Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Idol Chatter

I think this is Elliott's week to go. He sang "Open Arms" which was quite enjoyable, then two other ok songs. He is a great singer but he is missing that it factor. Everything seems perfunctory, or like he's trying too hard to be perfect and therefore can't let himself go. He's the anti-Taylor.

Taylor on the other hand was awesome last night. "Dancing in the Dark" was the best song he's sang all season. Even though he danced a little bit he was able to keep singing well throughout. Getting Paula to reprise Courteney Cox-Zucker's role as the dancing chick was very cool. Paula even made a funny joke about double sided tape.

I didn't realize that Bruce had forbidden Idols to sing his songs. That's too bad because I think those would be good songs because they are very popular and well-known, but not song by someone so great (like Whitney) that they can't be topped.

Taylor's other two songs ("You Are So Beautiful" and "Try a Little Tenderness") were also both very good. He had one of his freak outs at the end of "Try..." where he just started screaming but I can ignore that. At this point, Taylor doing shit like that is like Scott Howard becoming the Wolf, "it's what everyone expects."

Katharine was awesome of course. I didn't love "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" the way the judges did, but it's a nice slow song that allowed her to sing well. I think she missed a real chance though. Had she dressed up in a sexier version of the Dorothy costume everyone with a penis would have voted for her.
She accomplished that in her third song though. I knew it was gonna be good because even though I was listening to the Mets while going to sleep I got text messages from Scott ("hot damn") and Pizza Parlor Derek ("oooh, hooker boots.")

For some reason Idol doesn't let you save photos so you will have to follow this link to see the slideshow. Also she was killing em in the turquoise dress she wore for the first song. It prompted Paula to say something like "from one woman to a gorgeous woman..." then she rambled and giggled and downed two Xanax during the break. I don't know if she really takes Xanax but it's my favorite drug because it's a palindrome.

1 comment:

Derek said...

I feel like I serve as the "music Paul doesn't like or listen much to" correspondent to this blog.

Bruce is very territorial over his music, doesn't loan it to ringtones or karaoke (except for few exceptions) either so its not a concept disagreement with American Idol.

"Dancing in the Dark" is the "Rocky V" or "Godfather III" of the Springsteen catalog. It was recorded in the 80's a time when all songs were done with some sort of synthesizer part. He rarely plays it live and when he does, its at a time he knows his crowd is so drunk that they'll just enjoy doing the Courtney Cox(-Zucker) dance to amuse themselves. I'm sure when Clive Davis called him he was like "oh you want him to do THAT ONE? okay, why not".

I'm not sure how the rest of Bruce's songs would play on American Idol. Chris Daughtry could do a decent version of "Youngstown" but the E Street Band is very very underrated.

That said, I of course hated Taylor's version of "Dancing in the Dark". Of course I don't really like Taylor so that probably had me biased. Bringing up Paula was a smart move however, I just wish she did the Courtney Cox (-Zucker) dance.