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Pop Rock Nation

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  • American Idol Season 11 – Who Makes The Top 3?

    I have to apologize for not writing about last week’s elimination of one Skylar Laine. I was out of town chaperoning my son and his classmates at his science camp. But I did write a bit of a recap for those of you who came into the season late at Popblerd. I wrote about last night’s performances as well.

    Last night’s show was a separation show. It was quite easy to separate the good from the bad. Jessica Sanchez and Joshua Ledet are head and shoulders above Phillip Phillips. And Phillip is head and shoulders above Hollie Cavanagh. When America eliminated Skylar Laine last week, it screwed up the possibility of maybe the best top four in American Idol history. Thanks for that voters.

    Check out the performances from Joshua and Jessica below if you didn’t watch last night’s show:

    Those performances cemented that Jessica and Joshua are my favorite twosome from any season of American Idol. I put together a poll to see what everyone else thought. Take the poll here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/6C2RDNL.

    Now, onto the elimination show to see our top three.

    The crew performed California Dreaming at the start of the show. Ryno is going to have to do his ultimate stretch job tonight to get us through this hour. At least Jenny Lo is performing tonight. (So is David Cook.)

    He brings up Phillip Phillips first. Ryno pulled the move on him making him believe he made it, but he wasn’t going to give out the results just yet. Poor Double P looked quite embarrassed.

    Hollie was next and Jimmy Iovine pretty much called her out for being the worst of the four. I’ve been saying that all season long. Ryno won’t spoil it. We don’t know if she’s safe or not yet either. Looks like we’re waiting until the end for all of them.

    David Cook is performing his latest song. He probably doesn’t like Adam Lambert very much. If not for Lambert, he would’ve been the only good singer doing anything from the last five years of the show. But Lambert pretty much blows him away. I hope we see Lambert between here and the finale.

    Joshua is next and Jimmy basically called his version of It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World the best of the season.

    And finally, young Jessica comes to center stage. Jimmy didn’t think her Etta James song was the right move, but thought the Jennifer Holliday song was fantastic and said that Tommy Motolla told him she was the real deal. Please, keep Tommy Motolla away from young Jessica.

    It’s Jenny Lo time. She’s singing Dance Again. Okay, she’s probably not singing live. But she’s Jenny Lo. You don’t really watch her to hear her singing. You just watch her to watch her.

    The first person to make the top three is Jessica Sanchez. The next person in the top three is Joshua Ledet. Why do I have a feeling Phillip is leaving us? Please no. Please no.

    Phillip Phillips is through! And we have the strongest top three in quite some time. Jasmine Trias, I mean Hollie Cavanagh is gone.

    Seacrest out!

  • It’s Hard to Dance With a Devil on Your Back: Glee Girls “Shake It Out”

    Dot Jones as ”Coach Beast”

    For much of its third season, it seems to have been coasting along towards graduation and a much anticipated farewell to a handful of its charter characters; but occasionally, Glee busts out something special to remind us just how a great a TV show Glee can be, and why we ever cared about it in the first place. Last week’s episode was like that.

    And it wasn’t just because we got to see Rachel (Lea Michele) fail (in spectacularly humiliating fashion) the audition she’d been preparing for her whole life; although watching her flub the words to “Don’t Rain On My Parade” – twice – especially after she’d (very condescendingly) counseled dear Kurt (Chris Colfer) not to do anything risky in his audition, certainly was a lot of mean-spirited fun (or maybe it was just sweet justice). When you heard Rachel say that she wasn’t nervous about her audition, you knew she was doomed.

    Her character’s flameout even delivered some satisfying meta-schadenfreude for those of us who love love love to hate actress Lea Michele. In my head, when I saw Rachel Berry sobbing, screaming, begging, pleading for another chance, I imagined Lea Michele in Ryan Murphy’s offices sobbing, screaming, begging, pleading to let her character flunk out and have to return in Season 4 as a fifth-year senior.

