that's a curious song title. Let's hit Google for some lyrics, shall we?
"I'm not afraid to cry every once in a while/ Even though going on with you gone still upsets me/ There are days every now and again I pretend I'm okay/ But that's not what gets me/ What hurts the most was being so close.../ And never knowing what could have been.../ It's hard to deal with the pain of losing you everywhere I go/ But I'm doing it/ It's hard to force that smile when I see our old friends and I'm alone/ Still harder getting up, getting dressed, living with this regret/ But I know if I could do it over/ I would trade give away all the words that I saved in my heart/ That I left unspoken..."
Maybe there's some math I'm not quite doing right, but um, is there any way this equals out to anything other than Danny Is An Asshole? Because I'm trying really hard to see how this isn't maybe the grossest thing I've ever seen in my entire life, and I can't quite get there. Well, it's no "I Loved Her First," which my friend actually is going to be performing at a wedding sometime soon. But barring that, isn't Danny Gokey sort of... Automatically disgusting? It's not the producers this time, it's not his homie holding her picture up with a tear running down his face. It's just Danny, himself, given a very long list of songs, picking this particular song, and singing it on TV, to win some money.
And you know what, I don't care what happens. He whines about how it's not his fault he was so shitty last week because he didn't get to have the song he wanted, and also, why is he talking like West Side Story this week? Is that how they talk where he's from? That is ghastly. And then some talk about how he has all these emotions and the love and the thing and the audience, and blah blah. "Tool" isn't passive enough, and "douchebag" is too clueless and innocent and naïve for what he is, which is officially at this point ghoulish and cynical and awful. And all the other words I can think of are just generally insulting to people's genitalia. I have run out of words. I am going to have to search for videos of babies cracking up on YouTube for like an hour to get back to being myself. I haven't done that in almost a year, the laughing babies thing, but I know that's what it is going to take.
The performance is belty and gaspy and whiny and not entirely unlovely, but God, way to stack the deck and be disgusting in front of everybody. So very done. So done with Danny. The cheers go on and on and on, and Paula tells him he thrives "from the first note to the cadence" and wants to hear it again. Simon recalls last week, when he didn't love Danny, but this week he thought it was Danny's best performance. What a fucking circus. I don't understand anything anymore. By comparison with Anoop and Megan sucking rocks, yes, he was better than everybody. Except you're talking about Megan, who should just fall in a hole, and Anoop, who is hateful suddenly and refuses to sing each week, so like: how is that better? And then Kara wraps up with how everyone in the room was moved emotionally, and the heart and the soul and the goosebumps and whatever. Then he tells Ryan about how heartfelt and wonderful he was, some more.
Thank God, at least Allison can't be blamed for why she's awful to deal with, and can actually sing. She will be playing a guitar and singing "Don't Speak." Good feeling about this, even if she's dressed like a visual bitchslap of dorkiness, and even that is a little better in the bright-white rock spotlight. Her voice is fantastic at first, but then gets sort of yelling and rushed and weird in parts. It's still the best thing so far, but it's almost like having sung the song a million times ("growing up," she "grew up" listening to this song, suck on that for a second) is a bad thing, because it seems too easy and just sort of disinterested. I don't know. I don't trust myself tonight anymore.
Dude, she looks like a clown dressed as Pebbles Flintstone dressed as a moron. Kara says to stop dressing like rock and roll and "put all that on yourself" when she has such a great voice and brings the rock automatically. She's fair -- not that the idiots in the audience are even listening -- in saying that Allison's great voice was not at its best tonight. Paula says some words that not even Allison can pretend are meaningful, and Simon compares her to the Addams Family, and calls her a precocious daughter dressed up and pretending to sing rock music, and that it carried over to the performance itself. Yes. Plus shouting. Ryan's like, "Good girl play guitar good? Hard?" And she goes, "Goo goo gaga." I mean that's literally what she says. Is everybody on crazy pills tonight? What the shit is going on in this episode? What a horrible, terrible mess. F is for Fail.
Scott will be singing Billy Joel, "Just The Way You Are," which should be fun because that's pretty much Scott: pleasant, boring, unchallenging in any way. People are funny about Billy Joel the way we all are about things. (For me it might be Julia Roberts, Ryan Seacrest, Howie Day, Geena Davis. I realize that these things are not perfect, but somehow to me they still are. If you put America's Sweethearts in front of me, my brain will say "This is the worst movie ever made," but my mouth will say, "How dare you even bring that up, you bastard." For you, it might be Bruce Campbell, or Kathy Griffin, or like... Rush. I don't judge, everybody's got a surprise party or two.) Billy Joel, now, I'm not weird about him like boys sometimes are, but I do love him.
