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  • American Idol Season 9 – And The Winner Is…

    Paula Abdul
    It’s time to see who is the season 9 winner of American Idol. However, it will take us over two hours to get here. Fox usually packs the finale show with performances, goofy skits, and video packages. Tonight, I have heard they’ll also give Simon Cowell a mighty send off. I just hope that they bring back Paula Abdul to help send him off.

    Tonight, let’s do the recap diary style.

    8:02 – It’s been 24 hours since last night’s performances and Lee still looks nervous.

    8:03 – Ryno Seacrest introduces the judges and Randall Jackson is wearing a suit that would make a pimp blush.

    8:06 – Alice Cooper performs School’s Out For Summer with the Top 12, and Siobhan (aka creepy little girl) stole his creepy thunder with her creepiness.

    (By the way Idol, way to understand your demographics with that one. Who’s next tonight, Ozzy Osbourne?)

    8:13 – Kris Allen is singing some new song and I’m still giving anyone 2-1 odds who doesn’t think he’s getting divorced soon. He has that look in his eyes that says he’s on the hunt for new meat.

    8:16 – We get our first Simon Cowell video package, which is a complete waste of time. But at least I got to see Paula.

    8:18 – Creepy little girl and Aaron Kelly are singing How Deep Is Your Love. She looks like she wants to eat him.

    8:19 – The beautiful Bee Gees came out to join them. Barry had to sing his lines to creepy girl, while poor Robin had to sing his to Aaron. That was awkward.

    8:26 – Big Mike Lynche and Michael McDonald are dueting Taking It To The Streets. If Taylor Hicks comes out right now doing his jig, I will smile largely.

    (By the way, Alice Cooper, the brothers Gibb, and Michael McDonald have been the celebrity performers so far, and McDonald is the youngest at a ripe age of 58. American Idol, on the cutting edge!)

    8:31 – Let’s take a moment of silence for Dane Cook’s career. Bow, there it is.

    8:34 – The top 6 girls came out to perform Christina Aguilera’s Beautiful. Lacy Brown led the way and all of America tried to remember if she was on the show or not.

    8:37 – Christina herself came out to sing and she’s still number one on my list of those who I’d request to sing me lullabies before I sleep. Rosie O’Donnell is last on that list by the way.

    (The roaming camera reached around to Christina’s backside, and I have to say that for a skinny girl, she’s got some junk in the trunk.)

    8:47 – The top 6 boys are singing Hall & Oates tunes, which leads me to think…

    8:49 – …that of course, Hall & Oates are coming out. I wonder if they’ll get Scott Savol to get on stage and sing She’s Gone? You think Scott’s persona non grata with Idol? All he did was beat his girlfriend. Come on people, where’s your forgiveness!

    (By the way, I might be the only Idol blog to mention Scott Savol’s name. I’ll do you one better. How about Corey Clark?

    8:51 – Darryl Hall looks like he hasn’t bathed in the year 2010.

    8:52 – Janelle Wheeler who was my favorite Idol contestant to look at, and who also dated Tim Tebow is hanging out with Crystal’s fans in Toledo, Ohio. But she’s not wearing those terrific pants that I love.

    This Girl Can Wear Some Pants

    8:53 – Crystal is out singing Ironic. Wait, does that mean Alanis Morrisette is coming out?

    8:54 – Of course it does! I think she’s making fun of Joey from Full House or something.

    9:01 – Carrie Underwood is performing. Do you remember what I said about Christina Aguilera being such a skinny girl and having junk in the trunk? Well, as far as having junk in the trunk, it’s the same for Carrie, only the opposite. She has one of the more famous cases of noassatall.

    9:08 – Casey James is out singing and Bret Michaels comes out. Wait, isn’t Bret Michaels sick? I have a feeling those guys are going carousing tonight.

    9:18 – Lee DeWyze and Chicago perform, and right after, Ryan throws it to Matt Rogers, the former football player who was on Idol many years ago. Rogers looks about 45 years old with a receding hair line. I don’t want to remember my Idols this way. Go away Matt, just go away.