    Regrets collect like old friends
    Here to relive your darkest moments
    I can see no way, I can see no way
    And all of the ghouls come out to play
    – “Shake It Out” by Florence + the Machine

    Kurt, meanwhile, shook off Rachel’s advice, and nervously made an eleventh hour (fifty-ninth-minute) switch to a less-rehearsed audition piece. He performed the number (the very very gay song “Not the Boy Next Door” from the Peter Allen bio-musical The Boy from Oz) with exuberant confidence; he had a blast doing it, and the audition’s jury of one – Whoopi Goldberg, impersonating Mount Rushmore – was duly impressed.

    Hugh Jackman “Not the Boy Next Door” (2003)

    Still, the episode’s other major plotline managed to upstage even Rachel Berry’s epic Streisand-fail. When Coach Beiste (“Beast”, the always amazing Dot Jones) shows up to school with a black eye, some of the meaner Glee girls make a joke about Coach’s boyfriend Cooter “going all Chris Brown” on her. It’s a joke – a mean one – but clearly a joke: it’s absolutely unfathomable (to the girls on the TV show, and to us watching) that any man in his right mind would even physically threaten Coach Beiste, much less do something so foolish as commit actual violence against her. She’d kick his ass, right? Not that Coach is invulnerable. We’ve seen her break down when, as a new teacher to the school, she was ridiculed and excluded by her fellow teachers. Still, the girls are comfortable making the “Chris Brown” joke because it’s self-evident to them (and us) that Coach is no victim.

    But the joke was made within earshot of a teacher played by this Real Housewife of Atlanta, and she, having grown up around domestic violence, is determined to impress upon the girls just how unfunny their joke was. She notes that the American pop songbook is full of songs that commit some sort of violence against women, and (you know this is coming) gives the girls a Glee-signment for the week: take one of those songs and perform it in a way that takes back the woman’s power. Suddenly, visions of the Glee-girls singing this infamous Phil Spector “classic” danced in my head:

    The Crystals “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)” (1962)

    It’s probably a good thing Glee didn’t go there.**

    To this point, the plot is a little bit ABC After School Special-ish. We’ve seen these “special” sitcom episodes before, and we’re expecting a tidy, meaningful, lesson-learned moment. But what may have been a self-evidently preposterous proposition – Coach Beiste as the Tina to Cooter’s Ike – turns out to be exactly what’s going on. While this conveniently proves NeNe Leakes’s point – domestic jokes aren’t funny, no matter the context – that’s the last concession this episode makes to “special episode” tidiness. We learn that self-esteem issues aren’t so easily healed with just a stirring pep talk, a touching musical number, and a hug just before the credits roll.

    As far as touching musical numbers go, though, the Glee girls’ nearly a cappella cover of “Shake It Out”, last year’s near-hit by Florence + the Machine, was unexpected, beautiful and incredibly powerful. Florence Welch’s lyrics about confronting the “demons” and “ghouls” that haunt a relationship and play havoc with a woman’s sense of self and worth feel as if they were written specifically for this episode of this show – and they get added sting from the scenes interspersed throughout the song.

    Glee Cast “Shake It Out” (2012)

    Where Florence + the Machine’s performance of the song is loud, anthemic, cathartic – it fills a room even at a soft volume – the Glee girls’ performance is intimate and quiet, as if giving voice to Coach Beiste’s seemingly unlikely but nevertheless very credible, very real vulnerabilities. The girls think they are singing an apology to Coach for their insensitive jokes, and giving her the support she needs to move on with her life. But instead of moving on, we see Coach moving back in. The girls are finally fulfulling the assignment they were given; sadly, no matter how empowering the song might feel, no amount of pretty harmonies can make Coach Beiste empower herself.

    Florence + the Machine “Shake It Out” (2011)

    **This song is 50 years old, and it feels – appropriately – shocking that it was ever released as a single marketed to a teenagers. But let’s not shit ourselves: teenagers made Rihanna’s “Birthday Cake” featuring Chris Brown a major hit this year. “He Hit Me” didn’t chart.

