IdolHeadEd.com - Don’t Dare To Be Different

I got it wrong. Again. But at least America picked a sensible bottom three.

Slowly but surely, America continues to delete the more unusual contestants. I never thought Lacey Brown would win this year, but having made it this far, I thought she should at least have outlasted some of the incredibly average male contestants still remaining.

I think Lacey was prepared for her ouster. She took it graciously, with a few tears.

I wonder, after seeing how quickly America has offloaded the unusual contestants, whether the judges will repeat this year’s selection criteria. I fear the answer to that is ‘no’. Idol is, above all else, a commercial entity. And if America wants vanilla, Idol will probably give that to us. And that really makes me sad. Just sayin’.

I had never heard of either of the guest ‘artists’ tonight, and to be frank, it wouldn’t upset me if I never heard them again. Lots of flash, but very little substance. They may be studio ‘creatures’ who don’t translate well in a live venue. Or maybe I’m just too…errr….mature, shall we say?, to ‘get’ them. David Cook, on the other hand, looked and sounded good. I wasn’t too sure about his band’s lead guitarist, who seemed to be playing music from a different era altogether. But I tend to like my Stones the way I found them.

Lest I sound altogether too grumpy, I will say I was pleased to see Tim and Paige in the bottom three. Based on their body of work so far, they were proper choices. It may seem a bit unfair to Paige, who did by far her best work and was battling a throat issue, but we all know the voters’ predilection for not voting as hard for a contestant when they have a good week as when they have a bad one. Clearly Andrew Garcia’s fans rallied when he floundered a bit this week.

Personally, I’ll miss Lacey. She may not always have had a stellar performance, but at least she was interesting. Instead, I’ll have to listen to Tim Urban yet again, and he’s….well….not.

I also want to weigh in on the so-called ‘battle’ between Ryan and Simon. C’mon folks, that has the hand of the producers stamped all over it. This hasn’t been a particularly lively season so far and they are trying to whip up a buzz over something, anything. Simon has mentally left the building, and the program is suffering because of it. I have real doubts about the survival of the program post-Simon, although I hate to feed his monumental ego by admitting to those doubts. But he’s clearly serving time this year, and it shows. But producers, we see through your machinations, I promise you we do. And even the naïve will figure it out eventually. Find another way to drum up some excitement. Experiment now, while you can safely do so. Don’t wait until next year when you’ll be desperate.

On balance, this was a much better week than I’d thought it would be. I’d anticipated a Stones’ week might be a bit of a train wreck, and it wasn’t. Not at all.

Idolista, in Denver with her head in the clouds