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Tag: crystal bowersox

  • American Idol Season 10 – Who Makes The Final 5?

    Jimmy Iovine wants us to believe that Jacob Lusk is close to elimination. Randall Jackson said the same thing last night. Think about this for a second. In a singing competition, Haley could outlast Jacob. In any other examination of singing as an artform, people would be up in arms. But on this show? Nope, no one cares. They’re fine with it. American Idol has warped our brains.

    Of course, it’s much more than just voice. It’s presentation and charisma and look. But let’s not be vague about this. The reason why people are ok with Jacob Lusk leaving a singing competition before someone like Haley is because he has a feminine personality, and for whatever reason, that’s offensive to viewers. The fact that Steven Tyler was insinuating that Haley and Casey were knocking boots on last night’s show wasn’t offensive. But Jacob sings in a dramatic fashion and it’s offensive. I’m calling you out America. It’s flat out wrong.

    J. Lo Booty alert
    I turned on the show and J. Lo was immediately seated. Fail.

    Bruno Mars is on the show tonight. My twitter friend, Raphael is a dead ringer for him.

    The Idol crew sings a medley of Carole King’s hits. After seeing each contestant sing once and then seing three duets last night, I’m fine with fast forwarding through this. But Scotty was signing amidst 6 young girls. I would’ve never let my daughter be looked at as Scotty groupie food like that.

    Hey, Crystal Bowersox is singing live tonight. You know how Haley has big teeth? Crystal just has bad teeth. But she sings well. Ryan didn’t even ask her to give the contestants any advice. They just went straight to commercial. Bad hosting Seacrest.

    Ryno is taking email questions and the first one is for Casey. Casey was asked who he would want to sing a duet with, living or dead. Casey said Oscar Peterson and the crowd clapped as if they knew who Oscar Peterson was. Someone asked Jacob when he found his range. He said singing in choir when he could sing all the parts. Lauren is asked what the hardest part about being a finalist is. She said missing friends and family. Someone asked Scotty what his pre-Idol job was. He worked at a grocery store and a tanning salon. Someone asked James if he played with a band before Idol. Of course he has. Haley’s teeth was asked who her all-time favorite Idol contestant was and she answered Adam Lambert and then answered about 5 more. Yes, that was as painful to watch and write as it was painful to read.

    Ryno brings Haley’s teeth to the stage. Haley’s teeth is safe tonight.

    Scotty is in the center of the stage. Ryno just tells him to sit down, but doesn’t tell him if he’s safe or not. He brings Lauren to the stage. Then he tells her to sit down too. And he does the same to Casey. He’s also trying to sell that it’s going to be a surprise. At this point, who going home would be a surprise? They’re all pretty even. Well, except for Haley’s teeth, but she’s already safe.

    Big Game James is safe. So it’s between Jacob, Casey, Lauren, and Scotty. Jimmy Iovine thinks that Jacob is on banana peel status because of his clothing choice from last night.

    Lauren is safe. So it’s down to three dudes.

    Bruno Mars is onstage singing The Lazy Song. It’s exactly what it’s titled. It’s one of the worst singles on the album and is the underachiever’s anthem. He sings about P90X, doing the Dougie, and just not combing his hair. Yes, and he put it on his album. And yes, I hear it on the radio. Stoner’s are ruling the world people.

    Jacob is safe which has to mean Casey’s a goner. Pia is going to cackle if Casey goes home. She’s cackling and cackling hard. Casey is going home.

    He went home in fashion. He nearly made out with Steven Tyler on his way out. He had J. Lo in tears and decided to kiss a bunch of women on the cheek and high five a bunch of dudes as the show went to credits. Seacrest out!

    (I guess my entire intro wasn’t necessary since Jacob didn’t go home eh?)

    Photo of Bruno Mars is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

  • The American Idol Tour Is Getting Cut Short. Is This Bad News?

    In what might be further proof of the faltering of the American Idol franchise, Billboard.com reported in a brief post yesterday that the American Idol summer tour, which features Season 9’s top 10 contestants including this year’s winner Lee DeWyze and shoulda-been winner Crystal Bowersox, will be coming to an early close at the end of August. But while I certainly sympathize with the show’s performers, I have to think this is a good thing – for the performers as well as their audiences. Although by its very definition, the American Idol concert tour should feel current, it has always struck me as a weirdly anachronistic concept, an ugly ghost of the recording industry’s past haunting the summer tour schedules each year. Like the travelling road shows of the 50s and 60s (famously sent up via the “Play-Tone Galaxy of Stars” tour in Tom Hanks’ wonderful 1996 movie That Thing You Do!), it always seemed more about advancing the Idol brand then promoting any of the individual artists.

    Especially as the franchise has maneuvered away from the by-the-numbers big-vocals pop performance template it began with, gradually culminating in this last, much-unloved season’s full-on embrace of “artist” values – varied and often idiosyncratic vocal styles, varied and often idiosyncratic stage personae, singers as both songwriters and (multi-)instrumentalists – the American Idol summer tour has begun to seem out of touch with its own brand. Moreover, as the show has started to find more and more artists who’ve already had their foot in (and slammed by) the music industry’s door, there’s an even greater disparity among its finalists’ in terms of level of experience and/or naivete. Even despite the relative compatibilities of their styles (compared to previous seasons’ first and second finishers), why, but for their common appearance on a hit TV show, should someone like Crystal Bowersox ever have to share a bill with a singer like Lee DeWyze? Or vice versa? (I don’t mean that as a diss to either.) In the real world, there’s no way David Cook would ever co-headline a tour with David Archuleta. I mean, c’mon. The sheer diversity of the show’s contestants has turned what used to be a pretty straightforward pop showcase into an increasingly hodge-podgy (in terms of both stage prowess and style) travelling version of a talent show for which the winner has already been declared, thereby limiting and cheapening what each of the performers can do, reducing their act to a least-common-denominator-ready instant replay of the season’s greatest hits and misses.

