It's Disco Time! Those crazy boogie children let their love lights shine, Barry Gibb's face eats itself inside out, but the kids rock it. Melinda's "Love You Inside Out" is relaxed and not entirely overwhelming; the judges admit we expect more from her than anyone ever. There's a momentary fight with Barry about the lyrics to "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart," but when she explains her refusal to sing any lyric about losing or going home, he loves it. The usual pandering key change sets off the entire crowd, so you know Randy and Paula are in love with it, although Paula once more asks her to do something unexpected at some point.
Blake goes all Blake on "You Should Be Dancing," blonde stripes making his eyes pop like whoa, and Barry loves it. It starts out kinda Jamiroquai-verging-on-Antony Johnson creepy, then abruptly flips into Maxwell-sexy. Falsetto: sometimes it's like this, other times it's like that. Randy finds the beeping noises and beatboxing "corny," and Simon hates it, but Paula likes shiny stuff. He sings "This Is Where I Came In" wearing his most semiotically canny outfit so far: imagine if Battle Royale had a pop group subplot. His confidence outstrips what America's capable of buying, but it's a real either/or kind of performance; definitely my favorite of the season, but not really a crowd-pleaser. Needless to say, Simon's unhappy about the Blakeness and Randy's horrified by the beeping, but Paula loves it and accuses Simon, correctly, of Jive Talking.
LaKisha sings an ungraceful and disinterested "Stayin' Alive" with some really hot extensions; her creativity with the melody offends Randy; her slow-take tempo update pisses off Paula; and Simon declines to kiss her again because of her Blaking of the song, which was actually awesome. The very romantic "Run To Me" has a pretty meh arrangement, but at least she hops two key changes, causing the audience to basically shit themselves. She biffs the last line; nobody cares but it's still all the judges can talk about; Simon pretty much calls her and Blake out for the losers this week.
Jordin ups everybody's game with "To Love Somebody," convincing Barry Gibb that she is the queen of the entire universe, and for good reason. She rocks it, and even stays almost entirely in her lower register, a really confident choice at this point. In the end, it's her "Woman In Love," one of the most original and majestic songs from the Gibb catalog, that confuses everybody. She does it up right, wearing the most flattering dress we've seen, but the judges pan her. I wonder if they won't reconsider tonight; Simon calls it "old-fashioned" and "pageanty," but it was actually awesome.
Best of the Night: Blake's and Jordin's second songs. Unless you're not me, and then it's probably one of the diva turns from Melinda or LaKisha's second round. Worst of the Night: Blake's and Jordin's second songs, unless you're me, and then it's probably either of LaKisha's two numbers. Should go home: Lakisha. Will go home, unless the Blaker Girls seriously mobilize: Blake.
Blake's mouth hangs open like a flytrap as Ryan pans across the kids: thirty million Americans deciding your fate, and it's three girls and one guy. Of sorts. I'd be jaw-dropped too. Ryan's wearing a black suit and blue tie, or a blue suit (Armani does not make a blue suit) but whatever it is, the combination, it's strange. Like, Wonder Woman and Clark Kent can't really have blue hair, but then how come -- that's the color of the suit and the tie. "I am Ryan Seacrest," he declares, "And the pressure is on, in America." You know what, if fucking George and Laura show up I'm outta here. Ryan's scruff is not great this week: he looks like G.I. Joe, or a Halloween hobo, or today's FTM. As he introduces the judges, the screaming is insane for Simon and not so much for the other two, and that makes me, Simon, and Ryan giggle madly. It's going to be a good week. Simon's wearing a white v-neck. With a capital V. Capital.
Did you know Barry Gibb is a music icon? He's been around just forever, five decades, starting out in Manchester with his Brothers Gibb. They show clips from the very excellent "Stayin' Alive" video, which is basically four to eight unattractive Mancunians standing around in unattractive locations, occasionally thrusting hips, singing in ghostly high voices. I recommend it strongly. (Remember Saturday Night Fever? You know, I was making out with the pilot of my private jet the other day and one or the other of us brought up that movie, and my, how we laughed. What a moment, culturally. Then we joined a cult, got really fat, and traded on our outdated celebrity cache for one million bloated years. Do you think Rita Wilson and Kelly Preston have a secret club where they get drunk and bemoan the fact that they will never, ever be famous? And then prank-call Patti Scialfa? That's what I would do. Hell, that's already what I do, I'm not gonna lie.) The Bee Gees had 30 albums and 19 of them were awesome in some way, they had five number ones in a row, there's gay name dropping extraordinaire: Diana Ross, Celine Dion, Barbra. In every picture, Barry's uncomfortably nuzzling the lady of the moment in the exact same not-so-present fashion. Seven Grammies, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, "How Deep Is Your Love," and through it all, they were not that great looking. Barry Gibb will always look weird, in a new way each century, and Barry Gibb will always sound weird, edging ever up on self-parody, and Barry Gibb will always write kick-ass songs, with so-so lyrics. He tells us how our Top Four have "grown immensely," and then points out for the first of several thousand times that he's made "a lot of records with ladies," and that's what he is doing here: working with lots of ladies, and Blake. He keeps saying this and we will never know why he feels it's important to stress this point. Also, he talks CRAZY.
