Tragedy
I sort of shooting myself in the foot last week when I sort-of promised that I'd write about American Idol every week until the record ends. For one thing, the mere act of watching the show this week turned out to be something of a challenge. I'm in Virginia this week to set stuff up for my wedding, which means I'm away from my trusty DVR. And I didn't catch the point when it aired, either;
I was out with dinner with Bridget and her house instead. So that left me with the frustrating challenge of trying to absorb last night's show through the grainy YouTube clips that people posted this morning. I got to see all the actual performances, but I didn't get the intro video montage or the closing clip-show summary or any taped messages from President Bush that may or may not have shut out this week's show. (Blissfully, though, Judge Judy's cameo remained intact. All those complaints might appear like quibbles, and perchance they are, but the experience really drove how just how often of American Idol's prayer is entirely extramusical: the drawn-out suspense, the strategic location of commercial-breaks, the reassuringly formulaic pacing. When all that's left is the actual performances and the judges' comments, there's not a lot of record there. And that's a further support of something I've already written: a whole lot of people don't like about music. Or, rather, a whole lot of people want to be made to worry about music, and it takes AI's meticulous plotting to turn what's become a niche obsession back into a hysteria-generating mass-culture phenomenon. Another matter that made this week's show a tough assignment: Barry Gibb week fucking sucked.
When Ryan Seacrest announced last week that Barry Gibb would be this week's guest coach, I was hoping we'd get a full-on disco-theme week, sort of like how the show drafted Lulu and Peter Noone to train British Invasion Week. Those guys were glad to bear in for an entire era; after all, the thought of a Lulu Week or a Herman's Hermits week was pretty much ridiculous. A Bee Gees Week made a little more sense, considering that the group did receive an enormously deep catalogue of great songs. But it was telling how nobody actually used the word disco in any of the clips that I saw; I question if Gibb's management forced the omission. Of the eight Gibb songs that the contestants performed last night, only 3 of them came from the Bee Gees' disco-era peak, and yet so they were euphemistically referred to as "dancing music." In turn, three of the songs came from the Bee Gees' late-60s/eary-70s snoozy MOR folk-rock stage, one came from an already-forgotten 2001 comeback album, and one was a blown-out ballad that Gibb wrote for Barbara Streisand. The whole collection of the disco-week idea is that it should rip the four remaining contestants out of their Dianne Warren comfort-zones and squeeze them to flesh out how to fit rhythm and bluster into their styles. When the show's producers allow those contestants access to Gibb's entire back catalogue, though, they're a whole lot more potential to come backward into tired orchestral-ballad tropes, which is just what happened.
The show's producers were probably correct to plan those three disco-jams before everything else, but kicking everything off with Melinda Doolittle's yawnsomely competent and genteel read of "Love You Inside and Out" was perhaps not such a just idea. Still, Melinda was basically genius compared to Blake Lewis, who is becoming more unendurable every week that America inexplicably refuses to vote him off. Blake is leaving so deeply into his beatboxing/scatting gimmick that he's forgetting to really sing; every sentence he returned to the speech on his twin massacres of "You Should Be Dancing" and failed-comeback gem "This is Where I Came In," his part was completely straight and defeated. My greatest nightmare is that Timbaland is watching Blake this season and rubbing his men together, thinking that he's going to work this fuckface into the next Justin. That's probably what Blake is banking on if he knows anything about Tim's avowed love of beatboxing and of maudlin sub-Coldplay whiteboy moan-merchants. I get a lot of gracious things to say about Marylander soul-shouter LaKisha Jones, but this week her showy displays of gospel-runs prevented her from actually telling the goddam songs the saame way Blake's beatboxing did. LaKisha always strains to Mary J. Bligify her songs, but I wish she would've noted the one time that MJB herself tried her hand at a disco-era club-banger: the brood of First Choice's "Let No Man Put Asunder" on 1999's Mary, wherein Mary just straight-up howled the song without dipping into her ad-lib arsenal. And LaKisha's version of the ballad "Run to Me" was only as soul-crushingly boring as anything Melinda's done in recent weeks. And so the only contestant to emerge relatively unscathed was Jordin Sparks, the sole one who's figured out how to sing those big ballads in a remotely compelling way.
The sole real bright bit of the picture was Gibb himself, who looked like he was spending every moment calculating ways to avoid coming off like the coked-up egomaniac Jimmy Fallon played on the Barry Gibb Talk Show skits on SNL a pair of days ago. His features have aged in a distinctly deranged-homeless-man way, but he remained impressively mellow even as the contestants were slaughtering his songs in presence of his face. And the one sentence he busted out his "Stayin' Alive" falsetto, he showed exactly what these kids were doing wrong.
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