[QUOTE=DKW]
…why is doing an unfamiliar song a bad thing? For all the factors that go into who moves on, this is still, at heart, a singing competition. If it’s something they can do, why the heck shouldn’t they go for it?
[/QUOTE]
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.
- A music teacher my sister once had, apparently a failed comedian, once said to her class “You realize when the audience claps as a singer sings the opening bars to an an old favorite, their really clapping for themselves: ‘Hey, I know this one!’”
** 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.”