And I bet you a billion that Scott is weird about him. I kind of love the world that Scott lives in, this unending Yacht Rock Michael McDonald slow-jam world where all the men's manes are flowing and free and all the shoes are really comfortable, and it always smells like the smoking section of 1981. You know? "Just The Two Of Us" and Toto singing "Africa" in fern bars and Tom Selleck is telling you to use Close-Up toothpaste on the regular. That's where he's comfortable, and it pleases me to no end. I'll have to remember to stay there time he takes the stage.
Kara says these were smart decisions because of the singer-songwriteriness of Billy Joel, not rocking the boat so to speak, and also points out that his hair has been sort of mangled and gelled into being square and going straight up into the '80s. Paula can't help but dick it up because -- oh man, even Simon goes "Fucking Hell" in the middle of this -- "I'm most proud of you and I want the audience to know it has nothing to do about your challenge but everything to do that makes me forget about that challenge." Fantastic. You were so good I forgot for five seconds that you were blind. WTG. Scott's awesome about it, of course, and puts on a very serious "Yes, even I -- a blind man -- can see what a fabulously good person you are," and then Simon tells him he was amazing, best performance so far, and I would agree. But I would submit to you that this also is about song choice, because it's the first song he's chosen that has a melody of any discernable sort, and that made it enjoyable instead of earnest and unbelievably boring. I still don't think he's any better than the rest, besides Megan and Mike, but at least it wasn't painful this week, and that's nice.
Matt's singing a song "for him," because last week he tried to impress the judges and landed in the Bottom Three, so fuck it. He'll be singing "You Found Me" by the Fray. You can tell it's by the Fray because it sounds like every other song they ever wrote. Which is not to say it isn't good, because they're all good. They're all the exact same amount of good. By definition.
He's on keyboards down in the mosh pit, singing the song and being sort of totally hot, mesmerizing a young lady or two in so doing, and surrounded by young ladies in fact in the middle of the floor on a dais, which is just amazing. Like he's leading a meeting of the overprivileged children of California. How, I'm sorry but I've been watching this show for a few weeks now, and I need to know how he got way hot just now. Not his most stirring performance, I'll grant you, but the staging and everything was pretty cool. No upper range which is a bummer because he sings so well, but the gritty growly thing was awesome, and way different from the sweet soft hobbit singer of that band, who I'm trying to imagine growling right now and it's just coming out as Corey Feldman in The Fox & The Hound.
They're going to ding him for no range, I think, and possibly because they are too old to know who the Fray are. Which is only like three years younger than being too old to know who Coldplay is, you know what I mean? Not a huge difference. Paula accuses him of "aborting" the things she loves about him, i.e. he had a falsetto abortion onstage. Oh Paula. She namechecks the singer of the band, surprisingly, but compares him to said singer, wrongfully, and then compares it to his Coldplay performance. Simon calls it fake and put-on and pretending to be the Fray and "uptight." Then Simon calls him out for frowning, and says he's pretending to be all kinds of people and desperately trying to stay in the competition. Ouch. That's like the harshest thing I've ever heard, and not entirely untrue, which is of course way worse.
Simon pronounces it "uncomfortable," and says he should have gone with "Apologize." Which honestly I believe would have killed me dead, that would be so awesome. Kara says he needs to commit to rock or R&B, and stop jumping over the pop fence, and tells him he deserves to stay in the competition. Ryan asks what's up, and Matt nervously jumps around and says he's afraid of getting pigeonholed in R&B, but apparently that's a problem in itself, and it's sort of scary and sad, because secretly I like him best.
Lil Rounds, who invented Stay In Your Box as a way of life, is singing "I Surrender," which is a fine song I suppose. I mean, I like it because it's one of the most dramatic songs of all time, like you feel like the entire cast of Grey's Anatomy is simultaneously falling down with heart attacks in slow motion when they sing it, that spooky Old Hollywood Sunset Blvd lights on the faces everywhere, and that's funny, and there's all manner of opportunities to belt and key changes and ... Oh my God Becky look at her butt! Lil Rounds has a butt you could open beer bottles on. I don't know, she can sing, we knew that, she did it, lightshow, it's insane. You could play Jenga on that thing.
