Hey, thanks, ogged.
Is anyone else annoyed by Brooke White's never having watched an R-rated movie?
American Idol? Joe Drymala? It's like it's 2006 all over again up in here.
What is this "American Idol" of which you tweenage girls speak? Does it have anything to do with this "Lost" about which I have heard so much?
It does involve a certain amount of losing, yes.
And, you know I don't think humans are a particularly fancy animal either.
Parrots, leopards, angel fish...now those are some fancy animals.
Boo for David Archulata!
Yeah for David Cook!
I know, I know. But guys! This year is different. Because people can play their own instruments. And 2 of this year's big contenders, Brooke White and David Cook, are capitalizing on it in an exciting way.
Not that they'll beat Archuleta, of course, because Archuleta is clearly the Barack Obama of the race, but it feels a little more like there are real musicians competing.
The American Idol is the symbolic equivalent of the Ark of the Covenant and is what the Humans seek Earth in hope of finding in Battlestar Galactica.
Drymala doesn't think singers are real musicians, pass it on.
9: More like the Golden Calf, I would think.
Joe's gonna get in troooooouuuuble!
And is actually sort of confusing me, by arguing for what even I -- ever ready to diminish the accomplishments of others -- see as a self-evidently false proposition.
I mean, singers>actors, surely. But singers
Goddamn html fucked me up.
One more time:
singers > actors
instrumentalists > singers
songwriters/composers > all of the above.
"I don't need to watch no X-rated movies," she was quoted as saying. "My life is an X-rated movie."
Stravinsky referred Chaliapin, one of the great singers of his era, "'that idiot from every non-vocal point of view, and even from some of those".
American Idol is one of those things I am proud to loathe utterly, despite never having seen it. This opinion is non-negotiable.
My life is the surveillance loop at a suburban post office.
Archuleta!? This is outrageous. Unfortunately, I haven't watched in a couple of weeks so I can't tell you who the rightful American Idol is. But Archuleta's a phony.
Don't thank Ogged, Joe. It's a short trip from having him pimp your blog to trolling it -- very short indeed.
Don't pretend that a pun is beneath you people.
Tom is Geraldine Ferraro here, people. Archuleta is the one.
Embarrassed to admit we've seen pretty much every ep of this season's AI - unlike in years past. And I have to say I used to think Archuleta was going to blow this out of the water, but as the competition goes on, he bores me. Good on Broadway, maybe, or maybe his stuff would be good if remixed as a dance song (Rick Astley, anyone?), but in terms of someone whose voice I would pay to listen to, it's David Cook, then Brooke White, then Carly the Oyrish Lass. David Cook won me over initially with his rendition of Lionel Ritchie's 'Hello' that was so good that I almost - almost! - forgot about the creepy bust of Ritchie that the blind girl sculpted in the video for the song, and then I truly became a fan when his cover of Chris Cornell's cover (hello, meta) of Billie Jean kicked Cornell's ass.
Basically, it comes down to which performer doesn't make you nervous when they get up to sing. Archuleta still seems like he will hit a bad note or forget the words. He's a pup, though.
Brooke White is boring, even more boring that Archuleta. He has an amazing talent, but his song choice is based on some unicorns-and-rainbows metric that makes Disney look like a pornographer.
I agree with moira on everything else.
You guys are pretending that unicorns and rainbows isn't what wins American Idol, which is a weird thing to pretend, really.
I don't usually watch, but this season I've seen quite a few. I keep wondering when Superficial Country Girl will go, along with Pretty Boy in Dreads. Maybe Tattooed Irish Girl will be in the finals, along with the two serious boys (i.e., not Girls Swooning Boy).
One contestant that I'll admit has to go well before Archuleta: the rocker guy who Simon loves so bad. Everything he does is awful, but close enough to credible that it could perhaps be mistaken for real music.
Young David seems likely to quickly become embroiled in a universal-appeal-lessening sex scandal and retreat to Broadway, which will be fine so long as it happens before he provides voice-acting for any CGI kids' movies. But fake rocker boy -- he's a real threat, and must be stopped.
Indeed, the enemy of David Cook is my friend.
Brooke White melted down in a weird way last night. For a couple of weeks there, I was thinking that the top 3 would be Brooke White, David Cook and David Archuleta. I still think that's the most likely scenario, with Archuleta and White as the 2 finalists and Archuleta as the champion, but the pressure is getting to Brooke White and I don't know if she can get back on the horse. But, above all, AI is a political competition, and those three have the largest individual constituencies, and what's more, they don't overlap all that much.
I think the real shocker this season is going to be when the Irish girl gets the boot. It might even happen this week. She started strong, but there's something massively unlikeable about her, and let's be honest here -- having a foreign accent is very much not a point in your favor on (ahem) American Idol. I don't see her as having a massive base of support.
That leaves Brooke White as the only serious female contender, which almost guarantees her a slot in the top three, if she can just stop psyching herself out. Irish girl? She's toast. Country girl? Barely hanging on by the slim thread of her demographic appeal. Sayesha? Not good enough for what she's trying to sell herself as. Brooke White is still the female frontrunner.
David Cook sucked last night, and that unbearable message on the palm of his hand was a huge miscalculation on his part. But this is a Guys Year, and he's more likely than any other guy to go all the way to the top 3. Jason Castro? Stoner in a college dorm room. Aussie dude? Poor man's David Cook, and that's saying something.
Anyway, the three frontrunners are still Archuleta, White and Cook, if only because they have the firmest grasp of what they are trying to sell themselves as, coupled with enough talent to live up to the expectations that each is trying to set for themselves.
I missed AI last night, but your analysis sounds spot-on to me. I have a hard time believing that a nation of tweens will vote for contestants as old as Brooke or Aussie dude (or me). And I sort of hope they don't -- I like Brooke, but justice demands that Aussie dude be gotten rid of: anyone who lives in Buckhead, Atlanta is virtually guaranteed to be a date rapist.
Agreed that country girl is out of her league (although she knows martial arts and is quite hot, so I kind of like her) and that much of the rest of the field is even weaker. Irish Girl is great, and would be my favorite, but she doesn't come off as being very warm toward the audience. If she were 20% more pixieish she'd take this thing home in a walk.
But yeah, right now I'm afraid that I think the odds favor Cook. I think the producers are bored and would like to have the franchise produce a winner with a rock album, particularly given the moderate success of a few of the losers' rock acts. And unlike say, Fantasia's season, this year the competitors are all close enough in talent and sufficiently lacking in charisma that manipulation by the judges can sway things pretty easily.
Brooke is going right for Hillary's constituency -- boomer moms. All the artists she covers are aimed straight for those older ladies -- Carole King, Carly Simon, etc etc. There are a surprising number of votes there; American Idol is watched by 30-ish million people, and plenty of families watch it together.