    That said, a far more palatable (and possibly far more profitable) alternative to the annual Idol tour is already presenting itself. This summer, last year’s runner up Adam Lambert is currently on tour with fellow Season 8 finalist Allison Iraheta. Not only does it offer Lambert, clearly the more seasoned and exciting performer, the showcase he clearly deserves while giving Iraheta a platform (and a sympathetic audience – surely more of Iraheta’s AI constituents gravitated toward Lambert than Season 8 winner Kris Allen in the final tallies) on which to grow as both an artist and a live performer. Maybe the venues they’re playing are smaller than the Idol tours, but I imagine that after spending nearly half a year watching these singers from the comforts of their living rooms, audiences would both crave and appreciate the intimacy that smaller venues might afford. Seriously, how many people really come to see all 10 artists?

    So. Note to American Idol producers. Ditch the “Top 10” road show. Instead of one big tour, why not criss-cross the country with three or four smaller tours with two or three artists on each bill. For every Adam, an Allison; for every Kris Allen, a Danny Gokey. It will better serve the artist. It could very well better serve the brand as well. The Idol tour might only hit any given concert market once or twice in the summer. With multiple tours, they could hit the same market half a dozen times. And there really may be folks who want to see all 10 artists bad enough to buy tickets every time one of the many AI tours comes to town. Just sayin’.

  • Big In Germany – Idol Edition: “Superstars” Mark Medlock and Mehrzad Marashi Are On A Boat

    Back around maybe the second or third season of American Idol, when the show was becoming the established pop cultural phenomenon it is today, we started hearing about similar shows being developed by Lord of the Idols Simon Fuller and 19 Entertainment in other countries like Sweden and Poland and Indo(friggin)nesia. To date, there have been approximately 30 various Idol-esque franchises created around the world. I remember reading around that time about Kurt Nilsen, the first-season winner of Idols Norway – just how cool he seemed. He was a guitar player and unlike earlier seasons of American Idol, he could actually accompany himself on the show. I don’t remember that I ever heard him sing until he did a duet with Willie Nelson on the song “Lost Highway” in 2008 (at which point I was duly impressed), but I remember thinking that he sounded like – well, like an artist. Specifically, the kind of singing-songwriting-guitar-playing artist that our own American Idol showed seemed to hold in contempt.

    It’s easy to trash the pop we Americans produce because we’re fairly buried in it. And just like any landfill, you can bet that there are a few treasures in that giant mound of refuse (future ski-hill?), but the smell from the rest of it is way too powerful – even if we thought the Hope Diamond were buried in it, would that be enough for us to throw on the haz-mat suits and go digging? Instead, we see from a distance pretty flowers growing on what looks like a majestic purple mountain shrouded in the soft fog of an early spring morning, and we think: All those international Idol competitions are actually producing, real, good, legitimate stuff. Or at least better than that awful Kelly Clarkson that we’re stuck with. She’s never gonna last. (Editorial Note: This is my 2003-4 self speaking. In gross ignorance. I didn’t watch any of Season 1, and Clarkson hadn’t put out Breakaway yet, which I contend is one of the best start-to-finish pop records of the last decade. Carry on.)

    But maybe that majestic purple mountain is really just another gigantic, disgusting, depressing landfill, and maybe its shroud of early morning spring fog is really just a cloud toxic fumes rising out of it.

    Maybe it’s just my deeply ingrained musical Europhilia, but I think it’s always easy to fall into thinking that Europeans are just naturally more artsy than we are; that they’re more willing to hear songs in languages other than their first, more open to genuine weirdness in the name of art; and thus, easier to romanticize their Idols – Kurt Nilsen, for instance – as more talented, more legitimate, more worthy. But in 2010, American Idol‘s metamorphosis from mere singing competition to artist farm team is complete, a metamorphosis that probably began around the time of Taylor Hicks‘s win in Season 5 (the show’s peak ratings season, by the way) and has culminated with the coronation of an Idol, Lee DeWyze, not so very dissimilar from that chunky (for a Scandinavian) blonde troubadour from Norge; and this against Crystal Bowersox, a very white girl from Ohio, with white-girl dreadlocks, a serious Janis Joplin jones, a long-standing residency at one of her local pubs, and really bad teeth, who not only writes her own songs, but writes them well enough that one of them was actually featured in an Idol video package last week. American Idol has become the very epitome of the Idols I’d always imagined all those Euro Idols to be. (And yet, this season, I couldn’t have been less interested in watching it.)

    Meanwhile, the most recent winner of the German Idol equivalent Deutschland sucht den Superstar , 29-year-old Iranian-born singer Mehrzad Marashi has just released the follow-up to his debut, show finale single “Don’t Believe”, which is still charting in Germany’s Top 10 this week. The song, “Sweat (The A La La La La Long Song)” is a pop-reggae duet with openly gay former Superstar winner Mark Medlock, the German franchise’s most successful winner to date. If you are still harboring any romantic notions about the presumed artistic superiority of the artists developed by international (read: non-American) Idol franchises, let the video you’re about to see be your reality check.

    BTW: Marashi’s the one whose ridiculous, Guido-er-than-thou facial hair doesn’t form the weird trident points on his chin. And did I mention Medlock’s gayness? Also: Andy Samberg should sue.