Yeah, I did get the part about no “true originals” would make it in this competition. What I don’t understand is why you’re so dead against one competitor (Chris) when he’s no worse/better than the others in terms of originality. It seems you believe he has committed some terrible crime against music, for which he must be chastised, while the others get a pass. Speaking of tunnels.
If you want to call someone’s argument “drivel,” that’s fine, but do NOT use the quote feature. The quote feature is to be used for actual quotes, subject to all the usual rules of quoting someone else’s material.
The use of the QUOTE feature is for quoting. If you want to paraphrase or summarize or re-state in your own words, use quotation marks if you will, but NOT the quote feature.
We thought this was made abundantly clear the last time it came around.
I think that describes Chris perfectly. The Chili Peppers arrangement, for example, expressed Chris’s personality much better than the Stevie Wonder arrangement would have. So, I’ll add a sixth question: what arrangement ought Chris to have done on any of his songs other than the one he selected? Surely, you wouldn’t have him be the only Idol composing his own songs. What would people be saying about him if he made unreasonable demands on the house band each week just to play his personal concoction that they all have to learn from scratch?
I’m signing off for the weekend (our computer is getting a new hard drive tomorrow), so I’m just popping in to say have a good weekend and if anyone posts anything brilliant to one of my posts and I don’t respond, please don’t think I’m ignoring you or have conceded a point. (In other words, if you notice that one of your stalkers is missing, lissener, do not fret. I’ll be back on Monday. 
)
Fair enough. I actually feel kind of likewise – although I will also admit that I have purchased two CD’s by former AI contestants. Super double bonus points if you can correctly guess that those Idols were Kim Locke and Bo Bice. 
Did you like Bo’s cd? I liked the songs well enough but was a little disappointed that it didn’t feel “all colored up with Bo.”
I’d have liked it if he went balls out and did “Walk the Line” the way Johnny Cash did it, i.e., not shitty.
You are the only one who is saying anything about “composing his own songs,” and none of the other singers are making “unreasonable demands on the house band each week.” How come discussing almost anything with you, Liberal, is mostly an exercise in reiterating the rules of legitimate discussion and tilting at strawmen?
Sorry; I thought the point of last time was that it was not made sufficiently clear, so I tried to make it sufficiently clear, and stated explicitly what I was doing. Thanks for clarifying.
Um, I don’t know what you’re going on about. Each of us likes different of the singers for different reasons. I personally don’t like Chris, opinion wise, as an artist/singer/performer. I thought that was the point of the show? Just because I’m trying to explain WHY I don’t like him, how does that make me “dead set against” him? Who said “terrible crime”? I’m just trying to explain my opinion. And obviously we disagree that he IS “worse/better than the others in terms of originality.”
Why are your undies so much more bunched up about my opinion, than about anyone else’s? Chris is my least favorite performer. Here’s why. Period. Where’s the beef?
What’s a the beef?
</Kellie Pickler>
I think it was a good first album. Not spectacular, but there is obviously a lot of potential there, and clearly he gets some respect from proven artists, judging from the names in the credits. I definitely think Bo is one of those people who is better live than he is recorded – a lot of his spark comes from seeing him perform. Overall, I like it (if you have the DualDisc, I think the songs on the B-side are the best). It’s not even close to the most embarrassing record in my collection, at any rate.
Hate to interrupt a perfectly ridiculous tangent on the artistic merits of singing a cover of “I’m a Believer” (the Monkees version) vs. a cover of “I’m a Believer” (Smash Mouth version), but here are my comments from the show (I’m late to the game; I had the flu):
I, too, was totally creeped out by Kevin. Now I’ve only seen the last 2 episodes of AI, so maybe I missed the part where he swept America off its feet with his self-depracating charm. But his comment to Simon last week made me feel like he was one step away from pulling an Uzi out and taking out the auditorium.
**Ace. ** He has the Tom Cruise disease. His grin is his biggest asset. Take away the grin and you’re left with a guy who has so-so talent and very little else to write home about. Oh, and his brother in the audience looks just like him.
Taylor - He seems to be enjoying himself. It would be hard to capture his appeal on a c.d. , IMO.
Lisa - I do not like the idea of pitting adults vs. kids in a competition. Why? Because the judges cannot offer equal criticism. If Simon goes on the attack against someone like Chris or Taylor, then that’s fine. But who could, or would, attack Lisa with the same verocity? She might cry right there on stage. Not fair. She’s talented, yes. She’s just not ready for prime time.
Mandisa - Darling, but she’s not “Idol” material.
