Previously on Platinum Hit was a really long time ago. Sonyae was loved to life, Jes wrote a bad song and made awful Melissa act even worse than usual. The show moved to Friday, I guess because Bravo wanted to Watch What Happens if the show lost even more viewers and is now being watched by a negative number of people.
Or a number of negative people, I guess. Such as Nick, who likes to sleep in a porkpie hat and necktie just in case anybody needs him to be a jerkoff at a moment's notice. Flash that doucherag Batsign up in the sky, here comes Nick skankin' towards you.
Scotty's just happy Melissa is gone, because she was both a drag and a monster -- I'm paraphrasing -- but now there's got to be something new for them to stress out about and he's excited to find out what it is, because Scotty likes to dwell sometimes.
Johnny still has his own apartment and still thinks that's interesting. He's so bizarre inside and so disturbingly About Johnny that probably he thinks that's a valid storyline. A boy and his empty apartment, and all the things he does and doesn't do in there. Johnny will marry a rollercoaster, like that one lady.
Jackie is wearing some vaguely stupid furred hat and being just a titch too cute for the morning, which is kind of her deal. Does dressing like a South Park mean she's going to be eliminated? And if so, does it mean she's coming back week?
VENTURA/HOOKING
There's no Jewel, just Kara, which causes everybody to shit because yeah, they're both totally scary, but without Jewel balancing her out, it's like you really don't know which way Kara's going to go. The vibe is kind of like a substitute teacher? But more like if your dad's girlfriend resented taking you for the afternoon, and just wanted to go to Ventura Beach and smoke cigarettes and not talk to you. So that's what she does. Kara takes the kids to the Promenade to write songs about risking and riskiness, and then they will busk their hooks on the Promenade, and then they will count their money up, and then I guess they will go buy drugs.
Brian writes: About tits.
Jackie: Wears her hat and bitches about how loud Brian is, about the tits.
Awesomely, Sonyae -- who doesn't play an instrument and yet is still going to win this mother -- realizes that if she just stands on the corner and sings without an instrument, she won't look as dorky as the other ones writing their hooks: She will look full-on bonkers.
Luckily Sonyae is already completely bonkers, so she doesn't really care that much and just goes for it, but it's nice to see her given pause just this one time.
Jackie plays her hook, still wearing the dumb hat, and the hook is about how one time she told her boyfriend she loved him first, which I guess is a risk. (If you were to do something like that, which you should not.) At least at this point she giggles with some little girls and makes fun of her own hat, which makes up for it. At the end of the song, the clever Jackie twist is that she tells the crowd she loves us and they have to say it back -- which Scotty realizes is a great way to squeeze them for more money.
Scotty's hook sounds like a Scott song -- only, you know, riskier -- and Kara pulls out her moleskine and asks a rando if he would like to hear the Scotty song on the radio and the guy's like, "I can imagine it being played on the radio," but what he doesn't know is that Scotty is already a Pandora radio, set to Beyoncé singing Ryan Tedder songs and then branching out from there. I don't know what his risk was, maybe too much Voguing.
Jes, while pre-hooking, told us all about how she might actually do something this week, but even she didn't seem that convinced. In the performance we see she has gone the full Feist, with some unappealing glasses to go with her unappealing Regina Spektor song about escaping while the roof is caving in. I guess the risk here has to do with living in a house with a structurally unsound roof. Or the importance of an exit plan.
Sonyae scares the piss out of all the bystanding innocents with her yelling song. I guess the risk is people finding out she is bonkers. She stares this risk fiercely in the face; she does not back down from it.
Johnny's hook is titled "Bettin' My Life On You," so I guess the point is that Johnny does not mind avoiding risks of all kinds. The risk is that, he's betting his life on nobody noticing he's merely a very good copy of a human being without a human emotion inside it, and then call a bladerunner on him, so he shows you all the fake emotions right up front, like, hands dripping with jewels, only instead of jewels it's total 100% heterosexual love, and thereby all risks are neutralized.
Nick reminisces, of course, about how he left home at five years of age to be this incredibly talented, unduly sullen child-busker and has been annoying everybody ever since, and then sings like he's got a dick in him. The song is called "Risky Business" and the theme is "fake angry." I think the risk is somebody sees past his BS into the abyss of his own self-loathing and feel terrible for him, being so young and so clichéd at the same time. Risky business indeed!
