Tonight was Bizarro World night on Idol. Not because Paula's wig was extra frizzy. That's normal.
-Not because Kara was extra horny. I mean, everything out of her mouth was a double-entendre for boning. No, we've come to expect that as well.
-And it wasn't Bizarro night because Simon complimented Ryan on his hair.
-Or that the Idols sang "Songs from the Hot 100... that we've heard a million times before on Idol." No, that's par for the course.
-And it wasn't Bizarro World because the performances were uniformly terrible. Nope, that's just a hilarious bonus.
What made Idol truly bizarre was the fact that I basically agreed with every single thing Randy, Paula, Simon and Kara had to say. They all made cogent points. They were all basically sober and comprehensible. It was simply astonishing.
Well, it made it easy that everyone stunk to the high heavens.
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Jackie Tohn -- "A Little Less Conversation" as sung by Elvis.
Jackie brings her raspy vocals and tuneless singing on the karaoke version of the song while wearing Olivia Newton John's painted on pants from the end of Grease. Except that Jackie doesn't have anything that I want to see. This song felt long as Jackie's vocals are worse than a third rate tone-deaf Elvis impersonator in a Sing Elvis Crappily Night. Kara rightly says that Jackie has personality... but she's done.
GRADE: D === The most memorable part of Jackie's song was the random shot of hallway inserted in the middle of the performance. Another gaffe from Idol's crack production team. Not the last or most egregious tonight. And were all the Idols forced to sing a song made famous by the opposite sex?
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Ricky Braddy -- (Who?) "A Song For You" as sung by Elliott Yamin
Ricky's wearing his good luck velvet plum smoking jacket. His back story apparently is that he's a fry cook at a fast food joint who got tired of serving chicken fingers. "That's not who I am" pleads Ricky. Um, nobody defines themselves by hairnets and grease-smattered aprons. It's called the real world, and welcome back to it after tonight. Anyhow, Ricky's performance is completely schmaltzy and forgettable. Combine that with the fact that he's gotten zero air time until now... The judges love it, but it doesn't matter because Ricky is going home.
GRADE: C- === Boring and overwrought. As long as Randy and Paula are gainfully employed on this show someone has to serve the chicken fingers, so you've got to do it, dude.
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Alexis Grace -- "I Never Loved a Man" as sung by Jordin Sparks (I don't even remember if she sung this song, but she probably did.)
Alexis is the goody-goody blonde girl with pink highlights who Kara told should be more dirty. And boy does Alexis tart it up, wearing some ugly black nightie and doing a flirtatious but un-sexy version of this tired, dog of a song. I need to shower now, I feel greasy just watching. Alexis isn't the least bit sexy, but she sluts it up as per Kara's suggestion, selling her last shred of dignity before disappearing forever from our TVs. Alexis isn't terrible, but she can't hit any of the low notes. It's medium bluesy, not very soulful but not bad...
GRADE: B- === Simon compares Alexis to Kelly Clarkson. He's way off base, but after everyone else screws the pooch vocally tonight, Alexis might sneak into the Finals.
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Brent Keith -- "Hicktown" as sung by the squarest, most milquetoast country performer this side of "Nashville Star"... oh, right. I forgot.
Brent's sob story is basically, "I'm poor." I've never heard "Hicktown" before, but it's a bit of a Mickey Mouse country song. Nothing remarkable as sung by Brent. He's got clean, pretty vocals that really don't suit country at all. He gives a Wonder Bread country performance. Bucky Covington would crush him. And he's Bucky, not even Willie, Kenny or even that Gabriel dude who WON "Nashville Star."
GRADE: C === Brent wisely picks a genre whose fans don't give a crap about quality. Speaking of awful quality, the video freezes when production cuts to Brent's bio video. We see a freeze frame from Stevie's bio video instead, then random shots as the cameras try to find Brent. Then after the song the cameras follow Brent up the stairs instead of cutting to Ryan interviewing Brent's mama. Just remarkable. Does any show on TV have such shoddy production values? Let alone THE #1 SHOW ON TV?!?! I guess country fans are the only ones who don't demand quality.