Kara suggests perhaps having sung Eric Carmen or something, which is awesome, and she praises Lil for her effortless perfection, Paula says nothing of worth and then claps, and Simon says again she's playing it safe to stay in the competition, and compares it to a wedding performance. He suggests "One," which would have been freaking awesome, or anything less old-fashioned. Ryan has some fun with Lil's kids, and tells one daughter and then the other to go punch Randy Jackson. Randy loves it, and the little girl gives him a huge hug and Lil cries, and it's just about awesome. Ryan gives Lil a big extemp hug because she's crying and then is absolutely adorable with Lil's kids some more, and damn. You know, after five years of constant, unreserved approval and admiration I find it rare that Ryan surprises me with new ways to be awesome -- I think we can agree, you and I, that I have mapped this territory extensively, in fact -- so it's like your dog learned a cute new trick and you don't even know where he learned it but you want to see him do it like a hundred million times.
And Adam, will he be doing something totally fucked up? Oh yes. "Play That Funky Music," of course. Like he's in a musical about funky white people, with one hand on his squirrel, making strange plosive sounds with his mouth, twirling on the stage, twisting the time signature around and around like it's stuck in a Topsy Tail, screaming on his knees he will sing it. It's kind of like church, if church were a discotheque full of snakes. At the end he is so out of control he's like WOOOOO! Not of his own volition, and Paula is actually on her stomach wriggling toward him.
Paula gives a wild speech comparing him to Jagger and Tyler, Simon calls him "brave" and a welcome antidote to the bullshit preceding, and they agree he was clearly having the time of his life. I like it when Adam has a good time, because it makes everybody in the room go absolutely shit-hot nuts, which is exciting. He praises the band and their overwhelming arrangement, and then Kara says she -- like all of us -- pretty much waits for this show to get to the Adam part to see what the fuck he's going to pull. Then she compares it to Studio 57, which is I think like Studio 54 but with 57 separate ingredients, like a delicious condiment that perhaps you would like to eat with some french fries. The three extra ingredients are even more gayness, mindbending WTF, and technically keeping the pants on. Studio 54 is kind of like church with snakes, actually. Kara and me, sometimes it's like this, but we usually get back to this pretty quick. Ryan says something that makes Adam laugh about how he needs to loosen up, and then tries to climb inside his jacket.
Man, poor Kris Allen being last and following that noise. As much as I think America is at a place where it's become sort of revolutionary and nonconformist to admit that Scott's not the best, if you know what I mean, and Kris's cuteness I think is becoming his own personal challenge. It's hard to look a puppy in the face and go, "Meh." Ryan points out Mandisa in the audience -- still seething I'm sure, because of Adam being an abomination -- and then Kris says he's going to attempt to be memorable. I say don't worry about it, because when you stress out you get less cute.
He sings "Ain't No Sunshine" on the keyboard, and I'm going to not look at the screen this time so that I will not be swayed by the adorableness of his tiny self. Oh, nice! Strings, I do like a little string section, and it's not entirely new-sounding, but works. I think a heavier bass drum would give it the thing he wants it to have, but no, there is no such. This is almost to that "Apologize" place, but then kind of hangs back away from it. His voice sounds awesome, as usual, and will get no credit, as usual, because of his lamentable cuteness. I guess I can see why this was the last song, but it's not as dramatic or powerful as it could be, or should be. Great vocal, and one of the best ones of the night, but nothing like it could have been.
Kara says that this is the definition of "artistry" after all, and Paula says he made it new and a great single, and calls it his best performance to date. I think maybe that's true because it was not sweet and tiny like usual. Simon says the arrangement was very good, and that his confidence level is finally where it needs to be. He totally basks and wants for Ryan to close it out so he can go hyperventilate, and we're done. The pressure, it is cracking them right down the middle.
Anoop sucked all over the place like a total joke and then acted jerky, Megan is pretty much worthless to an even more nail-pulling level, Danny's wife is dead and I can no longer even slightly care about that because he obviously doesn't, Allison was only different from Anoop by a hair of natural ability, Scott's voice was labored and over/undery, Matt G gave up being a virtuoso for being a hottie just like this one time, Lil did her usual thing really loudly, Adam did a great job but was neither memorably bizarre nor bizarrely memorable as in past weeks, and Kris proved the thing he needed to prove in order to keep from being Kat McPhee for at least a couple more weeks. Should go home: Anoop and Megan. Will go home? Probably Matt. Either way I'll be there with a smile on my face, because this rotten mood is doing nobody any favors.
The Gossip Girl people keep saying that I'm a big faker for pretending I don't like music when I write about this show, or like I only listen to Belinda Carlisle, so let's see if this is interesting at all. Playlist for this week: the Shout Out Louds, Kirk Hamilton, Paul Tabachneck, and anything Andrew Maury/RAC touches. And today's most especial honors go to the perennial favorite Cajun Dance Party, and the new Metric, Fantasies. So give those a shot, let me know what you think, I'll see you here tomorrow night.