Jackie hugs a lady and works the crowd, everybody avoids Nick because obviously you can tell, everybody on the entire boardwalk wants to fuck Johnny, even the randoms new to this scene are somehow glad that Melissa is gone, Brian still loves tits and stalking, Jes can barely remember her own name so how are they supposed to, Sonyae is ten pounds of crazy in a five-pound bra, and it's like: Did we really have to go to Ventura Beach to know this stuff? Check in with America? Can America possibly tell us what our own eyeholes and earholes are telling us? Did we really have to take this Jewel-less risk? When it's just as likely that Kara will leave them there to find their way back?
TOP HOOKERS
14% of the money -- the third-place person -- is Jes! That's exciting. Kara tells her that it was not hooky and it was meandering, but that essentially a cute girl acting desperate is always good for about 14% of the take. 27% went to Johnny, because he is sentimental and user-friendly in his emotional settings and because he is adorable and because the lowest common denominator is his deal. But 43% of all the money! Went to Jackie! Because she is the best performer on the show by one hundred, but not the best songwriter, so it sucks how this is a show about the second thing.
I wonder honestly if Jackie thought to herself, well, this happens every week. Every week I am the best hooker, and every week the songwriting thing gets me so weird I act coked up and it all dissolves into a congealing mess. I wonder if she thought about that, don't you? Like maybe changing it up or doing things differently this week. And if so, then did she fold that idea up and put it back in the drawer, and just go back to her traditional stratagem of getting ADD and running around the room in a cape until she passes out.
Jackie chooses Scotty for her team, and Johnny it's so embarrassing I don't even want to talk about it. Brian, he chooses Brian. Jes looks at Nick and looks at Sonyae and thinks about how Nick is the worst human, but that Sonyae has immunity so your choices are either to go home or actually try. Scotty tells Jackie to take Sonyae because she's the best, and Nick loves it because he hates women and now Jackie has two on her team so she'll probably be leaving.
This is when things get weird. They have to write the full song based on one of six genres that they didn't do before. So then Sonyae, Jackie and Scotty choose country -- with which Scotty's already shown skill, if you'll remember -- and Brian and Johnny laugh at her for thinking black people can sing other kinds of music than R&B. (Even Jackie wonders, privately, if maybe she should have stuck to R&B.)
Things become uncomfortably post-racial.
Then, after laughing at Jackie for this, Brian and Johnny choose Reggae as their genre. No connection is made. None. And the reason is that they're white and they don't have to.
Then Nick and Jes choose Pop for their song, because Nick sucks butts and Jes has no accountability for herself whatsoever.
WRITING
Scotty punches Jackie in the nose immediately, because they are flailing. Jes sings her boring roof song to Nick some more, and admits that it's not "bubble gum," because it's about crawling around on your knees and the importance of renter's insurance.
Nick: "Pop stands for 'popular.' Jes stands for 'boring.' Nick stands for 'penis.'"
Of course, it takes them three seconds to turn her hook into a Sum 41 song. Duh.
Johnny and Brian sing a complete Jack Johnson song or like a Train song or like that song about not wanting to be anything other than what you've been trying to be lately. They seem amazed at how easily this happens, like, the Muses are really smiling on them today.
Brian: "Johnny, like, tell me a story about risking and what about the risks. The obvious title of the song doesn't give me a feel for what is clearly intended to be the most boring song of all time and we've already finished it. I need to go more and harder and go deeper. Deeper into your manhood."
Johnny: "I don't want to answer that question or any question or talk about this. If you look behind the curtain of my gross platitudes you will see that I am lost in the wilderness of authenticity and have no real working concept of how to be."
Brian: "Talk about your feelings and the narrative of your feelings and we can trade dating advice and hug each other and brush each other's hair and hold hands and tell stories about boobies."
Johnny: "I am so uncomfortable right now."
Brian: "But feelings!"
Johnny: "I wish you would stop trying to dig underneath my thin veneer of a personality."
Brian: "Yeah, well, I wish I knew what it was like to have a dad."
Scotty and Jackie and Sonyae discuss about saying it back and when you are waiting to hear it back. Sonyae says, this is actually what she says, "We don't want to do like pop metaphory, we want to just do complete Story Mind." They fight about whatever that is, for a long while. Jackie immediately jumps into her overworking-every-concept thing and then tells them to stop being so black, basically, even though they're not being particularly black at this time. It is once again uncomfortably post-racial in the atmosphere.
