A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

A MAN'S WORLD: There seem to be two schools of thought on how to approach Idol. You can go about it like a job interview, courting the tweens and the grandmas with scrubbed-clean goodness and carefully selected Disney-appropriate songs, or you can just play the music that you yourself would like to hear and let the chips fall where they may. Pick one, and you might have a shot. Pick neither, and you'll end up chasing bad judge advice right into the sing-out. Tonight everybody -- everybody -- said that they were just being themselves. Either they're lying or I don't like many of themselves. Bullets:

• Kara looks like she just ran straight through a wind tunnel. The wind also blew the top five buttons of Simon's shirt open. He has no chest hair but impressive upper stomach hair.
• I believe Big Mike just said that he could bench press four naked Seacrests. He sings a James Brown song competently, but without any of the anything that makes Brown special. Mike's one "hey" sounds lonely. The judges, who are confused by large black men with guitars singing frat-boy soul, laud Mike's choice to sing like he looks. The band does him no favors by playing an aggressively funkless funk.
• John Park was caught in Kara's wind tunnel. An Asian a cappeller? He will fail Anooptacularly. Unless he didn't speak until he turned six, he does not understand how to count to "second language." Park has a reedy voice that thins as it climbs, and he is sitting on a stool, which practically screams "now is the time for sleepy viewers to survey the fridge." This is an optimal song choice for Park, but it's not good. I amuse myself by imagining that Kara is virulently racist and believes that Asians should focus on violin. Suddenly, the hand gestures and facial expressions make sense.
• Casey James. Whoever said last week in the Lost comments that Emilie de Ravin looks completely different wasn't kidding. The judges criticize James's "I Don't Wanna Be" as pitchy, but they're missing the point. Nobody gives a shit about pitch when a guy is whaling away on a distorted guitar (even if you whiff on the fade-out solo). Have they ever heard rock music? You can be messy if you do it in a good way. My only problem with this is that James has Archuletal dead eyes.
• Alex Lambert. I don't think that's a mullet -- I think it's a mullet wig. He chose John Legend, a guy with a much larger voice and much more pronounced facial tics than Lambert, and he sings it in front of a band that is murdering the song as squarely as it can. This is just easy listening. Boo, get off the stage.
• Is Todrick Hall singing Tina Turner? An oldie by a woman? After the judges told him that they associate him too much with dancing? Odd choice. I generally like people who sing behind the beat, but wow, he is too behind the beat. A competent, but hyperactive, vocal on a song that nobody in 2010 would buy, although he did try to update it (naturally, the judges hated that).
• Jermaine Sellers won me over with the onesie, then lost me with the shark-fin hair. He got as far as "there's too many of you crying," and I was done already. This arrangement is abysmal, total Muzak schmaltz. Marvin Gaye's voice is all about pleading and urgency, and Sellers is singing this like he has nowhere to be. Pass.
• Andrew Garcia is performing this like Chaz Bono doing an allocution. I'm not fond of the song (or the backup singers who literally joined for only one line), but I like the rasp of Garcia's voice and the head of steam he builds up when he's going for it. Naturally, the judges thought it was pitchy. See Casey James, supra. He is just way better than, say, John Park at exactly the same thing.
• Frankie MunizAaron Kelly does not know that Motown Night murders contestants in broad daylight. He does "My Girl," a song nearly three times as old as he is, and who would buy this shit? Randy likes it. Why? Because he likes to hear sixteen-year-old-boys sing songs from his father's childhood? Aaron Kelly, incidentally, has the worst falsetto I've ever heard.
• Oh, Tim Urban's clip package. Now that's the worst falsetto I've ever heard. He does a bit of vote-begging in the interview, saying his warmup is prayer, and then to prove it, he sings a song that I think is about making out with Jesus's approval. Incidentally, what does "the rush of your skin" mean?
• I'll bet that Lee DeWyze (cough - stage name - cough) always played the date raper at school assemblies. He sings a song that is Idol-current, which means it sounds like late-90s Creed, but he has a big screamy voice, which the judges like. This is the second straight song that refers to lips and angels, but I think the point of this one is that LDW wants to get an angel drunk so that she makes bad choices.

Winners? Casey James, Andrew Garcia, though the judges don't agree. Losers: Tim Urban, maybe Alex Lambert or John Park. I would have said Aaron Kelly, but the judges liked him and he is the kind of tremendously geeky child that the tween/grandma group historically has liked to keep around.

ETA: Fienberg on last night: "If the men were bad last week, what could be better than seeing how they'd do when rushed and underprepared?"