That’ll show me about missing the first few moments, huh? I can’t believe they had a former Idol and just sat her there to nod sagely, in former seasons they’ve let Kelly and Clay pimp stuff, perhaps Fantasia had nothing to pimp?
After all, how weird to be dangling The Big Carrot in front of the contestants “You could be the Next American Idol! Untold fame and fortune!” and have one there as set dressing only, hehe.
Did you watch last season? Constantine did BoRap, and knocked it out of the park. Different arrangement, though; IIRC, his excerpt included the “scaramouche, scaramouche” segment, which I can’t see Kellie pulling off. Anyway, I agree that Kellie didn’t do anything with it, but Con proved that it’s not, as one would think, an undoable song for a soloist.
The thing with Chris is, I know he’s the best; I just don’t care. Taylor is still my personal favorite; I love the Ray Charles growl and the spazzy dancing.
I call Ace to leave tomorrow.
My prediction for the bottom three
Ace
Katharine
Elliot
Ace goes home
I’d love it if you were right. But I’m worried that you’re wrong. I usually start voting about this point in the competition. So last night I picked up the phone. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Bucky is the best or that he should win, but I like him and don’t want Ace to outlast him, so I threw my votes to Bucky. I re-dialed for 30 minutes straight and only got 2 busy signals. That doesn’t bode well for Bucky I’m afraid.
Once Ace and Catherine are gone I really don’t care which way it goes. I just couldn’t bare to see either of them win or even be in the final 3.
Well, I’m afraid too; I like Bucky.
And I forgot to say, Shut. Up. Kellie. And when you’re done, shut up some more. “On paper?..Gawd, he uses the weirdest expressions!” Mr. Rilch was like, “On paper? Ah didn’t raht anything on a piece of payper!” Whether she’s ignorant or an attention junkie, I am thoroughly sick of it.
I don’t think it was a bad thing that Chris did an unfamiliar song, it just wasn’t a very good song. Nor was it a very good performance, and I can’t help but think he chose the song he did because it wasn’t very hard to do… he could once again rely on the strobes and stage effects nobody else gets and shouting. Chris has been exposed the last couple of weeks.
Even before Simon mentioned it, I got very concerned that Chris had shot himself in the foot by doing an unfamiliar song. I liked his performance (of course I didn’t catch the errors since I didn’t know the song either) but thought that a well-known song will stick in the viewer’s mind better and they will be motivated to vote for him. At the same time, I respect him doing what he wanted.
That was classic, no man, I can’t do that to my song. I would love to hear what that was all about! And as much as I hate Ace and cringed at his performance, it’s not his fault that the backup singers just did not match the style of the song. They sounded really out of place to me, like karaoke or a parody.
And I liked Bucky’s rendition…sounded very Allman Brothers to me.
I was in total disagreement with the judges last night.
I thought that Paris really knocked one out of the park last night with her performance, and they seemed to give her only lukewarm reviews. I thought that Katherine has a LOT of off-key notes in there, and overall, it wasn’t a really good performance, and they fawned over how wonderful it was. Very strange.
I missed the first three songs last night. The local news played Bucky and Kellie, since they’re locals. I thought that Bucky’s version of Fat Bottomed Girls sounded pretty good, and that Kellie didn’t stink up the place with Bohemian Rhapsody. I think she deserves some credit for moving outside her comfort zone — which is something that Chris apparently doesn’t do. I thought his song was decent, though.
I thought Katherine was awful. But I have never liked her at all, so I’m hardly unbiased.
DialIdol says Ace, Bucky, and Chris in the bottom 3.
It’s hard to choose my order this week. In my top three would probably be:
Taylor
Bucky
Elliott
After that, probably:
Chris - probably would have been higher up, but the song was pretty crappy.
Paris
Bottom three:
Katharine
Kellie
Ace
I’m in the “Katharine was terrible” crowd. Those high notes were downright painful to listen to, which is too bad because she sounds beautiful on the lower notes. The song really sucked. And Highlander? People have seen that? What was Queen thinking? Kellie looked like Ashlee Simpson and sounded almost as bad. Ace was just awful. Though I did kind of feel for the guy that Queen wouldn’t work with him at all. He was trying to make the song work for him, he wasn’t trying to bastardize it. I think they took it the wrong way.
Comes galloping around the corner, skids into the thread
Phew! Sorry I’m late.
I expected to hate every minute of last night’s show, but I was pleasantly surprised. The music was so much better than usual, and most of the Idols didn’t stink it up too badly.
Bucky was only just passable. He sang it so calmly!