We hear about how the point of the Bee Gees, like the Beach Boys and En Vogue and like everybody good, was crazy awesome harmonies, like a prayer to the heavens. Barry tries desperately to...I don't know what. I don't understand his aim here. He's like, "I'm just here to enjoy it, and I'm I'm I'm I'm...havin' a boil." I think he thinks there's some cred rescue recovery that needs to happen here, and normally I don't mind a little bit of legitimacy handjob for the guests, it's part of the process, but..you're Barry Gibb. It works if you work it, you know? If you don't have the glory of plastic and disco-negligible credibility, you have nothing else.
Two songs each! We're to that point! Ryan asks, for the first time I can think of, if it's even possible "to fit all of this in"; he's a trouper though, and commits to trying at least. I have nothing to add except that this mimics the plot of a cinema film I recently screened at a friend's house, the star of which actually bore a discomfiting resemblance to Ryan Seacrest; the cinema film's denouement, if you will, was rather impressive but not really something you should try at home, or abroad, or ever, unless you have some serious historical issues. Find me a person capable at this late hour of watching pornography unironically and I will commit my life to the study of this person, this noble savage. Melinda's first song, "Love You Inside Out," follows the theme; Barry Gibb once more reveals the obvious, that the song was originally falsetto, being a Bee Gees song, and thus like all Bee Gees songs unsuitable to this venture, because it's all about harmony. He dances so close to the riddle of this episode but never actually admits that this shit makes no sense, just grins into the sun and hopes that all of them can manage to pull it off. Since it's Melinda, he loses his composure as we all do, and he marvels that "it worked for a lady," but does demonstrate a portion of poise in admitting that he was only ever "singing like a lady" in the first place. Every speech act Barry Gibb performs, it's a palindrome that leads back to irrelevance. A gentle saucepan, flimflam, a canal: Barry Gibb, ladies and gents. God, I love disco.
Although that's a word you hear like once all week, because the Mentor Thing demands that we cut loose from even the typical imaginary boundaries of genre and focus on songs the person wrote, or likes, or heard this one time. I love the Bee Gees, and I love disco, and I don't know what we're really doing here, so whatever. Flimflam. Melinda looks really nice, in a simple top with a yard-long shoestring around her neck and strange sleeves. I think what's going on here is a Mama's Family kind of shirt with something underneath to hide her body. She's also wearing jeans, and a crazy complicated bracelet that looks like it's about to meiose. Her voice sounds great, but there's not the insane charisma as usual. She does strut around, which I enjoy. I didn't love Bon Jovi week as much as you might imagine, given my outsize love of Slippery When Wet, but she was great. In the second chorus, she goes nuts and gets charismatic again, but the voice is just as good. I think the music's a bit loud and she's not completely committed, so it's like Melinda minus two. In the audience there's a family and in that family there's Melinda, but also in that group in the audience, there's a crazy girl.
Randy: "Yo so check it out this is the uh this is gonna be an interesting night," because he wants to see "who's really in it to win it." Randy's not "jumping up and down," but admits that it was good, as usual. When people say they hate Randy Jackson for his pointlessness, I never know what they mean, but I think I'm learning. Paula whines again that Melinda's vocals are above reproach, so there's nothing to say, so she opts for saying nothing. For a while, actually. She basically asks yet again for Melinda to raise the awesomeness bar on herself, like every week, and like every week, Doolittle nods quite seriously and ignores it altogether. Simon agrees with the germinal point of Paula, that she wasn't that impressed, and calls this "a backing vocalist performance." Of course, the crowd goes Pavlov because Simon opened his gob, and Doolittle tells them to cram it. "You are better than that," he explains once more, and grants it's lucky she's got a second song coming up. Ryan and Simon and Paula have an uninteresting conversation where everyone's at cross-purposes and flirting into space like microwaves and it's inert, and Ryan finally gets bored with them talking and fully snaps his fingers: "Eyes on me, bitches." The only thing better than disco is Ryan Seacrest, and that's a palindrome too.