Elliott - He’s asexual when he sings. That’s not good.
Bucky - He seems like a genuinely nice, not so very bright, guy. He doesn’t have the talent to stay in the competition, though.
Chris - I really enjoyed his version of “I Walk the Line” (Pearl Jam/Live version). He has confidence and he has a masculinity about him that I find attractive.
Kellie - When she acted like she had no idea what “ballsy” meant, Ryan should have taken the microphone and beat her with it. There’s a fine, though very crucial, line between ditzy and downright stupid.
Katharine, Melissa and Paris - young, talented, and beautiful, but do they have the ‘x’ factor? I wasn’t wowed by any of them, but they weren’t horrible either.
We heard you, and we asked you for some evidence of that just so we could know whether we’d missed something blatantly obvious or whether you just made it up out of whole cloth. If he is less original than the others, then that MUST mean the others have done something original. Who and what?
The pre-performance clips of each contestant centered entirely arround how they worked with Barry Manilow to make their own arrangements of the songs they’d be performing. The answer to your question lies right here within Chris’s segment on working out the arrangement with Barry. . .
There is an obvious implication that he and Barry (the “we” in his sentence), are going to change up Cash’s version, not Live’s version. Sure, you could say that he totally meant that he was going to do a different artist’s version of Johnny Cash’s song, but that’s not what he said, and it would be quite a stretch to get such simply stated words to that conclusion. And there’s nothing to support your contention that there’s a “likelihood” they just edited out his offering of proper credit for the arrangement in this case. Pure speculation and wishful thinking on your part.
Replace the word ‘composition’ with ‘arrangement’ and you have a better representation of our argument. And the answer to that version of the question is right here (emphasis mine). . .
One can draw 2 conclusions from that statement: 1, that the judges were completely unfamiliar with the Live version of that song, and 2, that they came away from watching the pre-performance clip with Barry thinking the exact same thing the rest of the audience believed, that he, Chris Daughtry, came up with that arrangement entirely on his own (with Barry, of course), which we all now know is a flat out falsehood.
The man is a poseur. Period.
Snerk! Good one.
Pehaps the debate could be pulled out into its own thread: “Chris Daughtry: Misunderstood Genius, or Fraud, Poseur, Charlatan?”
You should be elected as the spokesperson for the AntiChris people, Shayna. 
The argument you’ve made is superior in every way to all the others put forth so far. Unfortunately, you haven’t put asided the problems with it.
The keyword is “clips”. Obviously, you don’t believe that Chris and Barry worked together for twenty seconds, and then Chris was interviewed for ten seconds. Using your own example, take Chris’s declaration, “As much as I respect Johnny Cash’s creativity, we’re gonna try something different tonight.” Doesn’t it stand to reason that a reference to Live came up at some point at least once in at least Chris and Barry’s session at the piano? If not, then it must mean that they were speaking in code to one another.
Chris: Okay, Barry, here’s “the version”.
Barry: Ah, let’s call the name at the top of the sheet “the name”.
Piano Player: I know nossink, nossink, nossink!
I think common sense supports my assertion. Otherwise, there is a long line of people — including the band, the singing coach, Barry Manilow, the producers and interviewers, the judges, the sound techs, and others — who either explicitly cooperated in a cover-up designed to achieve God knows what or else are singularly clueless about contemporary music when compared to a handful of posters at SDMB. What is hard to believe is that Chris’s statement, which you’ve singled out for its mystical tone, did not have a fuller context that was not edited. People just don’t talk like that.
Excuse me, but Chris did everything that Randy said. He did take a popular song by selecting it; he did put a different spin on it by selecting a less popular arrangement; and he did make it an alternative record by performing it. He actually did all the things that the judges have told the contestants that they should be doing. Suppose he had done none of those things. Suppose he had sung the popular version in the manner it was performed by the original artist: isn’t that exactly what people are doing when the judges come down on them for karaoke?
False dichotomies are false for a reason. I’m sorry, but the notion that Barry was in on the alleged deception is just too far fetched. There is another conclusion that one can draw; namely, that people who are irrationally biased against Chris are going to find conspiracies and deception in everything he says and does, and are willing even to extend those accusations out to a broad swath of people if necessary.
The argument is weak. Period.