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Stevie Wright -- "You Belong With Me" as sung by Taylor Swift, if she were tone deaf, had a tracheotomy and was just a wee bit brain-damaged.
Yikes! Stevie gives us the first VFTW-worthy performance of the year. She's bad in so many ways. Off-tempo, out of tune, nervous, hesitant and just plain awful, even by Mall Singer standards. Stevie gives a train wreck of a performance. WE LOVE YOU STEVIE!!!
GRADE: FAIL -- I'm astonished when Paula makes her first cogent critique in about 4 seasons by mentioning Stevie's horrible low register. I give 16 year old Stevie full credit for taking her critical beating from the judges like a pro. Good for you. Too bad she's singing on the same night as Tatiana, otherwise we'd vote for her.
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Anoop Desai -- "Angel of Mine" as sung by Monica.
Anoop displays his sweet vocals on a trifle of a song. He's soulful but the song is a snooze and therefore the performance is pretty dull. Clearly Anoop chose this song because he could go off
on it, but it doesn't matter if he can sing or not, he needs to be entertaining to advance. That's his thing. Simon correctly calls the performance "A bit too serious" and Kara says Anoop "didn't nail it the way it needs to be nailed." And you know Kara knows all about being nailed.
GRADE: B -- The good news for Anoop is that SOMEBODY has to advance. It might as well be him.
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Casey Carlson -- "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" as sung by Scrantonicity, Kevin from "The Office"'s awful Police Cover band.
Casey is hot, but she still has terrible hair and tonight she's wearing an unspeakably ugly leather skirt. I know she's from Minnesota, but they've got to have ONE trendy clothing store and ONE decent salon in the entire state, right? It's baffling how style-less Casey is. Well, baffling until we see Momma Carlson's even uglier skirt and leggings later. So THAT'S her style inspiration. I get it now. As bad as Casey dresses, she sings even worse. She gives the second best-worst train wreck performance of the night. I see what she was trying to do here: a cutesy, perky chick version of the song, but her reach falls way short of her meager goal. She's drastically out of tune and hopelessly bad throughout the performance.
GRADE: FAIL -- How bad is she? She's so bad Randy "Freaking" Jackson has no problem incisively dissecting what was wrong with her performance. Oh, and according to Kara we need to put The Police on the same NEVER SING pedestal as Stevie Wonder, Whitney Houston and Aretha Franklin. I don't think anyone should sing it on Idol because I don't want to hear them butchered this badly ever again.
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Roughneck Michael Sarver -- "I Don't Want To Be" as sung by an unholy trio of Bo Bice, Elliott Yamin and Chris Richardson
Roughneck Michael was just plain rough tonight, butchering what should've been a slam dunk ticket to the Finals. If he just chose a reasonable song for his mumbling, shouting vocals. The dude has annunciation enunciation problems, but yet he chose to sing a song with a quickly sung, trippingly difficult chorus. He has no breath control so he's gassed by the end and he misses an entire refrain. I mean, he should've rocked on some Bon Jovi song, something popular and anthemic that we all know, and that he could just shout his way through. "Blaze of Glory" for example. He makes his usual furious faces, and Paula rightly points out he doesn't know what to do with the microphone. Bad.
GRADE: D -- Michael has a slim hope as he was pimped fairly prominently in previous weeks, and as Ryan pointed out he's come off as a nice, decent family guy so the Idol Fraus that didn't vote for Gokay might vote for him. Trivia question: How on EARTH does Paula remember that Bo, Elliott and Chris all sang this song in previous seasons? I mean, she probably can't remember what meds she's on, but she's pulling out Season 4 facts. Astonishing.
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Ann Marie Boskovitch -- "Natural Woman" as sung by millions of Idol auditioners, but worse.
