Randy lets her down right off the bat, saying it was an "interesting" song choice, but it was "just okay" and not that great. Lisa makes a face, because she honestly thought that performance was going to get her back into the thick of the competition. This sucks to watch. ["Interesting take on it. I'm not saying you're wrong by any means, but I felt like she knew the song got away from her." -- Sars] Off camera and off mic, you can hear Lisa's surprised "Randy!" Paula's encouraging ("Tell 'im, baby!"), but Randy, as ever, has to "keep it real." He is nothing if not the keeper of the real. Before we even get to Paula, Lisa knows how the rest of it is going to go, and she gets this awesome "Okay. Get this over with" look on her face. Paula starts with a compliment, saying we all know Lisa can "sing [her] butt off," but if you choose a song as popular and as Idol-connected as "Because of You," you need to "make it completely different, so that there's no comparison whatsoever." I get what Paula is saying, which is that when you set yourself up directly against Kelly you're almost always going to lose, so don't set yourself up like that in the first place. But Simon is also correct when he says, "The song is the song." You can't get around that. The problem was, according to Simon, that the song was too big for her voice. True. Heh, Simon says "true" as I type that. He goes on to say that there were portions of that performance that were positively "painful." Lisa makes yet another crazy face at that, and in the audience, you can see her mother say something like, "You didn't have to say that to her." Something close to that. That's a nice mom reaction. Just because you're protective doesn't mean you get to be an asshole, and Lisa's mom was appropriately restrained. The crowd turns on Simon, as they always do, and he has to remind them -- and this is a decent point -- that in the studio with the crazy energy and everybody in full support mode, of course it sounded great. But if Lisa watches it back, she'll see what he's talking about. Lisa is crushed, you guys. Ryan trots out on stage in the mood to play hero, so he's immediately all the way up Simon's ass about the "painful" thing. Simon tells him for the eleventeenth time that it's easy for Ryan to be the nice guy when he's not asked to judge anything. Ryan schoolyards that "two against one" the judges ruled it "not painful." Simon says the other judges agree with him that it was a bad performance (so nyah!). Then everything devolves into talking past each other and chaos. Simon is shouting that everyone agrees with him. Randy and Paula just keep repeating "not painful" over and over like they're Katie Holmes in a birthing room. Ryan won't stop wagging his finger in Simon's general direction. Lost in this cavalcade of idiots is poor Lisa, who is standing to Ryan wishing she could just get off the stage already. This is so ugly. This is what Ryan does all the time, though. He comes riding in on his friggin' white horse and tries to make Simon look bad, and the resulting argument always makes the contestant feel like an even bigger asshole.
“ They kind of look like they're talking shit about Kellie, which is awesome. How many different shades of livid do you think Debbie Gibson must be watching this show? 'Yeah, I was also in a cutthroat competition where teenagers whored themselves out to try and get America to love them the best. We called it 1987.' ”
Back from the break, Ryan is still trying to win points as the mayor of Niceburgh by shaking hands with yet another cute grade schooler. We get it, Ryan. You're a huggy teddy bear. He throws us to Kellie's video package. Kellie looks weird this week. Not like herself. Her hair isn't doing the full-on Heather Cox volume like during Stevie Wonder week, but it's definitely bouncier. It almost looks like the show is trying to make her look wholesome, which is ridiculous given the song she's chosen to sing. That song is "Suds in a Bucket" by Sara Evans. I think I might know what Sara Evans looks like if you showed me a picture of her, but I won't swear to it. "Suds in a Bucket" is one of those country songs that I like in theory but feel that I've really gotten all I'm going to get out of it by hearing the title. Sort of like "Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under?" I kind of already get it. In an overly scripted bit, Kellie explains that the song is "your typical fairytale story, except with a little twist. Instead of your Prince Charming coming in on a white stallion, he comes in a pickup truck. And instead of moving into a castle, you go to Vegas and you get hitched." Kellie finds this both scandalous and hilarious. Onstage, she looks so peculiar. I can't seem to put my finger on what's different. Well, the mom hair, I suppose. But her entire face looks different, like this isn't Kellie at all but a particularly skillful synthetic replica. I don't know. The song is exactly what you'd expect from the title: goofy and bouncy enough to make me think I'd enjoy the original version at least once. Kellie, like Ace, is not so much a singer as she is a performer, and in that respect she's doing okay. We expect her to sound like one degree of ass or another, so when she scrapes down by the bottom of her range, can we really be that outraged? And in fact, by the end of the song, she's not doing too badly.