Liberal, you really need to find a way to let this go. You cannot argue a person out of their opinion about what singers they like or don’t like. All you can do with your laserlike mind and mastery of false dichotomies (despite your claim to be aware that they’re not kosher) is poke holes in an individuals attempt to *express *those opinions. A discussion with you on matters of opinion almost invariably devolves to you arguing for the sake of arguing, and your “opponent” repeating variations on “that’s not what I meant.” You expend all your effort, it seems, into NOT understanding what people mean, and focus entirely how they’ve attempted to express it. You mine each little phrase, not for what they DO mean, not in an attempt to understand, but in an attempt to find an obscure way in which their words can be misconstrued, can be taken, at a leap, to mean something other than what they were trying to express. And then, incomprehensibly, you focus on that misconstruction rather than on their actual intent.
The sharing of artistic opinions should be marked by a mutual effort to understand and appreciate the other individual’s opinion, not by rigorous strategies of proof and defense.
Do you really think you’re going to argue someone into–to bully someone into–liking a singer they don’t like, even if they’re not particularly precise in explaining just why it is they don’t like them?
Can you describe all of your artistic likes and dislikes in such a way that they are utterly proof against microscopic dissection and aggressive debate? Can anybody? Can’t you argue with ANY artistic opinion to the point where you “win” be default, because the other person finally just backs away? Isn’t that the nature of artistic opinions, that they’re non-concrete, and open to interpretation, and theoretically, therefore, infinitely debatable?
Just because they’re infinitely debatable, does that mean that they must be infinitely debated?
You like Chris. Fine. You express why you like him, and people absorb that and go on to talk about Mandisa. Others don’t like Chris. They express why they don’t like him, and are then subject to being bullying out of yet another CS thread by someone who thinks the world is GD.
Seriously, Lib. Tell us why you like Chris, and then move on. Or please, open a new thread about the nature of originality in interpretive singers, or something.
Please.
Duh. Of course not. But you are assuming facts not in evidence, whereas I’m telling you exactly what Chris said without extrapolating other possible things he may have said. There’s just as much likelihood that he never uttered the name ‘Live’ in his pre-interview clips as that he did.
Yeah, it’s possible he may have presented the ‘Live’ arrangement to Barry in their session. It’s also possible he may not have. He may have just sung a few bars a capella and they all went with it. They are all professional musicians afterall.
I think common sense supports the fact that you cannot claim to know with any certainty that made-up versions of what you suspect might have been discussed, in any way supports your assertion in any factual manner. I don’t suggest that there was a conspiracy at all. I suspect that either very few (if any) involved in that arrangement even knew of the ‘Live’ version, or that of the few who may have known, no one bothered to call him out on it. Evidence supports that at the very least the judges weren’t familiar with it.
Mystical tone? What are you on about? I quoted him verbatim. Period. You’re the one inventing mysterious other things you suspect he “likely” said but were edited out. I don’t deny editing occurs on this and every other show on television – another ‘duh’. What you cannot possibly know is what was edited out. Anything you claim with regard to that would have to be entirely made up in your imagination. Your imagination might be accurate, but you cannot state so as a fact.
No, he didn’t. Now you’re completely twisting the plain words spoken into something they clearly weren’t intended to mean or imply. He did not put a different spin on it “by selecting a less popular arrangement.” That’s not only absurd in and of itself, it’s not what Randy meant, and you either know it or you’re being disingenuous in your interpretation merely to try to support your argument rather than concede that I provided you evidence of what you claim never happened.
Completely different subject that’s not under discussion here.
Ok, this is funny. Do you know what that term even means? You couldn’t possibly, or you wouldn’t be accusing me of creating one, when it’s you who has.
False dichotomy: Chris covered an arrangement really done by Live, only mentioning Johnny Cash’s version in his shown clips. Either there was some vast conspiracy to cover up the fact that he was really covering Live, or he said it and it was edited out. Since we know this show is edited, he must have acknowledged that he was really covering Live.
No. There are plenty of other reasons no mention was made on air about that being a Live cover, so you don’t get to pick the one you like best and declare yours the only “logical” one.
Irrational? Now you’re a psychologist and can claim to know that my dislike for Chris as an artist is an irrational bias? Just who do you think you are? I’m as entitled to my subjective opinion on his singing as anyone else in the world. I think he sounds like he swallowed a goat. I think he’s boring and a one-trick pony. I think his style isn’t fresh and new but old and stale. And there’s not a damn thing “irrational” about that, so I’ll thank you to leave your psychologist hat at the door.
The only weak argument in this thread is yours, since you have absolutely bubkis to actually back it up with.
Let’s remember the context, right? It’s a TV show for teenaged girls. It’s “Star Search” with theme nights. It’s a game show cum karaoke competition. It’s 12 people we don’t know vying for a bad record deal. Context, people. Context.