Two songs is nice, because there's almost no talking, just singing. Scarnato's in the audience, and that's nice too, because she's not on stage. Blake will be singing "You Should Be Dancing," after a long screw-around courtesy of Randy Jackson, at the culmination of which Ryan tells Randy he should be a finger model. Simon is amused, I'm confused, Paula is witless. Barry calls this song a "dance anthem" of the late '70s; Blake says Barry's a pioneer of dance music. Much throwing-around of the term "beatboxing" occurs. All of you, shut it and let me see my man sing. There's so little to enjoy about this show, let's just let it do what it does please. And then...at the beginning, Blake's voice is interesting, in that one feels it might be best to put the lotion on its skin, lest it get the hose again. As your now well-moisturized skin crawls around, though, it suddenly gets hot. I don't get falsetto, it's like, there's a way it can get weirdly sexy. Maxwell is not Tiny Tim. Jamiroquai, although that man deserves a punch in the box every day of his life, is full-on sexy. Lindsay Buckingham looks like a pervert science teacher, and sings like his foot is being crushed, and yet his voice is sexy. Blake has some blonde stripes, once more bringing his hair and mine into perfect isomorphic alignment, and there are vocal entendres. At certain points, he stops singing altogether and makes noises. He has decided to beep through the entire song. Blake beeping: what is better than that, I ask you? Besides calling it beatboxing, I mean, in case you were afraid people didn't get how out of touch you are; in case that wasn't blazingly obvious, you can call what's plainly beeping "beatboxing," and suddenly it's pejorative, because now that Chris is gone, white America's discomfort with crossing race lines needs a new mule to carry it. It would be better if he did other things too, in addition to the very sexy beeptendres, but he does it the whole time. I'm worried, I admit.
There's a sign: WE LOVE THE LIGHTS. Nice. Randy talks at length about the "beatboxing" that never occurred in the song, Randy Jackson is a well-known producer and purveyor of hip-hop, he knows goddamn well what beatboxing actually is. Which means there's a something underneath this, a message we're receiving, about what's possible for white boys and what's suspect. I'm not offended on Blake's behalf, because this is a thing about Blake that I too find weird, but call it what it really is: weird. Not beatboxing. Randy is "just keeping it very real" (you cannot be "very" real in the same way that you cannot be a tad bit pregnant, unless you are lying and not keeping it real at all, in which case you can be very real), saying that the entendres made it "corny, like a foreign discotheque." Which...isn't that the point of Blake? To be like a foreign discotheque in the future? In Germany I heard that they play severe industrial house at even like the gas station, and all the hot German grandmas shake their asses to it in the grocery store and whatever, with their haircuts and everything. One day we'll all live there, and Blake can take us there. Paula points out, correctly, that the pitch was kind of vile at the beginning, also drops the "beatboxing" word, but explains that Blake shows "true musicianship." She proclaims once again that Blake is capable of demonstrating why he's here. The highlights make Blake's lovely eyes pop like whoa. Simon admits that it was unique and a question of personal taste, but that he found it -- predictably enough -- absolutely terrible. While my obsession with Blake Lewis has yet to impact my real-life relationships, it is doing a fucking number on my mind-meld with Simon Cowell. I want to see him rampant and glorious and rubbing his nipples while stamping on dreams; I don't ever want to think of him as old. Ryan shuts him up and then does some of his own beeping while giving the numbers; Blake is pleased.