    9:21 – General Larry Platt and a bunch of extras from the movie Step Up performed Pants On The Ground. Then William Hung joined the fray and let’s just say that he doesn’t speak English any better than you remember. I would be lying if I didn’t say that I enjoyed this better than Lee DeWyze and Chicago.

    9:29 – Yay! It’s Paula Abdul on stage!

    9:34 – Boo! Paula’s gone.

    9:35 – Kelly Clarkson, Ruben Studdard, and Fantasia Barrino all came out to sing with Simon. Ten bucks says that Taylor Hicks didn’t get invited.

    9:36 – Damnit! I owe you ten bucks.

    9:37 – Holy jeez! All the terrible ghosts of American Idol contestants past came out to sing for Simon. Mikalah Gordon done growed up. Constantine just winked at me!

    9:38 – Mysteriously absent was David Cook. And for that matter, Jennifer Hudson. Wait, she hates Simon.

    9:44 – The top 12 is out singing Janet Jackson’s Again. Wait, does that mean…

    9:45 – Of course it does! Miss Janet Jackson is on stage sans her weave. Her hair is amazingly short.

    9:49 – And the junk in the trunk award goes to, Janet Jackson. Holy cow. She’s now performing Nasty. And you know who choreographed that video.

    9:52 – I think Randall Jackson is in love.

    9:54 – Please answer this for me once and for all. Is the gap in Crystal’s teeth near the side of her mouth charming or a hot mess?

    10:01 – Ryno’s going to tease us about the results for about five minutes here.

    10:02 – Ok, I lied. He’s getting right to it. And Lee is terrified.

    10:03 – And the winner is… (aw man) Lee DeWyze!

    10:04 – Crystal isn’t a sore loser at all, but you have to think that she knows she was robbed heartily.

    10:05 – I just realized that Lee’s average cover of Beautiful Day is going to top the iTunes charts next week.

    10:06 – I also just realized that this show may be entirely different next year. Good night everyone.

    Paula Abdul photo shared via Wikipedia through the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

  • Glee’s Gaga Episode Leaves Me… “Speechless”-less

    Though the show’s most beloved (for her unapologetic hatefulness) character, Sue Sylvester (played with all the purposefulness and empathy of a power drill by Jane Lynch) was pretty much absent from tonight’s Lady Gaga themed episode of Glee, the show still had a lot of great moments. Unfortunately, none of those great moments were musical. Tonight’s show was useful not only in demonstrating the essential commonality between the artistry of Lady Gaga, Barbra Streisand, and KISS – that is, in a word the show beat us over the head with tonight, theatricality – but also in explaining the symbology behind the KISS members’ made up personae. Who knew, right?

    It also boasted two of the season’s most dramatic and surprisingly uncartoonish plot developments. Kurt’s father’s confrontation with their potential future stepbrother/son over Fin’s use of the “F” word (not the four letter one) was powerful and moving, and suggested a new layer of complexity in the three characters’ relationships with each other.

    Meanwhile, Rachel’s thwarted reunion with her birth mother – rival glee club coach and disappointed former Broadway aspirant Ms. Cochrane (played by real life Broadway star Idina Menzel in a brilliant bit of lookalike-soundalike-no-way-these-two-don’t-share-genes casting) – felt almost underplayed. It was emotionally three-dimensional, as the relief of confession turned not into a happily-ever-after ending, but into a sort of relationship limbo. Moreover, when Rachel (Lea Michele) admitted with some degree of regret that she just didn’t feel a daughterly need for her mother, the show seemed to honor her relationship with her adoptive dads in a way the show, which has never really shown us her adoptive dads (which, as an adoptive dad, infuriates me!), never has before.