Ace: I’m sorry but I had to like him last night. He was way better than usual and it wasn’t just karaoke.
Kellie: Where do we call to vote for “tragic car accident”? What’s so fucking brave about singing the easy part of Bohemian Rhapsody?
Chris: I didn’t think much of the song choice but I thought he sounded better than usual. Kill the eyeliner (or wear a whole lot more of it.)
Taylor: Reminds me of my cat Lloyd–a big dumb gray goofball. If only he hadn’t kicked twice at that microphone stand! We’d never have known he messed up. Thank Og he didn’t do We Are The Champions. I heard it on the radio this morning and all I could think of was how wrong it would have been. He wasn’t so hot last night, but he still makes me smile.
Katharine: She’s a good singer and a beautiful girl. I just don’t want to hear or see her ever again.
Elliott: After he said he had never heard Someone to Love, I couldn’t have liked it, and I didn’t.
Paris: Best of the night. I’m actually wishing I could hear it again.
Going home: Bucky or Elliott.
If you want to get a hint as to the voting, check out http://dialidol.com/asp/predictions/Predictions.asp. It’s an autodialing voter for AI which keeps track of how busy the different lines are. Based on how busy the line is, it estimates who’s getting the most votes. Right now it’s predicting the bottom two are:
[ul]Bucky[/ul][ul]Ace[/ul]
[QUOTE=foolsguinea]
Um, extricating my foot from my mouth. Of course, it was written in 1991. I didn’t think about the songs from right before Mercury died. I was thinking about how Queen never performed Bohemian Rhapsody live, of course.
[QUOTE]
Just wanted to point out that you can see Queen performing “Bohemian Rhapsody” on the “Live at Wembley Stadium” DVD, so apparently it might have been a concert staple at some point.
I’m not picking up on the love for Taylor’s performance tonight. He seemed a little too “drunk uncle at the wedding reception” for my taste. He’ll rack up a few bucks on the State Fair circuit, but that’s all I see in his future.
I’m surprised that Bucky didn’t sing “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”. Dwight Yoakum did a decent version of it which had a country spin, so I figured that Bucky would follow suit. Actually, Taylor and Bucky would have been better off trading songs now that I think about it.
Rapid fire impressions of last night performances:
Bucky: Wrong song and boring performance
Ace: Weak voice and can’t work the stage
Elliot: Okay, but listen to the original song before attempting to sing it
Chris: Too much “goat”. Hint: most people put the vibrator in the other end.
Taylor: Looked like he would careen into the audience. The vocals should have been easy, but he failed to pull it off. WTF?
Katherine: Looked great, but the vocals hurt my ears.
Kelly: Nasal and twangy in parts, but not the disaster it should have been.
Paris: Good vocals, but I understood the weird vibe that Simon mentioned.
Here’s how I predict the audience will vote, not how I would vote:
Top 3 in no particular order:
Paris
Bucky
Chris
Bottom 3 in no particular order:
Ace
Taylor
Kelly
No matter how they tried to pimp it & fluff it – Queen’s interaction with the AI’s was not quite at the same level as previous celebrity coaches. Queen let AI hang around during a sound check, and sing a chorus with the band; after which they provided damning-with-faint-praise comments. That’s it.
Ace: best he’s ever done, but still not very good.
Eliot: probably “Somebody to Love” was most damaged by comparison to the original. Without the harmonies…cutting it down to 1:20…it was just a mess.
Taylor: probably the best of the night. I don’t know who peed in Simon’s cornflakes.
Paris: weird. She may be 17 and asserting her womanhood, but she looks like a little kid dressed as a hooker for Halloween.
The rest: mediocre. I’m finding it harder & harder to get excited about this lot (to use a Simonism.)
I can’t remember which contestant, but Paula’s commentary had something to do with the band…and it was a long series of English words, clearly enunciated, but having little to do with each other.
I didn’t say everything I’ve been wanting to say about Idol in my last post because I was headed off to work. But thanks to a sick child that had to be picked up from school, I am now back home and cozy so I can ramble all I want!
In order of most to least favorite:
Chris: I know I know. All the backlash and arguing about staying in his alternative box, whether or not he copied this or that bands version. I honestly don’t care about all that. All I know is he is the only one this season who gets on the stage and looks and acts like he belongs there and has been doing this forever.