  • Commercial-isms: T-Mobile vs. Laurie Anderson “O Superman”

    Commercial-isms: T-Mobile vs. Laurie Anderson “O Superman”

    HTC O… M Effing G
    I took it as further evidence of my exceptional parenting when my 17-year-old son perked up at the sound of Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” coming across from the TV and pronounced “Awesome song!” In my head, I was congratulating myself: My son knows Laurie Anderson’s music! I am a good dad! I am a good dad! But this moment of parental pride was sullied when I realized that familiar “hah hah hah hah hah hah” (I always thought it sounded like a robot breathing) was being played in the background of a commercial. For T-Mobile’s new HTC One phone.

    Really?

    Now I’m not so naive to actually believe that, at least when it comes to pop culture, some things might actually be sacred. But seriously: what’s “O Superman” doing in a cell phone commercial? Suddenly the tired arguments about artists “selling out” with their licensing choices feel freshly relevant. Not that I think Laurie Anderson has sold out, nor do I begrudge her whatever money she might be making from a 30-year-old song that might only be regarded as a “hit” in the most artsy-NYC-hipster-ish sense. (It did top the Village Voice’s 1981 Pazz & Jop singles poll.) But there is something sad about such a monumental song reduced to… this.

    If you’ve never heard “O Superman”, you may be asking yourself just what the big deal is. And if you’re just hearing “O Superman” for the first time, you should know: it’s damn weird. But it’s also wonderful. As proud as I am that my son could identify it so readily, he was a tiny bit wrong in pronouncing “O Superman” an “awesome song”. It certainly is awesome, and I don’t mean “awesome” in the deeply trivializing 80s-vintage colloquialism sense, but rather in the Old Testament music to bring down the walls of Jericho sense. It is awesome. But to call it simply a song is also a little trivializing.

    For one thing, it’s just not very song-like. For another, it’s massive: eight-and-a-half minutes massive, sustained without benefit of a catchy chorus or an extended guitar jam or even a drum solo. The music is stark and electronic, the words poetic and prayerful, and delivered (through a vocoder) alternately as a monologue and a chant – ah-hah-hah-ah hah-hah-hah-ha-ah. It is by turns funny and sweet (“Hi Mom!”), and chillingly prophetic:

    Here come the planes
    They’re American planes
    Made in America
    Smoking
    or Non-smoking

    There’s also a visual element that is integral to the song itself. In live performance, Laurie Anderson would play her synthesizer with one hand, and with the other, punctuate her lines with hand and arm gestures projected as shadows in a circle of light on a screen behind her.

    Laurie Anderson “O Superman” (1981)

    The song was first released as a NEA-funded limited edition 7″ single in 1981; the following year it became the centerpiece of Anderson’s major label debut record Big Science, which, itself, was conceived as part of an epic scale multi-media performance piece called United States, inspired largely by a four-year field trip Anderson took around the country, working various sorts of jobs as she went. “O Superman” is still regarded as Anderson’s masterpiece, and in the same way the “Hallelujah Chorus” (all 100 or so seconds of it) has become “bigger” than the larger work it was part of (Handel’s “Messiah” oratorio), “O Superman” has eclipsed United States in sheer concentrated power and historical resonance.

    The song was inspired by the aria O Souverain, O Juge, O Pere, from French composer Jules Massenet’s opera Le Cid, and alludes to its words. Laurie Anderson described the aria as a “prayer for a knight on the eve of a hopeless battle… a prayer about empire, loss, and ambition.”

    ‘Cause when love is gone, there’s always justice.
    And when justice is gone, there’s always force.
    And when force is gone, there’s always Mom.

    “O Superman” was also inspired by current events: specifically a tragically failed military mission during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979. But 9/11 and the government’s ongoing struggle to respond to it – both the military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the domestic policies passed in the name of security – have given the new song an even more powerful and unforeseen resonance. Here’s Laurie on performing the song to a New York audience a week after 9/11, from her notes to the 2007 reissue of Big Science:

    “During a top-secret mission to rescue hostages being held in Tehran, American helicopters crashed in a sandstorm and blew up. The mission’s failure was a blow to the United States’ reputation as a technological superpower and played a role in the downfall of the Carter Administration and the rise of Reaganism. Almost thirty years later we’re fighting the same war… I suddenly realized I was singing about the present.”

    So yeah, how about that skydiving fashion photographer? Here’s the song that opens the Big Science album:

    Laurie Anderson “From the Air” (1982)