Wednesday, May 6, 2009

episode 8-36 (May 6): Top 4 results

In the intro video, Kris says "I'm ready to rock!" This reminds me of the episode of King of the Hill, when Chuck Mangione comes to play on Arlen's town green, and Chuck says to the crowd "Hey Arlen! Are you ready to lite rock?" It's rock... but it's not.

The Ford video is so dumb, it's not even worth mentioning. Oops.

The Top 4 jam with Slash and his band on "School's Out", and Kris's inadequacies just get more and more apparent. I'm more and more impressed by Adam (he's singing the higher harmony with Allison, for God's sake), but I'm still gunning for Danny and Allison. Danny's breathy performance leads Samantha to make a comment that chills me to the bone: "He's reminding me of Taylor Hicks." Blasphemy! Blasphemy!!!!!

Well, if anyone needs Auto-Tune, it's Paula Abdul, and she's got it in spades. This is so heavily processed, it's like the opera singer from The Fifth Element. A terribly mediocre song, with a lead singer who's lit in a way that makes it impossible to tell if she even is lip-synching. All of her increasingly rational comments this season are meaningless in the face of this nonsense.

Oh, no! They've used up their rations of insanely bright sparks dropping from the ceiling! What will they use in the finale?

We go abruptly (so abruptly that I thought it was taped) into a performance by recently-reunited No Doubt. Gwen Stefani is a force of nature, easily giving the most spirited performance we've seen on the show this season. I'd really grown tired of her solo shenanigans ("Hollaback Girl"? Really?), but she seems like an earnest performer now that she's back with her heavily-gelled friends.

And Kris... is safe? Seriously? Good lord! How could any of the remaining three possibly leave tonight? That's unthinkable. The moony-eyed teenage girl was out in force last night, that's for sure.

To distract me from my annoyance, Chris Daughtry takes the stage to debut his new single "No Surprise". I loved his first two hits-- "It's Not Over" and "Feels Like Tonight" (my band covers the latter)-- so I'm shocked how milquetoast and unoriginal this song is. Here were my predictions of the chord changes of the first chorus as I heard them; let's see how they match up:

I... yep.
V... yep.
vi... yep.
IV... aaaaaaand yep. That's a shame.

Daughtry's voice still sounds great though, and in fact sounds stronger and cleaner in his high range than I'd expected.

Ryan reminds us that Kris is safe, so my anger returns. Adam, not surprisingly, is called to safety, which now leads me to the unthinkable exacta-breaking situation of Danny and Allison being the only two left. This is going to be a crime either way, and the victim is Allison, who was the best singer in this competition.

For some friends of mine, the breaking point was the wild-card round; this might be mine. Interestingly, back in the cattle-call rounds, Danny was generally considered to be the hausfraus' sentimental choice, but now Kris's apparent army of lovesick girls are obviously kingmakers now. Adam seems a universal choice to get to the finals, but if Kris outlasts Danny, then America is as mushy as the rest of the world thinks we are.

2 comments:

Pat R said...

the ironic thing about lip-syncing is that popular media outlets do it all the time, but it never seems to fool anyone

Warren B. said...

Lip-syncing hasn't worked since Solid Gold.

Or, more accurately, it hasn't intentionally worked since Solid Gold. Puttin' on the Hits, a lip-sync competition, was the cultural milestone that ironically turned lip-syncing from acceptable as business-as-usual into a fake-out tactic in the public eye.