Kelli: I undertand I’m a huge minority here. Can’t help it. Even though she isn’t the best vocalist, she has personality. Maybe it’s scripted but at least it’s there. Carrie Underwood has a gorgeous voice but watching her perform was equivolent to watching paint dry. To this day I can’t figure out who was voting for her over Bo Bice. This is the same problem that plagues Catherine this season. Kelli may be a dumb hick, but watching her is like watching my beloved basset hound romp around the yard, I can’t help but smile and say awwwww.
My third is a toss up between Bucky and Taylor. Taylor definetly has more talent, but I think out of all of them he is the least likely to be able to tackle things outside his area of expertise. When he does what he does best he sounds great, but anytime he has to go in another direction he loses me. Bucky kinda has the same effect on me that Kelli does, except as a straight female I get the added bonus of thinking he’s kinda hot. Bucky is definetly not a pop star, but anything with a country/rock edge is fair game for him. I also think Bucky is probably the best of the group when it comes to choosing songs that suit him. Chris has that talent but loses points for not putting enough of his own twist on the songs.
Paris: I don’t know if now is her time but that little girl has great potential and I have no doubt that someday she will be a big name.
Elliot: Sigh. This is a tough one. I think he has a pleasant voice, but the thing is, I always forget he is even on the show until his song comes up. When I run through the contestants in my head, I keep forgetting him in the lineup. I like his voice, his personality could use some work but it’s passable. But somehow he is very forgettable to me.
Catherine: Don’t like her. Don’t even know if it’s spelled with a C or a K and don’t care enough to look it up. Her voice is ok. Sometimes it stands out and shines above the others but not consistantly enough to make me enjoy her. I get a smug vibe from her that turns me off. And she has the distinction of being the first contestant ever in five seasons to make me channel surf during her songs. I’ve disliked many contestants in the past but I always watched their performance anyway, even if it was to catch them screwing up. I don’t think I’ve seen a full song of hers in the last three weeks, the remote always beckons me when she comes onstage.
Ace: At least here I know I’m not in the minority. Other than a few people who think he’s pretty, I never see anything positive about his overall performances throughout the season. Once in a while someone says he did alright this week, but they always follow with a disclaimer that he’s still an asshat. I think Ace is good only when he chooses the right song, which he never does. Ok I’ll give him “Father Figure” early on this season but since then he has tanked. I’m not into the boy band crap he leans toward, but I can take any style of music in a competition such as this if it’s done well. I hate country but I can enjoy it if the contestant does a good job. Ace seems to puke allover whatever genre he takes on.
Basically in my opinion I have to enjoy the overall person and performance. It’s not all vocals to me. One of my favorite performers is Steven Tyler, the man does nothing but screech and wail, but I could listen to or watch him anythime, cause he’s cool like that. 
Not that I don’t like a good vocal. Freddie Mercury is the God of my music collection.
Okay, I’m going to try something different, what my grandmother always said to do (even though she never did it), which is the old “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything” philosophy. So let’s see if I can only say nice stuff about everybody.
Bucky: He picks good songs for his voice, and as long as I don’t look at him I really enjoy his performances. He has an unusual voice, and for no known reason, especially considering my general dislike of country, I actually like him. I thought he had one of his best performances thus far this week.
Ace: Uh…he wasn’t as nasal as usual? That’s about all I can come up with in the plus column. 
Kellie: She’s got the dumb blonde shtick down cold. That’s all I got.
Chris: Brave to choose a less well known song. And less goat vibrato than Carmen. Wants this more than anyone else. Time to step outside the alt rock box, Chris, if you want to win it!
Taylor: Most relaxed on stage, by far. Best at working the whole stage. Has fun. I enjoy watching him because he’s enjoying himself. A natural performer, which successfully counteracts a lot of singing flaws.
Katharine: Good a good career in musical theater, and Papa T. drools every time she’s onstage. A solid if less-than-scintillating performer. I always think I should like her more than I do.
Elliott: Just a’ight this week. Less nervous than usual. Otherwise, I got nothin’.
Paris: I think it’s the speaking voice that causes people to forget she’s less than a year from no-longer-jailbait. Technically the strongest singer ever on Idol, although since that’s not what they’re looking for, I’m not sure that’s as positive as I’d like it to be. She’s got a brilliant career in front of her somewhere.
My rankings, top to bottom:
Taylor
Paris
Bucky
Elliott
Katharine
Chris
Kellie
Ace
It’s not, necessarily. But as a professional singer, if you’re going to do something the audience is unfamiliar with, you need to have the chops to take them on the journey with you.*
Last season, Bo Bice sand a fairly obscure tune by a more or less uncelebrated heavy metal band, doing it a capella of all things, and for the time he was singing it, it was the favorite song of everyone in the world who was watching.