Randy's laughing his ass off, because he already knows he's going to hate all the songs tonight. He doesn't think the song was "exciting enough" for Kellie's voice. Paula agrees that Kellie is "too good" for the song. If I were in the mood to look for shenanigans, I'd suggest that the judges were looking to knock Kellie down a peg or two but weren't yet willing to give up the ghost on how inferior a singer she is relative to the rest of the competition. So they went the "it's not you, it's the song" route. Personally, I thought it was the second best performance she's given, after "I'm the Only One." Simon gets annoyed with the hardcore country vibe, saying out of the "thousands and thousands" of songs she had to choose from, she had to pick the one with the most corn-pone title. Well, yeah. What the hell kind of image did you think she was cultivating all these weeks? I know Simon's been more partial to the empty-headed sex kitten routine, but if he's been paying attention, he'd know that bare feet hanging out the window of a pickup truck are what Kellie's been building up to since January. Kellie thinks the song is "cute." Simon calls it a gimmicky rodeo song. They're both right, actually. Then Kellie fakely apologizes, revealing every one of her layers at once. Randy can't take this bout of fake meanness, so he calls Ryan in from the wings like he's been doing all season. Ryan, awesomely, says, "I can't save you like this every time, Jackson." I wonder if Randy's been doing this everywhere. Like they're in hair and makeup and he and Simon are having a tiff over global warming or whether that Britney birthing statue represents a true pro-life political statement or is just an attention grabber, and Randy has to call Ryan in because Simon's getting too heated. And Ryan's all, "Not now! I'm on the phone with someone!" In an attempt to cool down from this whiz-bang trip through current events, I should mention that Debbie Gibson and Kristy Swanson are in the audience. They kind of look like they're talking shit about Kellie, which is awesome. How many different shades of livid do you think Debbie Gibson must be watching this show? "Yeah, I was also in a cutthroat competition where teenagers whored themselves out to try and get America to love them the best. We called it 1987."
“ What could possibly make this performance worse? How about when you hit the lyric that says, 'One without a permanent scar,' you pull back your already sparsely buttoned collar to reveal a big honking scar of your own? I could think of 95 reasons why that's disgusting and nail them to the door of 19 Entertainment. ”
Ace and his disturbingly rosy cheeks show up in video clip form to tell us something about a "rock edge." I wasn't exactly paying attention, because this is when the chyron tells me that he'll be singing "Drops of Jupiter" by Train, and I'm laughing way too loudly to hear anything. That's fucking awesome. For those who may not remember them, Train is an awful band. Like if Matchbox 20 was older and more pretentious. ["And if the lead singer went from being hot to looking like the creepy janitor at a haunted middle school in Prague." -- Jacob] They had two songs, one that was pretty catchy and I'll still listen to it if I hear it today ("Meet Virginia"), and one that was the living embodiment of wretchedness that would not leave any of us alone for the entirety of 2001. That song was called "Drops of Jupiter." And Ace will be singing it tonight and asking us to vote for him in return. Best of luck with that, dude. Especially since your hair looks like it's been drenched in canola oil. Wow, that looks awful. And of course, the first thing Ace does is call our attention to it, stroking his greasy locks to match the "drops of Jupiter in her hair" lyric (which: gross, if you think of it in anything close to mythological terms). His stupid eyebrows are still in the "love me?" position, and his voice is whiny as ever. So: sing a shitty song badly and look like an oil slick while doing so? Well planned. What could possibly make this performance worse? How about when you hit the lyric that says, "One without a permanent scar," you pull back your already sparsely buttoned collar to reveal a big honking scar of your own? I could think of 95 reasons why that's disgusting and nail them to the door of 19 Entertainment. For one: did he just get that tattooed on? Where's it been all season? For another: scars around the collar and neck area are so last season. Ask Jessie O'Donahue how far the trachea shit got her this year. For another, pulling back your shirt collar like you're trying to be sexy doubles back on you at twice the velocity when you're revealing a hideous scar. That's like ripping open your shirt to reveal your incredibly sexy triple nipple. Eight different kinds of grotesque, right there.
"Once again," says Randy, "completely the wrong song for you, and you didn't sing it well." Exactly. It's funny, because Randy is more one-note than he usually is this week, and that always bugs me, but he's exactly right. Ace gets stone faced, because Train is one of his favorite bands. Okay? Paula's not going to go as far as Randy (translation: Break out the sugar! It's coatin' time!). She thinks it was "refreshing" after the last two performances (translation: You're a boy!). She hates the song choice as well, though she still thinks he did a good job. She inquires about the scar. Is it real? Oh, yes. Ace shows it to us again, defiantly declaring, "I've got a real scar on my chest." Now he's a real boy! He seriously says it with this "Call me a faggot now!" tone, because while facial hair may elude him, his scarred-up body is proof that he's bad-ass. Paula asks him to one day explain to her how he got that. Simon immediately jumps in with the "Now now, Paula!" stuff, because she's a cougar on the prowl and none of us should forget it. I love how everyone -- audience, Ace, Randy, the Lord -- is all in on the same joke here. "Ha ha! You fucked Corey Clark!" Paula's even like, "Who, me?" It's funny, if played. After the taking of Will Makar, predatory innuendo just doesn't have the same spark. Simon gives a bit of a nod to the song choice thing, but mostly he just thought it was a crap vocal. Very karaoke. The crowd wants his head on a platter for it, but come on. That was awful. Ace tells Ryan that he "loves" the song, and he "feels" the song. You can't have an emotional connection to "Drops of Jupiter." I don't care how many actual permanent scars you have on your body. Even secret cutters would rather listen to Fiona Apple, you know? Ryan asks about the scar, on behalf of Paula. Ace says he was playing basketball and "landed on a T-bar." I'm pretty sure he said "T-bar." No idea. Is it part of the hoop apparatus? I'm actually not ignorant of sports, but last time I checked with basketball there was a ball and a court and a hoop. And sometimes a chair, but that's only for slam dunk contests and Bobby Knight. I'm still not ruling out Ace with a butcher knife in the conservatory last week when he figured he needed a gimmick to go with the song.