    Unfortunately, the show’s musical numbers tonight were uniformly duddish, from strictly imitative versions (in both staging and arrangement) of Streisand’s “Funny Girl”, KISS’s “Shout It Out Loud”, and, of course, Gaga’s “Bad Romance”, a performance so synthesized and Autotuned that the show momentarily felt like a trailer for RockStar: Lady Gaga Edition, to a boy-band-on-stools rendition of KISS’s “Beth”, similar to their take on Madonna’s “What It Feels Like For a Girl” a few weeks back. But at least in that performance, there were, y’know, harmonies and stuff. Here, the Glee boys couldn’t be troubled to throw in even the most rudimentary harmonies, instead singing key lines of the song’s chorus in an emotionally empty unison. It was like Kidz Bop performed by teenagers. Or rather Kidz Bop performed by 28-year-olds playing teenagers.

    But the show, sadly, saved the worst for last. Seriously, what were the writers thinking when they had Rachel and Ms. Cochrane (biological mother and daughter, remember) sing a duet on Gaga’s “Poker Face”? Confoundingly, this was the one musical number in tonight’s episode that did anything new with the song. In this case, it was given a cutesy, playful, old-timey vaudeville melodic treatment that rendered the song virtually unrecognizable – quite a feat given its 18-month pop-cultural omnipresence – while preserving the song’s aggressively graphic sexual innuendoes. It wasn’t just disappointing. It was sort of disgusting. Let me clarify: if this were a duet between Rachel and one of her peers – say, Quinn Fabray, her longtime rival for Fin’s affections – the song would have had a fun, kinky, but ultimately harmless, sexual tension. But the Michele/Menzel duet on the song had an unintended (I hope I hope I hope) incestuous undertone. It was just all kinds of wrong.

    Compounding my disappointment is the fact that there actually is a Lady Gaga song that could have served the scene well, and though it’s not one of The Lady’s hit singles, it’s no obscurity either. She’s performed it in numerous television appearances, and it even makes a cameo in tonight’s Glee episode – in an early scene, Kurt’s got it playing on his stereo. “Speechless”, from The Fame Monster, is a big Elton John-style ballad (which she performed with Elton John at this year’s Grammys) that she says was inspired by her own relationship with her father. The song is a full-throated, gut-wrenching emotional plea pounded out with big arena-rock power chords, and seems made for a moment like the one Rachel had with Ms. Cochrane at the end of tonight’s show – a moment full of conflicting emotions, a moment that was neither hello nor good-bye but rather “see ya ’round, I guess”. Unfortunately, especially after their gorgeous duet on “I Dreamed a Dream” (i.e. that Susan Boyle song from Les Mis) in last week’s episode, I can only imagine what Lea Michele and Idina Menzel could have done with “Speechless”.

    I could say, to the tune of “Speechless”, “I’ll never watch again.” But that would be dishonest. I still love the show. But as tonight’s episode has proven, it can be wildly – wildly – off the mark.

  • American Idol All-Stars

    As Lee DeWyze or Crystal Bowersox are revealed as the next American Idol during the next 36 hours, we’ll also reveal the winner of our Sonic Spring Singing competition.

    Here’s what I can tell you.  If Lee wins, then our winner and top finishers are a trio of folks.  If Crystal wins, then two of the three people get swapped out.  I want to give a special shout-out though to two people who predicted the Top 3 based solely on the Top 12.

    WTG, Michelle and Shantel!   Each predicted a Top 3 of Lee, Crystal and Casey James.

    Most people went a safer route and chose Siobhan or Michael over Casey.  One person went for the Duke-like upset and picked Aaron, but these two ladies showed they know their stuff!

    Your Task Now Is Important

    GG came up with the idea of American Idol All-Stars in honor of  the show’s 10th season next year and to hopefully allow a Simon-less panel to find its way.   In the interest of that notion since Idol will never do this, we’re going to pick our own All-Stars and have Idol Madness.  For every Kelly or Carrie, there was a Taylor Hicks.  And speaking of Taylor Hicks, anyone still amazed that he beat Daughtry and Yamin in the same year?

    Here are the rules:  anyone who didn’t win (that means you, Bo Bice) and also didn’t become popular later on.  Just answer in comments and tell us as many names as you want in the Idol All-Stars.

    We’re not going to pick obvious people:   Adam Lambert, Chris Daughtry, Jennifer Hudson, Clay Aiken, Elliott Yamin–artists who have had hits don’t count.