He had the chops to do it, he knew he had the chops, and he had the confidence to go for it.
I get the feeling a lot this year that the contestants, particularly Chris and Paris, are attempting to have their own Bo Bice moment, where they lift a song out of obscurity by the sheer power of their performance. There have been more performances of more obscure songs this year than any season I’ve seen. And it would be okay if all the performances put it over the way Bo Bice put over “In a Dream”. But for the most part, they haven’t pulled it off.
And meanwhile, there’s a singing competition going on. It’s like a baseball player who strikes out while trying ot hit one out of the park on every pitch. Sometimes a double or triple is good enough, and keeps you in the game until a nice meatball falls into your lap that you can really swat.
Moving on from my comments in last week’s thread, I tried to listen to the performances with an ear toward whether I would actually look forward to hearing any of them on the radio, or buying a CD, or even just if it struck me as “Yeah, that person sounds professional enough that I wouldn’t wonder why they’ve been recorded in the first place if this came out commercially.”
I thought Paris’ performance was weird** too, but I found it intriguing. Kellie convinced me that she could almost rock out if she wanted to, but it’s terrible to hear BR cut up so badly. Chris and Katharine managed to find tunes that allowed them to stay in their safe zones, which will probably hurt them. I love Kat’s voice, but the performance was nothing I hadn’t heard from her before even though it stood out in terms of sound quality. Everything Chris does sounds exactly the same. Can you imagine a whole CD of that? The rest pretty much just plain sucked, especially Ace. Taylor did a song we’ve already heard this year, and acted ridiculous; Elliot, for all the promise he showed getting into the finals, just can’t seem to cut it in the big leagues, and Bucky is just a goofy little non-entity. If I hadn’t heard of American Idol, and any of those performances were played in my vicinity, my reaction would be: “WTF? Who thought it was a good idea to record this crap?”
And the band REALLY sucks this year, along with the mixing. There’s a whole lot of problems with a whole lot of the performances this season that aren’t even the singers’ faults.
** That was the sum total of Simon’s comment. He said it was wierd, and as the music swelled up, he muttered “That’s it.”
I’m with Mama Tiger on Taylor. So he has gray hair and he moves in a funny way and doesn’t have the most fantastic voice. It’s okay. He has a lot of fun, clearly loves music, and he’s great fun to watch. I still can’t tell if he will make it to the end, but I hope he hangs on for a few more weeks.
Exactly. She bugs the crap out of me.
[vacant expression] “Crap? What’s tha-yat?”[/vacant expression]
Okay, here’s my ratings:
Bucky: I liked it. Even though I suspect he’s as intellectually dim as Kellie, he does not try to embrace his stupidity as some sort of charming virtue. He’s just likeable and I’m rooting for him.
Ace: Nope, didn’t work for me. Just okay.
Kellie: Better than ah expected, but cannot touch Constantine’s rendition (or, of course, Freddie Mercury).
Chris: Chris, Chris, Chris. I said what Simon said before he said it. Why the hell did he pick a song where he bleats the words? He has a beautiful voice, yet he seems determined to mask it. Oh, and note to Simon: Queen was your special guests that night. I’m sure they didn’t appreciate you calling their song “horrific.” If you want to skewer the singers, fine. But skewering your guests is ungentlemanly.
Katharine: I was listening to her sing (as opposed to watching her) and I thought she sucked. She was completely off key and warbled a lot of the notes. I was all ready to hear the panel filet her, and instead they PRAISE her? My best guess is that they were wooed by her beauty.
Elliott: I cannot believe he’d never heard of this song. Has he been living under a rock in Israel the last two decades? Anywho, did better than I expected but not a stellar performance.
Taylor: His charm has worn off and I think it’s time for him to leave. People with talent don’t need to resort to gimmicks. He reminds me of George Hamilton on “Dancing With the Stars.” He is moderately talented and charming, but at the end of the day he can’t compensate by using gimmicks forever. Vocally, he can’t compete with Chris or Elliott.
Paris: The clip of her on stage with Queen sounded amazing. But live, I think her nerves got the best of her. It was still one of the best performances last night, but I would have loved to see more of the clip of her belting it out with the band. And I agree that she’s way too young to pull off the dominatrix outfit.
Ratings:
Top 2
Paris
Bucky
Middle of the Road
Elliott
Kellie
Chris
Bottom Feeders
Ace
Katharine
Taylor
Oh, and on a final note: Seacrest’s outfit was AWFUL. Either lose the vest or the jacket.