Mr. White Linen has a great voice but, man, he’s Oooogly!
Oh, limp away thunder-stealer.
Yeah, Steven is making the auditions worth watching. He’s like all the original judges rolled into one person.
He’d be alright, except for the fact that he could eat corn on the cob through a picket fence.
Has anyone ever managed to pull off “Loving You” on this show?
Anyone who says they’re going to sing “Loving You,” you know immediately is not going to be able to sing. People who can sing avoid that song like fire.
I like the Shaggy guy. He has potential. Kinda want to see what the makeover people do with him.
Packers fan blows, but I would turn her down just for being a Packers fan. I wouldn’t even let a Packers fan in the room.
I liked the Rocker Girl. I didn’t think she sounded bad at all. And she doesn’t seem have anywhere near the annoying mannerisms that other Idol “rocker girls” have.
I liked the girl that kept saying she could sing better then half these girls. I wish one of the judges would have been thinking fast enough to say “Well, then right there you’re guaranteed to lose the competition. We’re looking for someone that can sing better then every. single. one of them…It’s a no for me.”
I think Tyler put that girl through just to be nice. She was pretty borderline, but I think he didn’t have the heart to say no to her after seeing what a fan she was.
She doesn’t need to worry about not being able to hit those high notes on “Dream On,” though. Nobody else can do that Steven Tyler shriek either.
Sad sob story guy, if you make it to Hollywood, won’t you be leaving her behind?
Damn. That story actually broke my heart a little bit. Good for him for sticking around when a lot of people would have bailed, but that poor girl is not getting any better.
I missed the last guy. What was the sob story?
I’m finding this season extra dull. The new judges add very little.
He had a girlfriend who was in an accident and is now pretty bad off (wheelchair, unable to speak), so he got engaged to her.
I thought he was engaged to her before the accident, and he stayed. Regardless, the girl was wheelchai-bound and palsied, but with it enough to barely raise and wave the golden ticket, so you know there’s some level of cognitive functioning there. I can’t imagine what that’s like.
I am sure this has been covered before, but are all of the folks that make it to the judges “set ups”?
I don’t see how someone can go to an audition (like the sob story guy), wait in line, and fill out a “who are you” sheet and they get that story.
So, I will assume that the questionnaires ask for personal stories that would make them more interesting. OK. But clearly the judges are prepped for the guy, and they must know he can sing… plus, they have the whole back story of the person taped, on location, so it just seems very set up.
How does this show really work? does AI scour the country for these people before the auditions, have everything ready for them, and then fly them into a city to look like a real contestant?
This is one of the reasons I hate AI. I feel so manipulated by the show.
If I remember correctly, there are two auditions. Ones for the producers and then some people are asked to come back a couple of weeks later, in the same outfit if possible. In the interim is when they videotape their homelife, etc.
Ahhh, I always figured of the people that made it through the grabbed a couple of promising ones and did the back story. Remember, these auditions all happened months ago. Has Hollywood week already been filmed yet? If it has, these are probably the people that already cleared that as well.
Something I had heard (FOAF) is that of the 10’s of thousands of people waiting to sing, not that many actually make it to the judges. There’s a set of judges ahead of Steve/Randy/J-Lo making sure that 95% of the garbage never sings anywhere near a camera. Probably cuts down on a lot of the hissy fits. Besides, it would take weeks to go through all those people one at a time. But I think that’s what you were referring to in your post.
ETA, Now that I think about it, there was a set of pre-auditions in Milwaukee 2 days before Randy/Steven/J-Lo were in town and you needed a ticket from the first audition to get into the second one, so there you go.
I remember the local Fox channel and one of the bars in town had a mini Idol competition where the winner won a ticket and got to bypass the initial audition.
That’s exactly it. There are actually multiple ways they screen contestants - local contests, advance people who scour for talent, the big 15,000 seat audition halls, then finally the fewf dozen or so who are produced out of all that get marched past the celebrity judges.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if the producers for 19 entertainment put out feelers in the music industry for local unsigned talent before they come to town. There have been an awful lot of pro musicians on the show. In some seasons, the majority of contestants have already been working as musicians, and some had already put out albums. You never hear that during the initial screening - it comes out later as people on the internet start discovering who these contestants really are. I’m guessing that someone like Carly Smithson was accelerated through the whole process on the advice of some agent somewhere.
It’s all legitimate - you really can get on the show as a nobody with talent. It’s just not quite like they present it on TV. For example, tonight Ryan’s voiceover said something about the judges going through a patch of good contestants, then he said, “And on the other side of town, thousands still wait for their chance.” What he didn’t say is that they waited for the their chance on the other side of town - two weeks earlier.
If you looked at the scenes in the big stadium, you could see a whole row of walled-off cubicles out in stage center. That’s the initial interview / screening where the masses come through and give it their best shot. I’m guessing that for 99% percent of them, it’s about 30 seconds and four bars of singing before they either boot you or send you on to the next level.
Remember, ultimately they’re producing a TV show. So they’re not just looking for singers, they’re looking for people who will be interesting on camera, or who might develop a fan following, or who have a big human interest angle, or whatever. There’s probably people who are great singers who don’t even make past the first level simply because they’re not what the show is looking for at that time.
My daughter takes singing lessons, and I’ve been to a number of recitals. The first thing I realized was that singing ability is not rare at all. Just among her teacher’s students there are probably half a dozen who can sing well enough that you’d think they were pretty good if you saw them auditioning on Idol. Every city has thousands of people who can sing on-key and have technical chops. Church choirs and bars are full of them. So to make it on Idol, you’ve got to bring something else to the table. Hence the pre-screening, the B-Roll footage that is shot, the camera crews going to people’s homes after the initial screening, etc.
I wonder how many of those who get picked and filmed wind up getting dropped because they aren’t good in front of the camera, or because they have obnoxious behaviours or obnoxious parents, or whatever. We probably never see those ones on TV, even if they can sing well.