Sometime before the late-evening news is over Wednesday, this intellectual hiatus will end. My first "American Idol" cruise will come home to port, four long months after launch.
That means no more feeling like I'm under house arrest every Tuesday and Wednesday night, no more shirking of larger responsibilities (orchestra recitals, soccer games), no more scraping my brain for ways to describe Paula Abdul's warped and random musings.
Tuesday night the final two contestants will audition one last time for a chance to be the winner of "American Idol." Wednesday night one will take the crown, and then both will spend the next year trying to disassociate themselves from the brand that made them famous, the way Kelly Clarkson has.
For this final assignment, I've been asked to regurgitate what has been learned and discerned from this year's competition, which has been widely regarded as the dullest ever. (And if another has been duller, I'd like to know how the show survived its tedium.)
A list of lessons learned:
Simon Cowell is the only reason to watch this show. He knows phoniness and weakness when he hears it, excretion when he sees it. He doesn't flatter promiscuously, doesn't suffer incompetence patiently. He does, occasionally, pull punches, but he doesn't have a patronizing bone in his body. Rather he has the straight-shooting bedside manner of an oncologist, one who calls it as coldly as the X-rays see it: You suck, and it's terminal.
His glacial candor is magnified by the gusts of withering inanity that waft and heave from his colleagues. You can't parody Paula Abdul; her comments bear not a flicker of logic, her syntax has no roots in Western linguistics. Parsing one of her sentences would be like tracking the flight of a one-winged hummingbird. Worse, she doesn't have the requisite gall for her job - to be a critic - so instead of saying, "You were bad, and here's why" she condescends to, "Um, you look pretty."
Randy Jackson - He has Simon Cowell's nose for garbage but doesn't have his stones (or vocabulary) for describing what he smells. It would help if he dropped the "What's Happening!!" jargon and conveyed some of his expertise as a producer and musician beyond obsolete lingo like, "You're in it to win it, dawg." Worse, he's prone to waiver on a verdict after the two others have expressed a differing opinion.
TV is a visual medium, especially in these days of 54-inch, high-def screens. This competition is nearly as much about the look as it is about the voice. That's why Melinda Doolittle, this year's best singer, didn't last as long as she should have and why Sanjaya Malakar and Haley Scarnato lasted well beyond their due residencies.
I'm pretty certain that if Nina Simone came back and subjected herself to this process, she'd end up losing to someone with more visual pop and less talent, like Blake Lewis or Jordin Sparks.
The judges and producers ought to ensure that more music genres are represented. This season virtually none of the final 24 was interested in country music, modern or traditional, which has produced some of the best songs in American music history.
And only one contestant, Gina Glocksen, tried to represent herself as a rock singer. But we know that a female rock singer has to be at least twice as good as a male if she wants to succeed, and Glocksen was only half as good as Chris Daughtry, who finished fourth last year.
Consequently this year's field was overstocked with too many generic "singers" who attached themselves to no specific style beyond homogenized Top 40 R&B/soul/pop. It made for some incredibly dull and monotonous TV.
Apparently a lot of viewers and, at times, the judges are vastly estranged from trends in popular music. Anyone who thinks Blake Lewis has been doing anything even slightly fresh or original is out of touch. He seemed "different" because no one else on this show before him has attempted his meager endeavor: to mimic traits of hip-hop, soul, R&B and rock. His act is a composite of ideas and techniques that someone else invented or revised long ago, starting with Beck and including Jamiroquai and Everlast
The judges are guilty, too. None had heard of 311, a 15-year-old band from Omaha, until Lewis covered its song "All Mixed Up." No big deal; 311's not a huge band. But the judges also acted like Lewis himself invented ska/reggae-rock fusion, as if they'd never listened to Sublime or the Clash. And the whole beat box thing? It's more than 25 years old.
The "theme" nights can be vastly unfair. LaKisha Jones may have been the best singer this season, but she faltered over the last several weeks, probably because she was asked to perform songs by artists or from eras she could not identify with: Martina McBride, Bon Jovi, Gwen Stefani, Barry Gibb, the British Invasion, Jennifer Lopez (Latin week was a disaster).
Her best moments came when she got material that suited her, such as "Stormy Weather" (Tony Bennett week), "God Bless the Child" (Diana Ross week) and, her "Idol"-defining moment, "And I Am Telling You, I'm Not Going," from "Dreamgirls."
As this was being written, two former "Idol" contestants were burning up the charts: Carrie Underwood's album "Some Hearts" just cracked the 6 million mark in CD sales and jumped to No 8 on the Billboard Top 200 chart. Chris Daughtry's "Daughtry" album was No. 7 and working its way toward 3 million sold since November. These days those numbers are astronomical.
It's hard to imagine either of this season's finalists doing that well, but if "Idol" has taught us any lessons, it's not to predict the tastes of the mainstream American public.
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