A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

I'M GONNA BE LIKE YOU, DAD, I'M GONNA BE JUST LIKE YOU: While attending to other business last night, I watched, with one eye, MTV's heavily-promoted Rock Off the Old Block Parents Just Don't Understand Your Mama Don't Dance and Your Daddy Don't Rock and Roll Rock the Cradle. If you're like me, at some point in the last six years you have complained about American Idol's relentless cheesiness, from its chrome-and-clip-art-fire stage to its lowest-common-denominator song selection to its fetishization of conformity, melisma, and adolescent male androgyny. One way to silence that complaint would be to fix all of the problems with Idol. Another way would be to demonstrate that it could be far, far worse. Ergo: Rock the Cradle.

Oy. There is no part of this Idol ripoff that is without problems -- the set (cramped and cardboard-flimsy), the contestants (mostly terrible, all lacking either charisma or talent and often both, and including one unpleasantly mouthy child with disfiguring plastic surgery), the parents (mortified for their children, but at least nice about it, if name-droppy), the host (cut-rate Dunkelman), the judges (Belinda Carlisle looking ageless but coated in spar varnish; some choreographer; some stylist; Britney's prodigal Svengali -- none of whom said anything worth hearing, making it Idol 1/3, Cradle 0), the weird editing choices (if you're trying to sell a talent show, should you show the band rolling their eyes at the contestants' lack of talent?). So allow me to single out one part of the production for particular criticism: the sound engineer. The pitch problems were so pervasive across all contestants that the only possible explanation is that they couldn't hear themselves sing. Just one in a million details that seem almost intended to remind us that if another show sometimes seems too professional, that at least means that it's professional in the first place.

Actually, I have one more criticism. It's really hard to get clearance for Led Zeppelin songs on TV or in the movies. The only time I can recall it being done by somebody who was not a friend of the band was when Sean Combs was allowed to rap over an orchestra doing Kashmir on SNL. So the fact that Dee Snider was able to twist Robert Plant's arm so that his son could screech his way through "Rock and Roll" is kind of galling.