So last week we sandbagged Adam into the Bottom 3 with Matt and Kris, which didn't matter because he was in the Top 4 anyway. Then, more recently, the stage manager was attacked by that damned Hogwarts staircase, probably while it was in mid-swivel. I hope this "Debbie" wasn't the cute goofy one that did ... something last year. I don't really remember the thing that I am thinking about, beyond a certain pleasant feeling about stage managers. While Ryan talks about that, the staircase lights up slowly, sinister and waiting breathlessly for its victim, like the Mangler. It has tasted human blood and you know it's a slow ride into shit town after that happens.
So there wasn't a real rehearsal, due to the awakening of the hell, which is interesting because I've always gotten the impression that most of the show happens in the rehearsal, so what do we have here? A whole lotta weird, which I forgot it would be because this season has made me believe in all kinds of things, and I completely misplaced the irony or cynicism that would allow me to see the perfectly clear fact that inviting rock into this show is like letting your grandmother pick out your dates: counterintuitive and bonerkilling.
If you went to a used CD store in the spring of 1997 the bins were full of the score to Zeffirelli's Romeo & Juliet, because old people can't follow directions. And it used to make me so, so sad because each and every unopened copy of the score to Zeffirelli's Romeo & Juliet is the artifact of a dead dream. Sad for the ungrateful recipient who just wanted to listen to "Lovefool" a hundred million times, and even sadder for the very caring and not very observant person who fully went all the way to the store and bought something for somebody they loved, and it was the wrong one. That is a story with no winners, except the guy who knew putting the score to Zeffirelli's Romeo & Juliet on a Best Buy endcap was a very smart idea, and it's just the saddest thing in the world to me, and that's what this is like.
OMG remember CDs? Anyway, tonight we're doing something that can't help but be stupid, which is doing duets. Six songs total, and I'm guessing it's going to be Adam/Allison and Danny/Kris, both of which sound like awesome trainwrecks. Kara's rocking the Stefani bouffant pony I hate so much, Simon is resplendent in gray, and Paula looks like a normal person. Like a very pretty substitute teacher for once, and less like a FIT thesis. The Idols themselves are wearing "rock" clothes. This means that Kris is dressed like Kris plus a leather jacket, Allison looks like Allison with tons more makeup like a little girl playing dress-up, Danny is dressed like a youth minister who is totally out of his depth which is what he is, and Adam looks like a gay pirate from a future gay pirate spaceship. "Rock fans are in luck tonight," Ryan lies through his perfect teeth.
And their mentor is Slash. Does he even have a face? I've always wondered what he looks like. I don't know much about Slash. I guess he's known as the best guitar player of all time, at least that's the impression I've always had. Not bad for a man without a face. Ryan tries to sell us on the ugly lie of Velvet Revolver. I mean, technically it's a supergroup, in that I would believe absolutely anybody was in that band. Say a name. If you told me the lineup of Velvet Revolver was Antonio Salieri, Abraham Lincoln, Captain Beefheart and the blue lady from Fifth Element, I would buy it. But there's nothing "super" about that supergroup, and I refuse to acknowledge them.
Oh! He does have a face! A nice one. He seems like a nice guy. He admits to hating this show a way lot, but he likes a few of the people this year, so it's not like selling out exactly. He underlines this concept -- that he's not selling out, and is staying 2 legit 2 quit by making them rehearse in a real live rock club -- several times for us. But you know what, after eight years I'm tired of all the backtracking and eating shit when it comes to this show. American Idol is like Twitter: it's stupid, but it's happening.
Adam will be singing "Whole Lotta Love," which is perfectly awesome. Slash praises his effortless range and can't think of much to say beyond cautioning him to improvise less in the high register, you know, like he does, and stay down and low and rock star-like. Adam tells us this is his favorite week, which is not surprising. I'm kind of amazed that he'll be singing this song because it's the scariest sex song of all time, and Adam is the scariest sex person. He goes Adam Crazy all over it for a bit, and sings about the learning and the schooling and the loving and the whatever, and screams all the time because this is the week for it.