Sonyae: "Much as in the half of this show's total episodes, I am quite familiar with the genre in which we are writing. Country. I am a country fan. I like everything, but for right now, Country is what I am all about."
And she provides us with a nutty little example of singing a country song, where the person is sitting on their front porch and cooking bacon and eggs and then tries to picture the logistics of that simultaneity. But you know, and I know, that she's probably got like an entire Wikipedia crammed in her head and actually she does know all about Country because Sonyae -- if you have not yet figured it out -- is some kind of savant. Some kind of Westchester teen mutant developed entirely to win this show.
My favorite song by her in real life makes zero sense, although she does talk about the timely topic of her areolas, in addition to the timely topic of retweeting things. And my second-favorite song includes the repeated refrain, Get me pregnant get me pregnant.
The second song is about a girl who would like to be pregnant.
I am still not sure about the first song, but I can confirm that it involves social media in some way, and also nipples.
DAY
Jackie: "You know how I get in over my head and spin my wheels like Fred Flintstone for a while because I get so nervous and can't concentrate and millions of brilliant ideas come shooting out of me but nothing really sticks? I'm going to be doing that."
Scotty: "You know how I'm put upon and used to the clutch play?"
Sonyae: "You know how I am straight up crazy?"
Jes: "You know how I have still haven't really done much as far as this game show?"
Nick: "You know how I am the dream collaborator and we'll probably win this?"
My Ridiculous: "Like what if there was an old man and then he was you, but older?"
Johnny: "What."
Brian: "Do you get it, and he has a pair of dice in his hands? And then he throws them in the air so high?"
Johnny: "What is going on right now? What are you even talking about?"
Brian: "Chill, buddy. Transform your energy."
Johnny: "Speaking of risk, why don't you go write a bridge somewhere else and get out of my boxer briefs? Ocupados, usted."
Jackie: (Sings some pretty song.)
Scotty: (Improves it so much that it's no longer Country; starts doing the track which is where he really shines; ignores them completely.)
Jackie & Sonyae: (Cannot handle that Scotty is ignoring them.)
Jes: "Like what kind of story do you want to tell?"
Nick: "No one cares about me... But me."
The only story he will ever tell.
Their poppy cutesy pie things meld together in an annoying way, and they'll be fine.
Jackie: "Is the track hot? Is the guitar part cool? Can we see what the song even sounds like?"
Scotty plays the track and piano and it sounds really pretty, actually. Nice strings. Scotty points out to us that he was the one that suggested Country, because he's good at it. It sounds good.
If you asked me to write a song about Risk, I would write it about taking over countries. There aren't enough songs about taking over countries. "Too much diplomacy/ Not enough shit blowing up/ Your Ambassador's time on Earth is limited/ You're the one who didn't want to play Cranium."
Team Reggae... I don't know. Johnny can do no wrong. It sounds dumb, but his songs always sound dumb and it's fine because dumb works on this show. Dumb works more often on this show than bonkers does, which makes sense if you think about music at all.
Jes: "For the sixth episode in a row, I have figured out that Nick is amazing to write with."
Nick: "These people are only talented when they are working with me. Narcissism is a coping strategy I developed ever since I horrified all the people around me as a child and they left me on a mountaintop."
Sonyae: "Is my manner of dress appropriate for the crazy-person effect I wish to create? Check."
PERFORMANCE & JUDGING
Kara's there, darling Keith's there, Jewel and the girls are there, and then they bring in Bonnie McKee, who is amazing, who is absolutely the only worthwhile thing about Katy Perry.
Jes/Nick: "Save Yourself." Jes sings it awkwardly because she's not behind the keyboard. Jewel is bored immediately, and Kara hates women even more when they blastin' that 'toe. It sounds like every song written for a Disney movie -- except for the main hook, which is exactly "Barracuda," a song older than I am -- but like, you can imagine Selena Gomez starting college, or her first day of work at a PR agency, and this is the song that is playing.
Johnny/Brian: "Betting My Life On Jah." Just because it's reggae doesn't mean you do the accent. It's just racist. Brian sings the part about the old man and the dice; only Sonyae understands that part of the song. We meet Virginia, we listen to Mr. Mister on the radio, drops of Jupiter in your ears, stealing bread from the mouth of decadence, etc.
