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Pop Rock Nation

Tag: Bon Jovi

  • American Idol Season 12: Cutting Down To 9

    Idol Even after the promised changes, new judges, and two less contestants in the finals, Wednesday night’s American Idol felt same old same old. The show was a mixed bag with some good performances and many shaky performances. It’s pretty obvious that the girls are much better than the guys. Could this be a carbon copy of season three when the girls owned the top four? It should be.

    But with the new voting app where fans can vote up to 50 times, I expect to see some really ragged results, including some very deserving girls to get booted earlier than they should. Angie Miller, I’m talking about you.

    My prediction on Wednesday night was that Curtis Finch, Jr. would be saying goodbye and going “home” (Phillip Phillips voice). I also thought Devin and Paul were forgettable.

    So what was different with the elimination show?

    It was like the bizarro elimination show. Instead of calling out the bottom three, Ryno Seacrest instead called out who made the top three. Those three were Candice Glover, Kree (Summer) Harrison, and Angie Miller. He would announce the rest of the rankings before unveiling who was going home. Oh, how very X Factor of you.

    Mid-show, Ryno introduced Charlie Askew, aka Creepy Charlie who was eliminated last week to get back on the stage to sing Sky Blue Diamond, his original song. Why? Well, since the top 10 will automatically make it to the tour they would like to add one more via a fan vote. Charlie was one of the highest of the two who were eliminated. And Aubrey Cleland was the other.

    Creepy Charlie looks a little bit like Rocky Dennis without the abnormality. And I don’t like his weird voice which sounds like what would happen if Michael Jackson plugged his nose and tried singing under water.

    Aubrey should make it simply because of how pretty she looked. The winner will be announced next week.

    Who rocked the stage?

    For whatever reason, Jon Bon Jovi’s dad sang lead for Bon Jovi. Wait, that wasn’t his dad? That man with the feathered mullet was really Jon Bon Jovi? Oh.


    Bon Jovi Live on American Idol Results 2013 by HumanSlinky

    Also, the most successful American Idol winner since Jordin Sparks, Phillip Phillips performed. After running the gamut on Home, he changed it up and performed his new single Gone, Gone, Gone, which is also really good.

    What were the rankings?

    Of course, Lazaro was fourth even though he’s one of the worst singers left. Amber Holcomb was fifth. Cotton mouth Janelle who went to the Kellie Pickler school of naive, was sixth. The best guy on Wednesday, Burnell is seventh. Unspectacular Paul Jolley is eighth, leaving forgettable Devin Vasquez and Curtis Finch, Jr. with their faith in America’s hands.

    Who went home?

    Nicki Minaj said that if Curtis went home, she would too. Devin is safe and Curtis is going home. Curtis has to sing for his life. Nicki got up to walk away forgetting that they had to watch Curtis sing to see if they would save him. She flashed that badonk and a half for a second. There’s no way in hell that they save Curtis and she knows it.

    Nicki Minaj Gif

    (During the X Factor season, I posted many of the wacky Britney gifs. It’s Nicki’s turn. This one is by Pink Friday Gifs.)

    This was predictable and the voting wasn’t as ragged as I thought. And Devin and Paul may be going home sooner than later.

    Goodbye Curtis. It was nice knowing you.

  • David Bryan and “Memphis” Win Big at the Tonys!

    Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan was always the band’s resident geek. A former pre-med student who left Rutgers to study at Juilliard, he ventured into musical theater in 2002 when he, along with playwright and lyricist Joe DiPietro, started work on a musical called Memphis, the story of a white radio DJ (based loosely on real life DJ Dewey Phillips, one of the first white DJs to play black music) and a black singer who fall in love in the Jim Crow south at the moment of rock ‘n’ roll’s ascendancy. Following several regional theater productions, the show finally opened on Broadway last fall. Tonight, it was nominated for 8 Tony Awards and won four including the night’s top prize for Best Musical. Bryan himself won for Best Score and (with Daryl Waters) Best Orchestrations. Early in the night’s broadcast, Jon Bon Jovi (and an entire Bon Jovi concert audience) wished his bandmate well via satellite.

    And apparently the well-wishes worked. Memphis won out against 11-time nominee Fela!, based on the life and music of Nigerian bandleader Fela Kuti. Among that musical’s many producers were Jay-Z and Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith. Though they left without trophies, the three Fela! producers got a lot of special attention from some of the performers. Lea Michele of Glee serenaded Jay-Z and Beyonce with “Don’t Rain on My Parade”, and, earlier, Douglas Hodge, who went on to win Best Actor in a Leading Role (Musical), playing drag queen Albin in La Cage aux Folles (the part Nathan Lane played in The Birdcage) delivered one of the night’s best laughs when s/he started to take a seat in Will Smith’s lap only to leap suddenly away with a coy glance to his crotch.