Even though he's totally doing a Zeppelinesque cover of a Tori Amos cover of a Zeppelin song, the ending is so totally amazing that everybody is overwhelmed and cries, and all the grownups are overjoyed because for once they're acquainted with what he's doing and it's not like straight-up weirdness for them to do with what they will. I don't know if it's crazy enough to be amazing, because he really just gave up on reinterpreting songs a while back. Mostly, I'm just happy in 2009 to see a gay man sing about giving you every inch of his love without apologizing for it in the slightest. It gives me Obama type feelings.
Kara gets sort of hyperoxygenated about how he's a ROCK GOD and sort of screams and spits for awhile about how awesome he is, and then says something I don't understand about how this is his true genre: "Classic rock from the 70s, glam rock from the 80s, with Nine Inch Nails." That is a not a genre, nor is it a thing that makes sense either separately or as a sum of parts, but whatever. She points out that this is his "lane" and nobody else is in it, because she just invented it. It's loopy enough that the audience just starts laughing about how weird Kara is now, which is sort of depressing.
Paula babbles on about how you can't improve on Led Zeppelin, but he kind of did, but you can't, but he's a "whole lotta perfect," and that's all she's got right now. Simon jokes that the performance was a little understated, for like the eighth time, and then totally goes, "Just kidding!" He says that it could have been a disaster, but is actually the best Adam performance, and nobody is going to top it. We will see that he is almost entirely correct, except for the shit that Danny pulls, which is so awesome I don't really care about anything else. Ryan and Adam giggle about him getting to sing Led Zeppelin, and how excited he was to hear about it, while Adam towers over him and smiles at everybody in more makeup than anybody you've ever seen in your life.
, Allison's singing "Cry Baby," because that's exactly how original Allison is. Ryan tries to talk to her, but they've both already kind of given up on that concept, so she talks about how she asked Adam for a stylist hookup and he took her to his "girl." The rest of the story is either so boring it's stupid, or so stupid it's boring, and then she talks about how she wasn't sure which song to choose: "Cry Baby" or "Somebody To Love," and Slash accidentally told her the wrong thing. "Cry Baby" is not a song, it's like this weird screaming poem without a melody, which sort of loses the whole point of being in a singing competition because you have nothing to add to it. I mean, Adam could probably do something with it, but not Allison. And WTF with the fake "rock" songs from billion years ago? I wasn't aware that it was Classic Rock week, and must now adjust my enthusiasm downward based on this new information.
I will say that she doesn't ape the voice exactly, it's still memorably Allison, like a poppier younger less destroyed version of the Joplin voice she was born with. And it does sound pretty nice, the guitar is really crunchy and sounds good up against her voice. Except the whole thing with songs by this lady is that she was pretty much a garbage truck full of trouble running herself over again and again, and suffered lots of self-destructive ways, and Allison is just a dumb little girl who sings in a furniture store, so her usual inauthentic prancing around is even more fake. But she sounds good, and the fact that she's not believable or appealing onstage, and has never understood a single word of any song she sings, is nothing new. Man, she would not have lasted one night. Janis would have picked barbecue out of her teeth with Allison's bones. Anyway, flawless vocal, uninspiring performance, and I can't speak to the rest because I think the song is useless.
Randy's right that the problem is that it's not melodic, it's just repetitive and screechy, and Kara suggests maybe "Piece Of My Heart" instead, which is like the most played-out song of all time, and then says that although Allison will always be dumb, she at least has a secret personality that Kara alone can see. Paula tells her to play Janis Joplin in the biopic, because that's relevant. Simon says once again that while it was good, and more confident, it was soundalike and also suffered from how she's not Adam. Simon says she should have chosen the Queen song, having misheard her choices in the package, and she snottily corrects him, because she was talking about Jefferson Airplane. He tells her she still should have picked another song, and she's like, "Really?" Then he pretty much tells her to fuck off, because her attitude is getting out of hand, and she gets really abrupt and Anoopy about fuck you granddad and whatever, and drops in a little snotty aside to Kara about how "Piece Of My Heart" is clichéd and Kara is stupid, and then goes back to yelling at Simon about how she was trying not to play it safe. Finally he's like, "Stop yelling at me and start begging the camera, because you're going the fuck home." That doesn't shut her up, because she's too dumb to see how totally schooled she just got. Wow, you're dumb. See you tomorrow when you go home. Simon starts to taunt her by complimenting her on talking back, and she yells some more in response, and Ryan kicks it to commercial so superfast it's incredibly.