"Stayin' Alive." Barry is upset that LaKisha does not respect the melody, giving the lie to the concept that he's ever seen this show before. LaKisha exists to defy mentors, especially now that Sanjaya is among the fallen. She loves the way he sings, and they work it out; she's very gracious about it, and Barry Gibb is happy that she finally listened to somebody about something. She could be lying, you never know. She's wearing a '60s top and leggings, creating that behemoth eggplant-on-stilts look that's so flattering to larger girls, but her extensions are hot. She rocks it in that LaKisha way, but her day is done; she changes "I'm a woman's man" to "I'm a woman [beat]" and it works. I don't need gender play at this point; nothing will ever beat Sanjaya's gender remix on "Bathwater" and you might as well not try. She does an awesome thing on the offbeat during the "ah ah ah ah" part that's rather glorious. "Ah (ah) ah (ah) ah (ah) ah (ah)." That alone makes the performance, although I'm sure the judges will refer to it as beatboxing. She's confident onstage in way she hasn't been in a while, despite being dressed kind of horrifically. She makes it work. Her voice is professional and full of flavors. In the audience there's a sign that says, I CAN'T DECIDE! And of the Top Four, hers is the only name missing, in a field of question marks. That's always been her problem.
Randy basically accuses her of beatboxing, in so many words, and Paula hates the fact that she changed the tempo so that the song would be more awesome. It's the usual Paula issue: she likes to hear songs she's heard a million times, like "For The Love Of Money," with all the pandering bullshit flash and pomp intact, whether or not it's musically interesting on its own terms. Paula does not care about that, she just wants to dance around drunkenly and pump her tiny fist from time to time. Everybody's really showing their age this week, not surprisingly. Simon denies her a kiss, "baby," and calls her on her shouting. He says it verged on "scary" in parts, and begs her to bring it back on the second song. Ryan puts Simon on total shout about how he's "not the type that calls back after a first date"; Simon laughs but we all know there's real anger there. You always call boys like Ryan two days later, or else it's back to the couch with a platter of nachos. He's needy.
Jordin will be singing "To Love Somebody," the song to which her great-grandparents first fell in love. There's a strange Viewer Q moment where Ryan spits on her and they make Blake noises with their mouths; it's strange and awkward and cute in that Jordin way. The Viewer Q relates to what Jordin's learned about herself during this process. Don't ask children about their introspection, because they have none, and it makes them uncomfortable, and there's nobody more uncomfortable with extemporaneous speaking than Miss Jordin Sparks anyway. She's like, "I learned I can handle things." She leaves out the fact that she hit puberty five seconds ago, but talks about how she's doing three hours of school every day, and getting A's and B's.
Barry talks flimflam malfmilf about how the song was "written for a man," but leaves out how it was written for a horrible man. "You don't know what it's like" to love somebody, the song says. Now, I am putting myself somewhat on shout by admitting this to you, so let's tread lightly, but let me tell you that this is not the week for me to be hearing whiny boy songs about being in love and all the entitlement that earns the lovesick. I literally do not have the capacity for empathy this week, for this kind of thing. I what? I don't know what it's like to love somebody? Because I can stand here with my back straight while you digress and whine and freak out about how very special and important and world-changing your stupid crush really is? That makes me a person who does not understand love? Hideous stupid man-love emo romance heath-wandering bullshit song. The act of loving earns you nothing, and has no effect on the beloved. That's how love works: it exists for and by and of itself, like art. The only thing worse than the whole "you have to tell him how you really feel" lie is turning it around and making it accusatory like that. You spit on love when you turn it into trouble and drama and narcissism, when you make it my problem, as the song's apostrophe. I have called more figurative and literal goddamn cabs in the last week... Snips and snails and nasty self-obsession: Boys are gross inside.
Um, YMMV. Barry LOVES Jordin, of course, because she is magical. He calls her the good kind of new, in essence. As usual, Jordin smiles beautifully and sings technically perfectly and has no idea of the heat she's packing. You can tell a kid there's a difference between water pistols and actual pistols, but when the chips are down they won't know the difference. "I wanted to show him my emotion," quoth Jordin Sparks. She has none of those but what she manufactures, and that is why she is my soul sister. And the Ringo. Barry Gibb fully says the following: "I know a couple hundred people have sung this song, but I...haven't heard a greater version than Jordin's." Wow. I don't know about any of this, but I'm susceptible to the same hyperbole regarding Jordin Sparks that everybody else on earth blunders into from time to time, so who knows? She's the best. The lights are very '70s disco glow on everything, her hair is soft and wavy and retro, she's got volume and manageability and double-barreled Jordinosity. She works the hell out of those cameras, buddy. She is, by the way, wearing a batiked bedsheet in strange Laura Ashley colors. And it works somehow, and I mean: she's still wearing jeans under it. She powers over and through the song in infinity gear, edging up to the top and possibly over it; there's a firmness in her performance that we haven't seen. Stupid hyperbole, I have no credibility. Lovely bronze colors in her makeup; it's not very screechy but you could say there are screechy parts. It's almost entirely in her lower register, which is intriguing, and like, almost cocky, in a good way.
