Didi Done Did It This TimeI’ve done pretty well at calling the first two eliminations and soon, they will be harder and harder to call. But I’ll call it here again. I don’t think Miss Didi Benami is going to make it to next week. When contestants don’t look happy performing and it seems as if they aren’t having fun, it doesn’t necessarily inspire people to vote for them. I think that’s what happens to Didi.
They pulled Ruben Studdard out of the closet they were hiding him in and he performed what seems like a new single. You can tell how much a crowd enjoys a performance by how many times the artist has to ask the crowd to get into it. Studdard must’ve asked the crowd at least three times to clap along with him. Maybe next time he should get on his knees and beg. “Come on y’all!”
Ryno Seacrest just said that Ruben and Clay Aiken were going on tour together. It’s like if Luther Vandross and Elton John impostors were touring together.
Onto the contestants …
Ryno asks Lee Dewyze to stand up. Lee goes on and on about his performance last night, but still looks constipated. How can the guy look constipated every week? Give the brother some fiber. He’s safe.
Ryno asks Casey to stand up and asks him how he can challenge himself. The first words out of Casey’s mouth were, “I mean …” No Case, we have no idea what you mean because you didn’t say anything yet. He’s safe.
Aaron Kelly is up and Ryno asks him if he’s ever really been in love. Aaron says that his nether regions were aflutter when he saw Miley Cyrus last week. Ok, he didn’t say that. Ryno told him he was safe anyway.
Creepy girl and Katie stand up together. Creepy girl isn’t living down her nickname with her wardrobe. Katie is in the bottom three. Simon says that he wishes Katie would’ve taken his advice as if to say that if she did, she wouldn’t be in the bottom three. Don’t worry Simon, she’s not going home.
Usher’s performing OMG, his newest single. It’s only the worst song on his new album. The girl might make Usher say, “Oh my God”, but the song makes me roll my eyes. The guy is simply too talented to put out crap like this. And to make things worse, will.i.am shows up to throw his terrible rhymes into the ether.
By the time this thing was over, I was hoping that Demi Lovato and Joe Jonas were going to save him.
Back to the evicting – it’s Didi’s turn. I have a bad feeling about this. I think Ryno could’ve told her to sit down and she would’ve just walked to the other side of the stage to join Katie anyway. Didi is in the bottom three, and all of you participating in the Sonic Spring Singing Contest were all right on the money in picking her, just like George wrote today.
Ryno tricked Big Mike into thinking he was in the bottom three and in turn, Big Mike picked Ryno up and nearly threw him into the air. Ryno better check his shorts during the next commercial.
Crystal is also safe. Timothy and Andrew stand up together. Timothy is the smartest person in this competition. He just told America that the reason he smiles is because he’s the luckiest man on the face of the earth. Or something like that. But he’s genuinely likable no matter how badly he sucks the big sloppy dunky one. Andrew is safe and Teflon Timothy is in the bottom three.
Ryno sends Katie back to safety. It’s Didi vs. Timothy in a “Who is more terrible?” competition.
Diddy and his group “Dirty Money” are performing tonight for whatever reason. This performance was actually not half bad. But in the 13 years that Diddy has been a recording artist, he still can’t rap worth a damn. And just to think, he was friends with one of the greatest rappers of all time. Just goes to show you that rapping is just as much of a talent as singing is. You can fake it to make it, but skills are skills.
I just thought about this. We have a Didi and a Diddy on the same show.
Teflon Timothy does it again. Didi Benami is on her way out, but she’s trying to sing her way back on the show hoping that the judges will save her from doom. It’s actually a really solid performance, but it also shows that her range is pretty weak. If Simon and company bring her back, I’ll eat my hat.
Simon says he’s not going to save her, saving Didi for another week of unhappy singing and saving me from having to eat my hat. It’s time for Didi to leave right now.
Just Bieber – My World 2.0It isn’t terribly big news that Justin Bieber’s 2.0 version of his first album went number one this week on the album charts. It was pretty much expected that the youngster would reign supreme this week. What’s newsworthy is that the original version My World, which was released six months ago, shot up the charts as well and sits at number five.