Ann Marie tells us her occupations are Waitress and Demo Singer. What exactly is a demo singer? Is it different than being a plain old Ringer? Ann Marie gives a fairly entertaining performance, full of furious faces and spastic dancing. She reminds me of Carly Smithson as she blasts out her vocals. She's got a powerful voice but she looks and sounds much older than 21, in a bad way. Simon rightly calls Ann Marie's performance "Good for a hotel singer." And also gets in the kiss-off line of the night with "You may have ruined your one chance. Sorry." Ouch, BURN!
GRADE: C === Ann Marie wasn't remarkable, but she has a good voice and gave a standard Idol performance on an Idol standard.
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Stephen "Super 'Fro" Fowler -- "Rock With You" as sung by Michael Jackson
Stephen choked in Hollywood by forgetting the words to his song, but he bit the big salami stick tonight. He does a horrible rendition of a mediocre Michael Jackson song. Dude, if you're going to bomb, at least go out on "Thriller" or "Smooth Criminal." I think Michael Jackson should also be put on the Idol "Do Not Perform List", not because he's terrible, but because of the whole, you know, cover-up on the child molestation thing. I mean, you could destroy on "Bad" but we'll still have visions of surgeon masked, mutant Michael grabbing his crotch. Stephen has a great voice but he flames out badly here. Needless to say, Stephen was pretty awful, even going flat on the glory note.
GRADE: D === Simon rightly blasts the horrible arrangement and $2 Casio keyboard synth backing music.
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Tatiana Del Toro -- "Saving All My Love For You" as sung by Whitney Houston, of course.
Has Tatiana sung anything but Whitney? It seemed like Tatiana took her Prozac tonight because she had a vacant stare and decided lack of affectation tonight. And you know what, she was boring? Her vocals were slightly above average for the night, but aside from her hilarious soulfully spent look on her face at the end of the song I wasn't entertained at all. She also tried to do damage control by explaining away her histrionics during Hollywood week. Don't make excuses Tatiana, that's WHY WE LOVE YOU!!!
GRADE: C === The judges seemed to like her, and she didn't screw up as badly as any other girl tonight, so Tatiana's looking good for the Finals. But if it's this eerie zombie Tatiana I'd rather vote for Boskovitch. Even the judges were trying to egg her on to do that annoying hyena laugh. Ouch.
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Danny Gokay -- "Hero" as sung by Mariah Carey --- because there is NO FRUITIER SONG that he could've chosen.
Danny's in the pimp slot (of course) with a bevy of dismally bad performances all night, so as long as he doesn't wet himself on-stage or reveal that he's boning 19 Entertainment Execs he's into the Finals. Gokay hits all the notes, even going to his raspiness in bits and pretty much nails his song. So Gokay victoriously hits the right notes on a schmaltzy and atrocious Mariah Carey number, the judges go wildly crazy, and the whole thing feels as staged as Wrestlemania. He wins the night, American Idol, and the WWE Championship Belt, all as scripted.
GRADE: A === I'm not a Gokay fan, but Danny did what he had to do and hit his marks. Simon shockingly brings the wet sock of reality down by declaring "I'm not buying the hype." Holy crap. I've agreed with every SINGLE THING Simon said tonight. If the judges continue making sense and speaking the truth, what will I have to talk about? Oh, but then Ryan gets in the unintentionally funny line of the night by quipping about Simon: "There was a point tonight where we believed you had that organ that we all have." What organ is that? A vagina? A penis? A spleen? All equally funny punch-lines. Thank you Ryan for reminding me that I will always have the strong homoerotic undertones on the show to mock. That and the horrible singing.
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And with that we're done with Semi-Finals #1. I have to say it was a strangely enjoyable 2 hours. We had many excruciatingly bad performances (YES!) Judges making salient, sober points about musicality (YES!) Several miserable singers with a chance to get into the Semi-Finals (Yes!) Super-Plant Joanna Pacitti booted from the show (YES!) Too many to mention horn-dog double-entendres (Yes!) And some good old-fashioned Ryan 'N' Simon homoerotic Man-Love (YES!) You just can't ask for much more than that.
--Chan
Location: Gokey's Graveyard