Crowd goes wild, Randy says it's the best so far and calls her on a certain "throwback Aretha-Mariah vibe." What I love is that now that we live in the future and the Jordin Generation is on its way up, Mariah's retro to the same omnipresent degree as Aretha. That makes me proud to be alive. There's a really crappy poster in the audience that has like three things glued to it all craftsmanlike and a serious misuse of negative space. Go back to poster school, scrub. Paula underlines Randy's statement and circles it in red and blue and black until you can barely see it. Simon calls it both the best song choice and the best vocal: "We're back in the competition." Ryan watches her geek out and act weird and awesome, silently, full of disco glow his own self. She thanks some screamer in the audience; backstage Melinda and Blake are adorable and pretending to be robots. So mean! Jordin's not just this year's Haley Joel Dakota! There is slightly more to her!
Halfway there. Melinda will be singing "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart," but not after a Viewer Q that will put the fear in you quite rightly. What was her first tape or CD? Already there's an issue in that you have to specify "tape or CD," allowing for age window; not even aged Melinda ever owned an LP. I think the physical presence of scratchable vinyl or unspoolable tapes, or the extremely kitten-vulnerable compact disc, is what gave us -- particularly Metallica -- the idea that sounds are something you can hold in your hand. I think that's why kids don't get intellectual property fighting, because songs don't exist in three dimensions again, which means the argument takes place across a line that's impossible to explain, and results in the parties talking about two different things entirely. As ever, I side with the kids. Melinda blushes and says that her first tape was Bad, and Ryan gets really intense for a second about Michael Jackson's honor, and how dare you be ashamed of Jacko, and Melinda's like, "No, my mom crossed out the title and wrote Good on it instead." Which is nice in that it deflates the issue, but weird in that it makes no sense. Why would you do that? Why would a person feel the need to do that? I saw a friend get very angry at the cover of a book once, in a bookstore -- it was The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, but this was well before we had reason to be angry at that book -- and I thought it was about the weirdest thing ever. I had to really deal with that.
Barry loves her and et cetera, but wonders why she keeps leaving out the line about "how can a loser ever win," until she explains that it's because she's refusing to sing anything about losing or going home or anything, all year. Bringing us back to the troubling concept that words, in and of themselves, have magic power. Barry loves it; I see the point, but superstition is not what keeps you successful. It's very obvious what creates success, and it's not the mere lazy fact of words. ["Then again...tell it to Gina as she smiles though her heart is breaking. Or Phil's blaze of glory." -- Joe R] She is though very cute in interview talking about how she's fine with the other lines, like, "How can you stop the rain from coming down," because if words really are magical and create situations, she'd rather get wet than be a loser. I would like to see her fully create a magical downpour inside the Kodiak Theater. I would pay any amount of money to see Melinda Doolittle's rain dance. If anybody could do it...
Barry grins hugely into the camera, on fire with rainbows of Doolittle, and then she's onstage, wearing this great retro dress with cap sleeves, somewhere approximately halfway between Studio 54 and Avonlea. I wish to live there. She starts very low, at the rock bottom of her range in fact, and that's how you know she's going to get crazy and pandering at the end. She does some gestures like she's inventing the song as she goes, and there's a very mournful and kind of 4/4 vibe about the proceedings. I like it. She starts getting sassy, you can hear the key change coming from a mile away, and then it all happens like you assumed it would: she goes nuts, the trumpets start, the room goes crazy with a thousand disco lights in the dark, the whole world becomes a Couples Skate and your date is Melinda Doolittle. Her shoes are totally cute but there's that so very Idol part where it's like showstopping and whatever. The crowd goes nuts, as they've been forced to do, because pandering is fun when your expectations are this low. Randy yo yo yo check it outs about how she did a much better job this time, and he loved the "beautiful" and oh-so-predictable ending; she's the "resident pro." Paula name-checks Stephanie "I Have Learned To Respect The Power Of Love" Mills. That's like the coolest song title in the entire canon, my goodness. I wonder if the song is good. All I know about that lady is that she has the same birthday as me and Sars, which means she's excellent. Oh, and she was married to the guy from Shalamar, also awesome. Paula says something, you can't talk to a psycho like a normal human being, and Randy screams for no reason. "Jump out. Jump off!" Hmm. Simon's like, "I didn't understand that shit either. Back on topic, the lame diva action on the second half of that song has put you into the semifinals." I will never understand what they mean by "semifinals" and all that. I've been writing about this show since I was a little child and I still don't know what that denotes.