Scotty/Jackie/Sonyae: "Say It Back." Scotty tells Jackie to do the same thing with the voice, by singing all country, and she does a good job with that. It's more nasal than her usual beautiful voice, but it's all there. It's the best song, lovely harmonies, and if there's one thing I know about this show it's that the fact I like the song means they're going to fail. Jackie is going home. Somehow, they are going to get her.
Nick: "[Bitching. Bitching anyway, bitching all day long, bitching and making that face. That dreadful, nasty, childish little bitchy bitch face.]"
BACKSTAGE
Scotty: "I wonder who won first place? Just kidding, it was us."
Nick: "I don't know! Could be anybody. Except Jackie, because I hate her irrationally..."
Everybody: "What a strangely valid, not-horrific thing to say."
Nick: "...Because the judges are stupid and this show is stupid and farts and hatred."
Everybody: "There it is."
Brian: "You're in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down and you see a tortoise. It's crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?"
Johnny: "..."
Sonyae: "..."
Nick: "Because turtles suck. They are not punk rock. They're just turtles. Fuck that turtle. I hate that turtle more than I hate Jackie. Unless Jackie hates the turtle, and then it is my friend. Unshakeable ideology is the privilege of the young and the damaged. It's okay to only have one dimension if that dimension is 100% ass horrible."
JUDGING
Jewel: "Everybody but Jes and Nick, come to the stage."
Jes: "Goddammit. Or not, depending on whatever Jewel decides are the rules this week."
Johnny: "I love writing with Brian. I love having an apartment to myself where he can't come, though, too."
Brian: "Johnny and I have so much in common, such as we both want to get married immediately to the girl we date. Or rollercoaster."
Jes: "That's so silly! (I hope he means it.)"
Johnny: "Yes, we are really zeroing in on masculinity. As a team. I think getting married at whatever baby age I am is a totally valid way to prove my point, whatever it is."
Sonyae: "I didn't worry about my immunity this week, I wanted to prove I didn't care and go even harder and go even bonkerser."
Jackie: "Scotty wanted Country, so did I, so we picked it."
Judges: (All they can think is Don't think about elephants about how Scotty and Sonyae are totally black; they all know Kara's the only one who will actually say it.)
Scotty: "I like the idea of 'Say It Back' because it's about saying it back."
Jewel: "Good point. But Johnny won this week again with that annoying song."
This is how you end up with Johnny. This kind of thing happening over and over.
Kara: (Reads the lyrics aloud; always weird to watch.)
Keith: (Is adorable; loves this song more than any other song so far.)
Bonnie: "You remind me of Jason Mraz. He's so relevant and cool. That's my paradigm."
Johnny, fucking verbatim: "It was utter dominaish. I am totes mos deftones stoked. [Grunts as though fucking an abstract concept]. Yes! Yes, bitch*!"
Johnny is a virgin. We know that now.
TOTES ELIMINAISH
*(The grossest part here being how "bitch" is like, so much quieter than the rest of his sex grunting, as though he was being naughty but then maybe that word is suddenly too naughty or he shouldn't say it on TV. Like it's a dirty word, or like people will think that when he has his Aspergers sex with abstract comments, he likes it rough. But also polite.)
Johnny: (Eerily proving the powers of my intuition for six episodes running.)
Jewel: "Much like Sonyae, I have decided I am really into country music. Just putting that out there, in case my nothing-selling album passed you by. Jes, what was the deal with your dumb boring song?"
Jes: "It was about people being mean to Nick, basically. I guess that happens a lot."
Jewel: "Well. Stay tuned."
Jewel: "You believe yourselves to have written a pop song?"
Jes & Nick: "We do."
Jewel: "You believe wrongly. Fools. Again I lead you into self-incrimination! Hoisted by your own word-petards!"
Nick, nasty-faced: "How so?"
Kara: "Oh you fancy, huh?"
Jewel: "I know you did not just fucking contradict me, maggot."
Nick: "Let's ask Bonnie, jerks!"
Bonnie: "It was pleasant but boring and I found myself wishing it would end, and also your lyrics are completely stupid and overcomplicated both at the same time."
Nick: "That's because you're dumb and girls are dumb and nobody likes you."
Kara: "Also, you changed your hook from being the chorus to being the pre-chorus?"
Pre-Chorus: A word I did not make up.
Nick: "Yeah, because I am a genius."
Kara: "Or a dumb-ass."
