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Top Three Ennui
#441 - 1--Idolista--Top Three Ennui--2008-05-15 00:00:00
#Under ordinary circumstances, the Top Three week energizes me, charges me up, and reminds me why I’m so passionate about this contest. But here I am, two full days after the performance show and I still am having a tough time finding anything to say about it. Maybe it’s a good thing this season is ending. I feel so very tired of it all of a sudden. - I heard nine songs performed by three competent singers, but not a single one of them seemed like a good fit or moved me in any way whatsoever. I keep thinking about past years where someone in the Top Three sang their heart out and blew me away (yes, Elliott, this includes you), and feeling somehow cheated at the smorgasbord of mediocre songs and mediocre performances this year. Of the nine songs performed, the judges’ choices came closest to making sense, but that’s only speaking relatively. The contestants’ own choices did them nothing but harm, and the producers’ choices were so wacked as to be downright ridiculous.
The kindest thing I can think of to say about the producers’ choices is that they favored no one contestant at the expense of any other. They were uniformly dreadful. David the Younger sounded good on Paula’s choice “And So It Goes”, slowing it down, filling it with unnecessary runs, and making it an earnest ballad as he tends to do with anything he sings. But it broke no new ground, stretched David in no way whatsoever, and is a song that has already been done on Idol. Yawn….. Next. Randy’s choice for Syesha was, you guessed it, the same type of diva song they warned contestants against doing all season. Alesia Keyes is a wonderful singer, very talented, very popular and with a very distinct style. Syesha made a valiant effort to tweak the song just a bit to make it her own without deviating too far from the original, but was simply unable to rise above that original in any way.
After telling contestants all year long not to sing a diva song unless you can do it better, I just don’t see the point in this choice. Unless, of course, the point was to force Syesha to crash and burn. But, as with David A above, this was Syesha’s best effort of the evening. And she did look positively luminous. She’s without question a very pretty girl. Simon’s choice of Robert Flack classic “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” for David the Elder did, at least, fit one of the goals for judges’ picks – it definitely stretched David far away from his usual comfort zone. David did ok with it, not phenomenal as Simon would have had you believe, but creditable. But was it a transcendent Idol moment? It was a million light years away from that. Contestant choice rounds are always iffy. Even after a season of exploring musical styles, some of the contestants still don’t recognize what their strengths are as vocalists, or what type of music they can make well and still be commercial.
And this year they may have labored under an even more burdensome handicap – they’d had precious little chance to practice picking song for themselves outside of the narrowest of categories. In an effort to position himself as hip, current, and marketable, David A chose current pop star Chris Brown’s “With You”. David made a valiant effort, but this song on David is reminiscent of a fish on a bicycle – there is something intrinsically wrong about the combination. I understood David motivation in choosing this song, but it put me in mind of ‘good intentions’ and the ‘road to hell’. ‘Nuff said on that one.
Syesha made a play for the male vote by choosing the veteran Peggy Lee torch song “Fever”. I understood Syesha trying to reprise the success of her performance on Broadway night by incorporating props and immersing herself in a character, but what we got was a very pretty girl singing a mildly pleasant song. “Fever”, done correctly, is crackling with sex appeal. Syesha’s version had some flirtatiousness to it, but there isn’t a vamp alive who felt the slightest bit threatened by this performance. David C. took the easy way out and opted for a song I’d lay odds he’s performed with his band back home. It’s a good song and right in his style, but the 90-second performance limitation left this, as so many other songs this season, oddly truncated with the beginning and ending portions of the song stuck awkwardly together like a pre-schooler’s collage. And for some odd reason, David was off pitch throughout the bulk of the song, something he rarely suffers from. I can’t speak to the motivation behind the producers’ choices because I can’t fathom one. Maybe they own the rights to these songs and get royalties when they’re performed? I seriously can’t think of any other reason for the choices. These just stunk.
I’m a Denverite, and there’s nothing I enjoy more than a quiet singer-songwriter evening at the Soiled Dove with an earnest guy (or gal) and a guitar singing quietly intimate songs to a small audience. So yes, I like Dan Fogelberg’s music. Sung by Dan, alone with his guitar, ‘Longer’ was an enjoyable experience. But this poor song has been drug through the performance mud, sung by two generations of indifferent wedding reception singers, prom bands, and more than likely by the elderly trio who performs on Saturday afternoon at the local nursing home. Like Edwin McCain’s ubiquitous “I’ll Be”, “Longer” only sounds right sung by its creator. Now that Dan Fogelberg has passed on, it should be retired from public performance. David A tried to do something with it, but he was clearly indifferent to the song and his idea of spicing it up was, you guessed it, adding a bunch of unnecessary runs to it and making some odd tempo changes. Yawn…..
Next. Syesha did her best with a silly little song from the animated movie “Happy Feet” and her performance ( as opposed to her singing) was enjoyable. But unfortunately, the song drove her backwards towards the ‘scream-esha’ days of the early part of the season. Vocally the song wrestled her to the ground and it got up the winner. Pointless choice of a vapid song I forgot the moment the last note ended. Unless the producers were setting Syesha up for failure, I see no reason to have assigned her this song. As soon as I saw Diane Warren in the audience, I knew what they’d assigned David C to sing. Just between you and me, I don’t get the adulation for Diane Warren. To these old ears, she’s an incredibly average songwriter of incredibly average songs. Sure some of them have done well financially, but so did “Who Let The Dogs Out”. Am I making my point here? The ONLY thing that made the insipid “Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing” a hit was the incredible Steven Tyler. Whether Aerosmith floats your boat or not, you have to give the guy his due. He can take any lyric and make it exciting. Tyler doesn’t just sing lyrics, they boil up out of him like a volcanic eruption. This song would have disappeared into oblivion if it had been recorded by an artist who sang it straight, as a ballad. David C gave it the patented Cook arrangement – pretty close to the melodic line in the beginning and then darkening and intensifying it with rocker angst as it draws to a climax. We surely didn’t have an Idol ‘moment’ here. Just a dumb song sung fairly decently in a very predictable way.
I think we all saw the handwriting on the wall (not as though we hadn’t seen it there weeks and weeks ago) at the end of Tuesday’s show. Both Davids had good first and third performances of indifferent songs, whereas Syesha struggled through all three. America is primed for a battle of the Davids and nothing happened Tuesday night to make that seem a bad idea. So I was unsurprised along with the rest of America on Wednesday night when Syesha sung us out.
I was, however, every bit as surprised as Simon at the hot mess Fantasia left on the stage. I was never a Fantasia fan back in the day, but I had to admit she had talent. With that fright wig of neon red hair and those extra 25 pounds or so, and that song that was allll over the place, I couldn’t help but wonder what happened to the young woman who sat on the stage and sang “Summertime” as beautifully as I’ve ever heard it performed. It was absolutely priceless when the camera cut to Simon’s gape-jawed look of shock. Summing it all up for me was a co-worker of mine who is still new to Idol (only watched this year and the year before). He asked me whether the person who sang on Wednesday night was a past winner. I said yes, indeed, it was Season Three’s winner. He gave me a curious look and asked me “Is he a female impersonator?” So to whichever of the Davids winds up as runner-up next week, maybe you DON’T want to win this thing. Look at what they did to Fantasia.
Idolista, in Denver with her head in the clouds. --comments-->1--1115--5
