BESIDES, THAT MAY BE THE ONLY BURNING MAN PICTURE I'VE EVER SEEN THAT DIDN'T INCLUDE A GLITTER-PAINTED REPRODUCTIVE ORGAN: It has not escaped my attention that my
Idol previews have been
so off-base that one might just as accurately predict results by throwing darts at a poster of last season’s contestants. So this week instead of ranking singers by how likely I think it is that they’re doomed, I will rank them in reverse order of how doomed they are assuming that America votes alphabetically.
Before I do, though, I should mention the pictures of last week’s pimpsloteer, Adam Lambert, that are lukewarming up the Internets. Lambert, like every person who ever went to college, apparently makes out with people and wears silly things while partying, and like seemingly every person who went to college after 1998, he gets his picture taken doing these things. The putative controversy, if there is one (and I doubt there will be one outside the TMZ world) is that the person he makes out with is a man, and the party at which he wears silly things is Burning Man. It seems inconceivable to me that
Idol would make a big deal out of this. Even if it hasn’t moved, the line between kicked off and tolerated falls between "accepted money for nude photos posted on mock-pedophile web site"/"criminal record" and "took partially nude photos for free while drunk"/"stripper," and you’d have to keep going a country mile (passing Bikini Girl and Paula’s sexual misconduct investigation on the way) before reaching "caught on camera kissing someone."
Which is not to give
Idol a pass, though, since the show likes to deal with the reality of its contestants’ sexuality by punting the question to a voting public with significant chastity-fetishist blocs. It’s hard to identify contestants who have been punished for being comfortable with their homosexuality, since people like, say, Danny Noriega weren’t good enough to be test cases. But
Idol does have a long history of rewarding utterly desexualized contestants, from the plasticine Carrie Underwood (a blankly beautiful woman who didn’t so much as show an upper calf until she had been a recording star for years) to Aiken, whose reps repeatedly issued indignant denials of his homosexuality right up until he
in vitro fertilized his lesbian manager. The new pictures of Lambert may not show anything anybody didn’t already know (or at least wasn’t already ignoring), but they just reinforce what I and everybody else said last week. Idol likes its boys non-threatening, and if there’s anything three of
Idol’s big voting blocs – grandmas, tween girls, and Mormons – finds threatening, it’s a guy who doesn’t give a shit that somebody is taking a picture of him kissing another guy. Which might be a reason for other people to vote for him, except his voice and mannerisms are incredibly annoying.
And speaking of the incredibly annoying, your Group 3 Semifinalists:
Ariana Afsar: She had a memorably good audition, she’s 16, she knows how to pick a hairstyle that frames her face, and she had the foresight to cram in a bunch of charity stuff that she can flog every time it seems like she has no personality. Her initials make a great hand in Hold’em.
Felicia Barton. We’ve had a few surprises from people who got no face time during Hollywood Week, but Barton – crybaby nepotist retread Joanna Pacitti’s pinch-hitter – barely even cracked the "sorry, your dreams are over, but check us out Tuesdays at 8:00" montage. I remember nothing about her, period, including which style of music – rhythm
or blues – she sings. One gets the sense that when they decided to mess with Pacitti’s imbalanced head, they just pulled out the
Idol class directory and kept dialing until somebody answered. She’s lucky her name starts with a B.
Kendall Beard. This week’s eye candy. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say we heard her cry more than we heard her sing. One of the benefits of being in Group 3 is that you get to watch and learn from the earlier contestants’ mistakes. Presumably she will not sing a Police song while trying to eyefuck America, like her closest proxy. She was smart enough to travel to Puerto Rico, where the talent pool was presumably smaller, for auditions. I think she’s a little bit country, so it will be fun to gauge her success by seeing if the judges compare her to Kristy Lee Cook, Kellie Pickler, or The Exalted Underwood.
Ju’Not Joyner-Kersee. Going to the finals? No, Ju’Not.
Nathaniel Marshall. This is what I mean by
Idol not getting a pass with the Adam Lambert stuff, because if Lambert is an actual real gay man,
Idol is playing Marshall like a cartoony joke, like the teen version of that actor who is always a flouncy choir director on
Will & Grace or a fussy waiter on
Ellen. Maybe there was no way around it, but the juxtaposition of his depressing backstory with his Hollywood Week hysterics seemed discordant. As a reality show character, I hate him. Unfortunately, I kind of liked the 15 seconds we got of him playing guitar and singing something that was neither musical theater nor R&B. My liking it, by the way, is a sure-fire way to alienate 99.9% of the voters.
Scott McIntyre. You know the guy, really thin voice, kind of lost without his piano but not that great with it, Willie Ames hair, okay with condescension, terrible with choreography? I feel like I’m forgetting something.
Kristen McNamara. She looks like a pint-sized
Bess Armstrong (
edit: fixed link), not just with the sad-eyed and weary face but also with all of the Hollywood Week pointed sighs and temple-rubbing while the drama addict and the gay best friend tried to sort it all out. Her singing was mediocre, blandly commercial with a surprisingly big aftertaste. Her look represents the least effort an Orange County sorority girl can possibly put into looking alternative.
Jorge Nunez. This is brilliantly shameless pandering to the Latin-music market. Didn’t Kara actually say, at some point, something like "I’m not sure I like it but we’re looking for a Latin singer this year?" If so, I agree – I didn’t like anything he sang, but that’s because I don’t like Latin music. He could be interesting, because if that is an actual bloc that watches this show, he could be on the express train to the next tier. People may try to horn in on another contestant’s country or gospel sounds, but I’m guessing that Lambert won’t be dusting off his high school Spanish. A caution re the trademark scarf, though: it’s a lot like a
superhero cape.
Lil Rounds and Von Smith. I say this to Lil Rounds and Von Smith: you and Adam Lambert must stop shouting at me. This is not Dora the Explorer. You can use your inside voice.
Taylor Vaifanua. Huge voice, though I usually get bored with the people who audition with gospel songs. I realize that there is a perfectly rational nonreligious reason to sing gospel at an audition – it is music that often is designed to sound good without instruments. But it seems to me that a pop musician needs to earn his or her gospel. Anyway, I liked her despite her professionalism and she definitely got the best audition-to-Hollywood Week makeover.
Alex Wagner-Trugman: This is a kid who looks like he lives in a perpetual state of panic. He looks like an elongated gopher. He has all the trappings of the guy who wanted to be the pitch in an
a capella group but wasn’t good enough so he really gives it that extra something when he does the dance moves. I have a feeling that he hangs around the
Idol rehearsal studios in stocking feet.
