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  • American Idol’s Top 4 Revealed

    One might think that the amount of screen time Henry Connick, Jr. received over the past two nights has positioned him as a candidate to judge the show next year. That would be a terrific lineup with a strong performer and arranger who also has credibility as a young star and a history with Ellen DeGeneres. But meanwhile, he likely helped his album sales tremendously this week. I know that he spent most of the day as a trending topic on most Internet sites.

    The video packages continue improving as Idol’s producers look for anything to generate interest in the show. This week, Ryan tell us that 32 million votes were cast and seems pretty smug about the situation. The judges remain strangely silent and even when Seacrest tries to draw out Simon, he gets nowhere.

    The Idolettes sing a Sinatra medley while Bowersox rocks a Fedora and suit like the guys. Everyone gets their obligatory solo although The Manhattan Transfer called and want their charts back.

    How cool was it tonight that Harry Connick, Jr. actually referred to charts and called the judges out for inventing the term “pitchy”. Go ahead. Look in a music theory book prior to Idol airing in the U.S. Good luck finding pitchy.

    Ryan teases out next week’s theme (Songs from the Cinema) and mentor (Jamie Foxx).  Jamie got the Rat Pack last year during the Top Five week, and Kris Allen and Adam Lambert both made the bottom three so it’s still anyone’s to win. Yes, Mike, exhale.  Oh, you did?  BTW, AI directing team, we’re really tired of audience shots of Michael’s family every episode.

    Gaga performed Alejandro. She was her typical push-the-envelope brilliant self.  Live leads on acoustic guitar, piano and violin mixed in with the catchy chorus.  She is on her way to being this generation’s Madonna and may even take it further.  Her live performances are events.   Less of an event was Harry’s take on And I Love Her.   I liked his crooner phrasing, which sounded more like Tony Bennett than Frank Sinatra.  It was a nice enough piece and after two decades, Connick knows how to command a stage and hold an audience. He really is a funny guy.  The judges gave him a standing ovation so they at least showed respect.

    Lee was declared safe between the performances so Ryan had Crystal on one side with Mike and Aaron on another.  Then he sent to Casey to join Crystal, and Lee declined to play the “Guess Which Group Is Safe” game.  Holy Cow, I thought.  The Clashers playing in the contest got it right again, and Crystal is in the Bottom Two!

    As if.

    Casey and Crystal are safe for some reason while Aaron and Mike face the music again.  This time Aaron, who belted Fly Me To The Moon both nights, gets the boot.  Look for his album to sell big at Christmas.  And as a true gentleman, Harry Connick played for him as he took the last bow.  (Anyone else notice Ricky Miner was absolutely marginalized this year, even before he took The Tonight Show gig?)

    So your Final Four are Crystal, Casey, Lee and Mike.

    Who goes to the finals?  Who goes home next week?

    What do you think?  Good show?  Bad show?  Boring show?

  • Sonic Singing Contest – Vote Now!

    Forcing the Top 5 to take on the ultimate song stylist, even with Harry Connick’s brilliant help, was a tough assignment.  Had Siobhan not gone home last week (sigh), she certainly would have been gone this week.  Or she would’ve carried SummerWind to a place Simon Cowell called cabaret.

    But the previous week’s votes were just as interesting. SonicClashers, usually a pretty uniform group, were absolutely split on who to send home.  True, more than a third selected Siobhan–heck, I had her in The Bottom Two–but there were plenty of votes for Mike and Aaron continues to get his share.    Let’s remember the GG/George rundown on this year’s American Idol top finishers recorded when the final 12 were announced.

    Crystal, Lee, Siobhan (“…and don’t be surprised to see Aaron emerge as a dark horse and finish fourth”)

    After getting 5 of 6 last year and potentially 3 of 4 this year, I”m feeling pretty cocky this year with my fancy 80% success rate.  If only my score this year was better than GG’s.  But there are plenty of scores that are looking really good.  Here is our Leader Board:

    MT – 12 points
    Yoel / Joel – 11 points each (a tie–how cool!)
    Cindy – 10 points

    and a whole mess of people around 8 and 9 points.  Let’s also get the obligatory “GG would be winning with 16 points were he eligible” message out of the way.  Me?  I have 12 because I refused to send Siobhan home last week.

    Looking ahead, most folks have Crystal winning the competition, but there are votes for Lee and even a vote for Aaron.  (Don’t look at me.  I picked him fourth).

    Ready to vote? Remember, you would win a $25 Amazon gift certificate.

    HERE IS YOUR LINK TO VOTE IN THIS WEEK’S SINGING CONTEST!

    Remember that voting closes the second the EAST COAST version of the results show begins to air.

  • Big In Europe: Stromae’s “Alors On Danse”

    When I was a kid, most of the music I loved best was coming from Europe, and so I loved it when Casey Kasem would occasionally mention on his weekly American Top 40 broadcasts which songs were topping the charts in places like Belgium and Norway (and, yes, of course, the U.K.). Most of the time, this would be in the context of introducing a song that was a current hit in the U.S. Example, “Coming up on AT40, the hit by the Austrian native Falco that’s currently number one in Romania, Italy, Poland, The Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia.” I always thought it was fascinating not just that, you know, Romania could have a Top 40, but that songs I knew could be on it. And that Casey Kasem knew what was on the Romanian Top 40. In my head, I imagined Romanian 11-year-olds like myself sneaking out of church (did they have church in Romania too?) to sit in their parents’ cars and listen to Casey Kasem count down the Romanian Top 40.

    The downside of this all was that sometimes, Casey would announce the number one hits in these far-flung locales, but you wouldn’t get to actually hear them. Later on, I realized I could go to the library in Kenosha and they would have a copy of the current Billboard, and Billboard actually published the top 10s, 20s and/or 40s of various international territories, which was all good fun to read. But it always ended up in the disappointment of unrequited curiosity. Even if I’d had the money to buy a Fra Lippo Lippi album out of sheer Billboard-chart-induced curiosity, where was a kid in small-town Wisconsin supposed to buy it? And certainly no radio station was going to be playing it. Sad. And it just wasn’t right, because as it turns out, the difference in radio air-playability between Fra Lippo Lippi (who never had an American hit), and, say, Johnny Hates Jazz (who had a couple) is pretty negligible. Perhaps, after a-ha, U.S. labels and radio stations had decided that they had met their quota of break-out Norwegian pop acts.

    Today’s musically-obsessive, internationally-minded, geographically-stranded pre-teens no longer have this issue. You don’t have to go to Kenosha to read the latest copy of Billboard. You can go to Billboard.com. And once there, and once you’re curious about, say, the number one hit in Europe that isn’t a hit here (yet?), you can go to YouTube and watch the video for that hit. And so, with that, I’m introducing this occasional little column called “Big In…” where I spin- err, embed – the hits of exotic locations. (Sadly, Billboard.com does not publish the Romanian Top 40.) First up is the current number one hit on the pan-European chart. It’s by 25-year-old Rwandan-Belgian rapper Paul van Haver, better known as Stromae. It’s called “Alors on Danse”, and it’s accompanied by a very cinematic split-screen video that only magnifies the song’s message (in French) of dancing in the face of existential boredom. Oui, baby!

    [Update: So, okay, Universal Music France is mean. Click the link below to actually see the video]
    Stromae \"Alors on Danse\"