    The first five minutes of the broadcast looked more like the Grammys than the Tonys, culminating with Green Day‘s appearance on stage to rip through the song “Holiday” with the cast of American Idiot, the musical based on the band’s 2004 concept album. The musical was only nominated for three awards (including Best Musical), and only took home an award for Best Lighting Design. The fourth Best Musical nominee was Million Dollar Quartet, a stage re-creation of a legendary Sun Studios session that brought together Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash for a historic, one-off rockabilly summit in 1956. Levi Kreis, the cast’s Jerry Lee Lewis, won for Best Actor in a Featured Role (Musical).

  • Paul’s Sunday Brunch Buffet: The Big Gay Superbowl LXIV Edition

    Tonight, it’s the 64th Annual Tony Awards! Can I get a huzzah up in here? Growing up in Paddock Lake, Wisconsin, the Tony Awards represented the very closest I ever got to seeing new Broadway shows. And, frankly, as someone who doesn’t really get out to New York all that much (umm, like, once… ever), it still is the very closest thing I ever get to seeing new Broadway shows. Moreover, in recent years, musicals seem to be making a comeback. It’s not necessarily a new golden age, but at least it’s not the like 90s when virtually every new musical that got produced got nominated – a nadir being the 94-95 season which only saw two new musicals hit Broadway, Andrew Lloyd Weber’s torpid adaptation of Sunset Boulevard, and a theme-park-calibre revue of Lieber & Stoller rock ‘n’ roll songs called Smokey Joe’s Cafe.

    Thankfully, things started looking up almost immediately when the late Jonathan Larson’s Rent opened the following year; and with the sleak, minimalist revival of Kander & Ebb’s Chicago. Musicals just feel cooler, more relevant, now than they did 20 years ago, and a new generation of musical composers – Jeanine Tesori, Adam Guettel, Andrew Lippa, Tom Kitt and Jason Robert Brown, to name a few – seem to finally be coming out of their predecessors’ long shadows, re-creating the musical in their own images. Meanwhile pop songwriters like Duncan Sheik and Elton John are taking more than a vanity interest in musical theater as a form, and both have been rewarded for their efforts. Sheik’s Spring Awakening won Best Musical in 2007, and Elton’s scored two Best Musicals in The Lion King and last year’s winner Billy Elliot.

    This year’s batch of nominees has a lot to offer fans of pop and rock music – most obviously, Green Day‘s American Idiot, a stage adaptation of the band’s 2004 masterpiece, which the band previewed with their performance of “21 Guns” at this year’s Grammy Awards.

    This isn’t the first time a rock album has been adapted as Broadway musical. In 1993, The Who’s Tommy became a huge hit. It’s general lack of coherent plotting not only didn’t hinder it – it actually became a sort of selling point. It was a colorful rock spectacle no-brainer. Here’s a performance from that year’s Tony Awards, introduced by (of course) Liza Minnelli – only slightly more coherent than Pete Townshend’s story.

    Another rocker who’s taken more than a passing interest in musical theater is Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan, who wrote the score for this year’s Best Musical nominee Memphis, which originated as an Off-Broadway show 8 years ago.

    Though the arrival of Memphis on Broadway has been a long time coming, Bryan continues to play in Bon Jovi and he’s most recently co-written another show, Toxic Avenger – The Musical, based on the horror film of the same name.

    This year’s top Tony contender is the musical Fela!, based on the life of Nigerian composer, bandleader, and activist Fela Kuti, and set to his music. The show coincides with the Knitting Factory label’s recent Fela Kuti reissue campaign, and is notable not only for its 11 nominations, but for the fact that it could very possibly make Jay-Z – along with Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, one of the show’s producers – a Tony Award winner.

    Of course, Jay-Z signalled early on in his career that he might have a soft spot for Broadway musicals. Long before Gwen Stefani’s update on Fiddler on the Roof, Jay-Z was channeling the orphans from the 1977 Broadway musical Annie in “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)” – a sample which, for me, established him as one of the smartest and ballsiest rappers to come out of the 90s. All of which makes me wonder: How long until “The Blueprint Trilogy: The Musical” hits the stage?