So yeah, now there's Kris and Danny, as expected, singing "Renegade" by Styx. That's the "Oh mama I've been nah-nah and the nah-nah by the long arm of the law" song. I can't think of a more appropriate pair of people to sing this song than Kris Allen and Danny Gokey, can you? They're so edgy and rebellious, you can totally believe that they have been nah-nah by the long arm of the law. Perhaps they are on the run as we speak, maybe Kris went buckwild in a Pottery Barn or something.
In the beginning, Danny is very uncomfortable, but once the song kicks in and he returns to his comfort zone -- upstaging and trying desperately to outsing Kris -- he gets a lot better. And while Kris doesn't have the issue of being a douchebag, he also doesn't really have the voice for a song like this, so it works out to the same thing. Gosh. The background, this is precious, is douchebag tribal tattoos made of fire. That's so much more eloquent than anything I could possibly write.
Then the judges talk. Why? This is dumb. Simon agrees that it's dumb, and since he has to say something he tells the ugly truth, which is that Danny was really good in that duet and Kris was pretty forgettable. Kris takes this badly, but luckily we don't have to look at that because hey! It's the DANNY GOKEY SHOW! He smarms around all over the place and explains pointless things to Ryan Seacrest like Ryan is the lunch lady and Danny's the loneliest kid on the planet, then at some point realizes that he's being obnoxious, and awkwardly tries to hug Kris, whose flesh pretty much crawls at this.
The only thing more painful than watching Danny on the Danny Gokey Show is watching his stupid ass explore the idea that it's not the Danny Gokey Show. These brief existential crises where he pulls his head out of his own rectum like Punxsutawney Phil for a sec, sees other people, and dives back in for six more weeks of the Danny Gokey Show.
Immediately after this festival of awkwardness, Kris must sing his actual song. Ryan commiserates with him about the hideous betrayal of Simon picking Danny over him, and they talk about how Kris wanted originally to sing "Revolution," because obviously it's going to be the Beatles for him, and then changed his mind to the "cool groove" of "Come Together." Slash enjoys the ways in which Kris was made nervous by the use of an amp, and meanwhile here's Kris on Slash: "I don't even know how to feel about that... I almost wanted to pee in my pants." Don't speak, honey. Shut that mouth. Slash hopes that he shows some energy, or something at all, onstage. I just hope he takes his clothes off. That would work. We don't care about energy, we care about the fact that he's cute as a button. Come on. He's like Jason Castro, but of age. And not mentally impaired.
I don't know, Kris seems to have suffered a major lack of confidence tonight. This is not his thing, right, but he does a sweet job with it and smiles through it. Watching his mouth make those nonsense words is really distracting, like, I keep rewinding it to have an opinion about it and I can't. He's singing the song, sounds good, very professional, the song goes lots of places, he does a bunch of subtle things you probably won't notice, which is how he operates. For once it helps that he doesn't care what the words mean, because they don't, so he can just sound awesome and play his guitar, which is all he really wants to do, and he's very good at that. He's got six-toed eyeballs, he's got Sri Lankan pesos, he's got Bernie Madoff's sense of regret and three-bean quinoa salad down to his knees. What do you do with that, honestly.
Now, it's Danny: he sounds pretty good at the beginning. And props to him for resisting the urge to grin into the camera, yes, because he's singing "Dream On," which is not a song I really understand but I know it's not a smiling song. But at the end of the second line, his voice sort of swoops up in a weird way, and you start to realize this is going to be awesomely fucked up. If he takes it all the way, it's going to be amazing. Then into the chorus, where he sounds really good still -- if a little bug-eyed and desperate -- and he hits that tone we almost never hear from him, that really rough angry voice, which I love. And I guess that means that he is taking the judges' comments somewhat seriously, which is good. And then even the "dream on" part is pretty good, weird pronunciations and some doo-doo-doos that don't really work at all, and the strobe lights coming on, and it looks like he will survive Rock Week. But then! THEN!