Blake: "This Is Where I Came In." Which is even more interesting than you think, and here's why. Maurice -- that's the cute one, the younger of the twins -- died in 2003, and the album of this song came out in 2001, so it was the last real album. It was intended as a comeback of sorts. Now, the way Barry says it, you could think it was from any time period at all, but no: it's the failed comeback single. It's a fabulous song both musically and lyrically ("It's a little too late/ And the wolf is on the run") and I have a soft spot in my heart for it, and for Maurice, and for Barry and the other one, and I guess the time has come for me to admit that I am a bit partial to Blake Lewis. I will say once and for all that I am pro-Blake, so you can stop wondering. Barry also: loves that he picked an obscure song (see, Barry doesn't know about this show) and that this song is a bit shocking because "it's not the Barry Gibb that everybody knows." Which is awesome enough, plus a little bit in this case. Barry says it'll give Blake the "chance to explore those extra gifts that he has." Blake's like, "Once again: I am from the future. I will always do this to you." Barry mourns the fact that the song wasn't a hit, but to me, it always will be. He muses that perhaps the song's just been "waiting for its time," and that maybe Blake will finally bring it to life.
Argyle. Shit he looks so hot I might die, says my notes. There's grindy funk guitar from the future, and colored psychedelic bubbles on the floor. This is killing me, says my notes. Here's the look: schoolboy shirt-and-tie, with that same argyle pattern in the same colors screen-printed across half of the shirt. A fake sweater! Picking up the same pattern he uses whenever it's a week to be safe/adorable and not progressive/unique! I don't have time to write the full five-page essay this outfit deserves, but it's possibly my favorite apparel occurrence in the history of fashion. Your clothing tells a story whether you want it to or not: therefore, your best bet is always to take over the story that your clothing is telling, and make sure it's telling the story you want told. And this story is...my favorite story in the world. It's a story about a boy, younger than Blake but not by much, who took the anger of Sanjaya and the professional rules-playing of Jordin, and put them together in a way that can be neither argued nor accused. A boy who foments revolution while holding down a 5.0 and seven extracurriculars. The boy stands in the schoolyard smiling and being nice to the younger kids, in the sun, and you'd never know he's making a mint off bootleg DVDs on the side, or that he's investing the money through a dummy corporation, or that he's got the paperwork for graduation equivalency at the ready, just waiting for some P.E. teacher to give him a fucking reason.
And boy if you put this outfit in a line with the chronology of his costumes, it gets even better: the "Imagine" job, military lines rumpled and unconstructed like a flower in the barrel of a gun, leads directly here: take some game-playing schoolboy apart but leave the appeal intact as you age him into college, still walking around on Huckleberry feet and whistling a private tune. Softer, smarter, faster, with secrets you'll never know about. Say what you will about Lifehouse, but that kid's smart like this too: baby face with a deep deep voice, and a shirt that says "Wild & Pure." Just throwing it all at you at once. Girls have been playing this game forever, but when boys play it they bring all the ammo they've got. I mean, Lord. God bless America. Blake is in the details, always, but I think what's interesting here is that we have compelling evidence that it's all on purpose, which is something I've been on pins and needles about since the first time we ever glimpsed the prismatic shine of his hair across the room. Blake's my hero usually but today, his clothes are my hero. I want to grow up to be just like them one day.
But we were talking about singing, weren't we? And that's interesting, because this is probably my favorite performance in the history of the show, but the reasons are kind of complicated. First of all, the car alarm wind-up birds. I haven't heard them in Austin but you used to get them all the time in Houston: birds whose calls are car alarms, recognizably: "Brrrrrrr! Onk-onk-onk! Wheeeeee-oooo wheeeeee-oooo! Ooooooop! Ooooooop!" Birds that don't recognize the high culture/low culture division between nature and mechanics, because they know that it's all nature, that they are nature and cars are nature and you and I are nature. And you've got car alarm wind-up Blake, making noises with his mouth that are normally made with mechanics, because he's not recognizing the division between nature and mechanics, because his body is an instrument and your body is an instrument, and mine. Which is why they're right by being wrong, when they call it "beatboxing" even when it's not, because that's what beatboxing is: turning machines into people, nature into mechanics, until you don't know the difference. Dissonance always resolves itself to harmony, if you wait long enough. That's how hip-hop works, and how this show among others works, and why Blake performs the way that he does. There's nothing more beautiful to me than those birds, singing their machine songs. It puts the world back together. I talk a lot about Blake and it never really rises above a certain level, you know, but this is where I'm coming from, and why I honestly do respect and love him so much and have, all along, in ways I didn't think this show could muster. That's so much hotter than the way he looks.