In fact, Bieber was on such a roll, sales of My World are up 50 percent from the previous week as either hardcore fans or misinformed parents bought the two albums together. My World finished the week at Number Five, its highest point in 19 weeks on the charts, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Has this ever happened before? Has an artist who has released an updated version of an album which charted in the top ten, also had the original album chart in the top 10 at the same time? I don’t remember this happening before, but I could be wrong.
It’s not like releasing second versions of an album happens often either. What about Lady Gaga? If anyone knows, shoot me a comment.
“And then it goes back. And then it goes back. And then it goes back…” And here it comes again. “Wavin’ Flag”, Somali-Canadian rapper K’Naan‘s loving and mournful, hopeful anthem to his home city of Mogadishu has, in the year since its release, taken on a life of its own – or rather: several lives of its own. A top 10 hit in his adopted home country of Canada (where he’s lived since his early teens), the song’s also been used on a video game soundtrack and later last year, was given a stadium ready bilingual remix (“The Celebration Mix”) when it was chosen as the official theme song for the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Then, a couple of months ago, after the earthquake in Haiti, K’Naan performed a delicate acoustic version of the song on the Canada for Haiti telethon. In a timely reminder that Haiti still needs help, a group of Canadian recording artists calling themselves Young Artists for Haiti got together in the studio with producer Bob Ezrin (producer of both Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Berlin’s Count Three and Pray) to re-record the song all “We Are The World” style with a the obligatory in-the-studio, right-hands-to-headphones, documentary music video.
The guest list for this gig includes a few international stars like Nelly Furtado and Avril Lavigne, some super-hip alterna-faves (Esthero, Emily Haines of Metric, rapper Kardinal Offishall, the bands Broken Social Scene and City and Colour), along with a few alterna-also-rans (Deryk Whibley, of Sum 41 – remember Sum 41?); there are a few wonderful “only-in-Canada” names (Corb Lund and the Hurtin’ Albertans?); there’s a token old guy (Tom “Life is a Highway” Cochrane doesn’t rate a solo, but you catch a few glimpses of him in the video), and a lot of pretty youngsters including Fefe Dobson, Drake, Nikki Yanofsky (who wasn’t born when Tom Cochrane had that big hit), and Justin Bieber, who also wasn’t born when people knew who Tom Cochrane was, and has the strange distinction of having sung the first lines of “We Are the World 25” and getting to sing the final words here. This assemblage of stars gets an added kick of wide-eyed optimism from a gaggle of singing, flag-waving children at the song’s climactic key-change.
The result may be a bit “over-inspirational” (as is wont for this type of project), but on the whole, it’s significantly less artistically misguided than “We Are The World 25”. For one thing, it’s shorter. Which is nice. But I think the major thing it’s got going for it is that, while it’s still a remake (K’Naan does get the first few lines), it’s a current song; it’s not attempting to re-conjure quarter-century-old charity-single magic. The original “Wavin’ Flag” is still charting in the Canadian Top 10. (How it continues to elude a significant American audience is absolutely beyond me.) The rap section in “We Are The World 25” felt like a freakish appendage to a song written for a pop landscape that had no idea rap was coming, but when Drake drops a Haiti-specific verse leading up to that final chorus (you know, the part where the flag-waving kids come in), it makes absolute musical sense – it feels organic and right, and places that final flag-waving moment in an appropriately empathetic context. On “We Are The World 25” it seemed like a bunch of rappers trying to out-machismo each other on a rhyme that seemed ghoulishly self-involved and self-aggrandizing. (I’d quote it here, but I honestly can’t bring myself to watch it again… so: sorry.) Also, aside from the rap, there’s a general (and refreshing) lack of Auto-tuniness here. These singers mostly just sing, and some of them sing pretty amazingly – amazingly enough for me to want to spend my evening Googling my brains out trying to figure out who they are and where I can get my hands on some of their other music.
All in all, the song gets more right than wrong, and this actually feels like the proper heir to the original “We Are the World” and all the other idealistic charity singles of the 80s. Even if the faces and names aren’t as recognizable as will.i.am and Barbra Streisand.