Danny totally starts screaming in this primal, hilarious, depressing way, and it becomes unending, and you can tell he honestly thinks this is his MOMENT and they are going to say all kinds of "didn't know you had it in you" stuff to him, and he drinks in this imaginary praise and it lends his shitty screaming even more POWER. He is incandescent! Afterwards he runs around fronting at the band and pointing at himself and yipping, so they know who's in charge I guess, and oh, Lord what a fine, fine moment. What an awesome nightmare that was!
Kara's like, "Thanks for listening to us when we told you to bring the edge and swagger. Having said that, we are totally embarrassed for you. And by 'we' I mean America. Even Jesus is really mortified right now, because you took it waaaay too far into a waaaay stupid place, and you ended up looking retarded. BUT. We appreciate risk, and taking chances, because that's what rock and roll is all about." Which is a lie. Rock and roll is about being awesome, which that was not.
Paula sympathizes with him about how hard this genre must have been for him, but gives him A+++ for effort. Which, just no. That wasn't awful because it was rock, that was awful because it was Danny being desperate once again, and not getting 90% of "it" in the largest sense. Simon says the ending was like a horror movie. Which it was, and we are the victim. Then he says the worst thing, which is that he knows exactly what Danny tried, and failed, to do: "With Adam it worked, with you it didn't." But, obviously he's going to be safe. Danny just stares at them like a total nozzle, and then gets really defensive about how he'll have to watch it himself before he believes them about how bad it was. "Doubt it, though." He tosses some snotty notes in the direction of how he was trying to move out of his safety zone, which is just the weakest thing for them to say at this point, but also untrue. You moved out of your -- and our -- safety zone... And into a pale, embarrassing version of Adam's. How is that awesome? He is just such a chumguzzling bottom-feeder that I can't even care about his awesome voice anymore. What a dick move, I'm sorry.
After that I simply cannot believe there's more. That had to be the endpiece, right? No. Allison and Adam have to come out and sing "Slow Ride," the stupidest song of all time, and Allison's still looking ridiculous, and Adam's penis is pretty much wearing the rest of Adam as an afterthought, and they sing the whole song and it's neither comfortable or interesting, but it's like: This is what American Idol does to rock. Allison is much more comfortable with Adam onstage, and she dances around really adorably. It's maybe the most appealing she's ever been onstage. But this is the most boring song of the entire universe. It's just five words over and over and over and over. Immediately after, they give each other a huge hug, rendering the judges powerless because they can't issue any comparisons at that point. If Danny had jumped into Kris's arms at the end of their song, Kris would have had a much less grumpy night. Think about it.
Kara says that they pushed each other to do better, which is true mostly, and Paula calls them "the perfect marriage," unnecessarily bringing up her imaginary relationship with Simon, and the whole Judgery keeps yelling about how they need to do a rock duet on their album or whatever. Paula tosses in this weird Catskills-inflected "It's a beautiful thing!" that cracked me up, and Simon tries to talk but some tacky Allison people start yelling a chant of some sort. He praises this duet over the other one, and Adam is God some more, and then he says a very smart thing, which is that Allison might not go home tomorrow, thanks to Adam. We'll see if the goodwill carries that far, but there's some merit to it. Adam says she's like his little sister, and Ryan goes, "So cute!" Which is, in itself, so cute.
So: Adam's "Whole Lotta Love" was pretty much sexy, which is funny because it's so unsubtle and unsexy usually, as songs about fucking tend to be. Then, speaking of unsubtle, Allison did a soundalike cover of Janis Joplin, without the roadhouse gangbangs to back it up, and basically excelled at not being Kris or Danny. Kris sure is pretty, which blinds you to a lot of the awesome details about what he does, which was very elaborately constructed and well-rehearsed this week, but suffered from Gokey proximity and inability to rock out. And then, in the recapperator, Danny hits those hideous notes once again. Awesome. Sabotage!
Tomorrow, we got a triple-threat of things I didn't ever need to see: DAUGHTRY, No Doubt, and Paula's fifth attempt at a comeback. See you there. Meantime, check out The Dodos, the fun new Patrick Wolf album, the reliable Helio Sequence, Shiny Toy Guns, Plushgun, and CJ Milli's awesome Lady Gaga/Sigur Rós mashup.