So the car alarm wind-up birds, and then the second thing is Jon Bon Jovi. A week I did not recap, which is good, because I hated both Blake and Jordin that week, and it wouldn't have been fun to write about, and of course because Couch Baron is simply irresistible. And what happened there, with Blake, informs everything after: he finally turned it up to eleven, that thing he's been doing all along, the thing I love about him, he finally went so intense and silly and OTT with it that the judges could actually hear it, for once, and it was so terribly unsubtle that they loved it. He wasn't doing anything he hasn't done every week, but he was doing it in such a carnivalesque, Rabelaisian fashion that it finally stood out from the din. (And boy, one of these days I'm going to tell you about Blake vis-Ã -vis Bakhtin, and you're gonna kill me. "One cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help...")
And so but this, the weeks that follow the day Blake Gave Love A Bad Name, represents an ongoing process of balance and equilibrium: the judges gave him his propers that week, and he realized he was going to have to become less subtle, but how to get there? To go this way and err on the side of caution and get burned, or to go too far in the other direction and risk accusations of repeating himself? There are people who can stomach the house style and people who cannot; who risk every week falling on their asses because they are compelled to stretch and tear and gnash their pearly whites, who open doors because they're there, who hate even the nebulous authority represented by the kind of idiom in which a Jordin or Melinda can excel. I don't have a lot of patience for the Aikens of the world, but I could watch Jordin do the exact same thing as them, for the rest of my life: it's a way to excel. I don't really hate Tony Bennett that much. You can go deeply into anything, an infinite distance, just as you can draw a box around the whole thing and redefine it infinitely. It's the same amount of Zen coming from the same location no matter what way you meditate, you know? Running or dancing dervish or singing or sitting zazen, staring at the wall. But this compulsion to resist, and to risk, by trying to change the concept of what a genre or show like this can do, to run with the bulls of possibility, to chance the accusation of not even actually grasping the point of the genre or show: that's something I rate very highly. That's so much hotter than the way he looks too.
So while I was hanging all my shit on Blake Lewis, he was giving the performance of a lifetime, and nobody liked it, and that's too bad. The two swaying graphs, the supply and demand, the new and the acceptable, met at a point that didn't exist until just now. That's wonderful, and we saw it happen, and maybe we didn't know what we were seeing: he created a new bar and met it. A wind-up bird, raising new alarms in the night; scaring and boring the shit out of us, by turns. Randy condemns the "beatboxing" some more; Simon gets nasty (but as usual, technically correct) and Paula accuses him of "jive talking," which is awesome. Being on one side of the line with Blake and Paula, against everybody else: that's the very name of terror. But she's always known about being plastic, hasn't she? So she's here too. She's also, as usual, the only one to get what Blake's actually trying to do, the enormity and grotesquerie of that, the reality behind Sligh's Hasslehoff jokes and po-mo pastiche. The fact that when you're on TV, you're simultaneously inside and outside it, starting with The Real World fifteen years ago and deforming the landscape forever. Creating a world in which even argyle sweaters can be evoked by gesture; in which medium and message sit across the room smoking cigarettes and not talking to anybody because nobody's cool or brave enough to engage them. In a surveillance culture everybody's a star: when TV and life mimic each other this closely you can lose track of where you end and where you begin. And maybe that's scary or inauthentic, but Team Life says: maybe that's just the future, just the birds becoming cars, becoming plastic, and it might as well start here, or anywhere else, because it's a personal crisis everybody hopefully reaches one day, and the kids are all right. When I talk about this stuff, I'm quite aware that it often comes across as angry: I'm angry as hell. But there's a whole other side of it we don't really talk about, and that's the joy of standing at the edge of the future, you and me, stepping forward into it every second of every day, with everybody beside us, stepping forward together into what happens . That's the road we have to walk and that's the ecstasy, these the wind-up birds that we're becoming, the alarms we raise, like harmonies to heaven: I loved Sanjaya for his anger, but for this too. This is better than rage. The kids are all right.