Wonderful Keith: "I wish you were more talented, Nick. And more creative. And, you know, not horrible."
Nick: "I wish you were eaten alive by snakes, jerkface!"
Beautiful Keith: "I think you are all talk, maybe."
Nick, who is all talk: (Forging ahead into a new territory of hideously shitty faces. Hates it most of all when people accuse him of true stuff.)
Magnificent Jewel & Keith: "Sonyae and Jackie and Scotty, your song made us barf."
Nick's Frown: (Instantly upside down. Totes mos deftones stoked.)
Jewel: "Scotty and Jackie, you're in trouble deep. Sonyae, be grateful. Jes and Nick, be even more grateful because your song sucked slightly less. Slightly."
Kara, unwisely: "They would throw you out of Nashville for lyrics like this. Also, how dare you have two black people on your team and choose Country?"
Scotty: (Has learned by now; stays quiet.)
Jewel: "Um, moving away from that bullshit landmine, I just want to say that it wasn't even Country. Except for Jackie's stupid fake accent."
Jackie: "It wasn't like a hoedown, I just... Twanged it."
Jewel & Kara: "You overtwanged."
Jackie: (Tosses Scotty under the bus, but he agrees that he was more interested in the track than the lyrics.)
Kara & Jewel: (So much with the lyrics.)
Jackie: "Yeah. I told them some of the lyrics were too black."
White Judges, nodding: "Way too black."
I hate this! I feel like I am freaking out. Am I crazy? This is bad, right? Weird?
So they fight about how helped the most, and Jackie and Scotty fight over who contributed the most to the loser song, and then they go meta and fight about that, and then I think they fight about that. About the fight about the fight about the song. I confess that I got lost on this part -- because it was Inception of bitching, but also because of my white privilege making me feel unbelievably uncomfortable -- but I guess I've captured the gist.
BACKSTAGE
Jackie and Scotty continue to hash, to rehash, to make everybody uncomfortable, to take all the eyes off Nick and Sonyae for once.
TOTES MOS DEFTONES RECRIMINAISH
Kara: "Scotty, you didn't help with lyrics, which is all Country music has because it's mostly for slow people who don't really like music. Jackie, you're about done here anyway."
Jewel: "Jackie. Jacob will miss you crazy bad."
Jackie: "Brutal."
Bonnie: (Nearly starts crying.)
Jewel: "But like, are you listening? Because your career is fine. You're amazing."
Keith: "Yeah. You're smart and funny and wonderful, don't sweat it."
Kara: (Says nothing at this point. Writes mean notes to herself about Jackie's looks.)
Jackie: "I reserve the right to remember that this is just a stupid game show at a future time, once I've had some rest."
She thanks them for their belief in her, because she is total class, and then gets her hugs from Jes and Sonyae. Brian almost sucks his head inside out, and Johnny weeps privately. Even Nick gets in on the group hug, because honestly this is the first one that actually hurts.
Jackie! Your ass will be fine! This was not your show! Your show doesn't exist, so stop being on TV! Your show is you! Go do that, you will be amazing! I want to send a future email to myself from years ago explaining that I don't actually hate you, so I never will future-say all the mean things I said about you. Even though sometimes they were funny and/or true, it all looks different from here.
They're recovered and talking about the genre thing when Jewel comes in to see them, and they all scream curse words because they're afraid of what's coming . And it sounds like she's just there to Tim Gunn them and make them feel more alive and happy in the sudden deafening silence of no Jackie.
But no, wrong, there actually is a twist. And it starts ... NOW!
WEEK
24 hours to write all the hooks that there are in the world, and then they are strung up over a tank full of sharks and Mark Cuban hits them with a whiffle bat, piñata style. Johnny takes up a Yiddish accent, Brian joins Big Brothers/Big Sisters, Jes slowly fades into actual invisibility without Jackie there to remember she exists, Sonyae writes so many hooks that nobody else can write any hooks because she took them all, and Scotty writes a song for Ryan Tedder called "It's Past Time For Apologies" and Ryan totally gets the joke and he's like, "Good one. Good burn, Scotty."
Guessing that Nick finds a new target. Hoping to God it's Johnny. Not because I bear him any ire or ill will but because it will be therapeutic for them both, and I want them to be happy. First very very sad, then a normal amount of happy. Then, and only then, can we begin to talk about the tangled mess of chaos that is Sonyae.