I can’t
wait to see two people booted off this week. I don’t
even care who it is anymore; I just want to see this
bullshit start wrapping up. I’ve been bored all
season long with these personality-free lumps. I blame
the producers and story editors, of course. It’s
their job to craft a compelling backstory out of
the mundane nothingness that most people bring to the table.
And this year the best they could come up
with—not counting Sanjaya, to whom I will
forever be grateful for the entertainment he’s
provided—is that TimberFake used to be almost
fat but lost it all when Los Angeles record execs told
him to take a hike to Weight Watchers, LaKisha worked in a
bank, Blake can make his mouth do stupid pet tricks, and
Phil Stacey has victorious egg-branding sperm. And
there’s very little suspense left now that
it’s become clear that every single person left will
have something at least resembling a career, even if
they never become the next Kelly or Carrie. As long as
there are gay pride festivals and Taste of Omaha
street fairs, none of these kids will see their dreams of
small-scale stardom die on the vine.
Seacrest
introduces Tuesday night’s show and walks out onstage
as the camera cuts to Antonella Barba in the audience.
I hear she’s dating TimberFake now. I have no
idea if that’s true, but I’m not above
spreading it around. And they’re both cute, so why
not? Gina Glocksen is in the audience too, loaded down
with fashion chains and stuff. Seacrest tells the
audience that combined with the corporate sponsorship from
Coke and Ford and Fox and whoever else, they raised
about 70 million bucks last week. And again I say
those three corporations alone could have each matched
that number, instead of however much Coke and Ford donated
into the kitty to sit next to News Corp.’s
piss-weak $5 million drop in the bucket. Those three
alone could have fuckin’ New Orleans up and running
at full steam again right now with no help from anyone, so I
would love it if everyone could just shut up already
about how amazing they’ve been during this
meaningful time.
Tonight’s
mentor is Jon Bon Jovi. They roll the
This-Person-Is-Legendary clip. Seacrest’s
narration explains that during the past two decades Bon
Jovi has become “one of the greatest rock bands in
history,” gives concert tour stats about
eleventy jillion fans and tickets and countries, and
says that they’ve sold 120 million albums.
That’s nice. He leaves out the parts about
Ally McBeal and Moonlight andValentino. And also the part about Bon Jovi
being a total joke. But I guess that leaving that stuff in
might alienate the 120 million dumb-asses who bought
those lame albums. (“You Give Love A Bad
Name” doesn’t count in that judgment call, by
the way, because it’s kind of rad. Every shit
band has at least one decent song in them.)
The Top 6 Idols
meet JBJ in the rehearsal space and he tells them that
his kids love the show. I want one of them to say,
“Oh yeah, well, all our moms love you,
Gramps.” Then he tells them to “make the
songs [their] own.” Now, that’s some
fresh advice. I wonder if he’ll also tell them
to sing it from their hearts? Oh, close—he tells them
to be sincere. Why isn’t Triumph the Insult
Comic Dog on this show each week to help the mentors?
I think he’d be a great addition to the process.
OK, time for
singing. Phil has chosen “Blaze of Glory,”
from the movie YoungGuns II. And man, this song is such a
fuckin’ amazing piece of poetry set to music
that Michelle Pfeiffer should use it to teach gang members
how to read and what it means to be truly alive. Phil
is very excited to be “jamming with Bon
Jovi.” And if what he means by that is that
he’s getting to stand next to Bon Jovi, then
yes, I assume you could count that as
“jamming.”
“I was the
kid who sang this song at home in the mirror with my comb in
my hand,” says Phil. “I’ve practiced
this song for 15 years.” Yeah, TMI, Mr. Stacey.
And to put that gut reaction into perspective, I just had to
watch a documentary called Zoo for my
movie-reviewing gig (Movies.com, y’all. Check it out)
and that film is about a guy who gets fucked to death
by a horse. So “TMI” isn’t something
I just prudishly throw around. Anyway, Phil has obviously
graduated from overrehearsing the song into his comb
to singing into his combination scalp
massager–lint roller and now into an actual TV
microphone, like he’s about to do right now,
starting off from a perch among the crowd. As he
begins, an Asian guy in the audience grabs his own finger in
rapturous joy, delighted that Phil has chosen to stand
so close to him.
Phil begins his
journey through the crowd, up onto the platform behind
the judges, and eventually to the stage, doing that
mesmerism stare that his night-loving kind are so good
at. He’s wearing a gothy Porter Wagoner jacket
and pointing an imaginary gun at the audience.
Sigh.
This just makes
me miss Taylor Hicks all over again. Now, that was a
dude who could sling an imaginary gun. No one else
will ever do it with as much dorkitude, as much goony
good-time jiveyness. Now Phil is getting to the part where
he has to say the line that includes the words
“young gun” in it. My
husband/partner/whatever looks up from the game he’s
playing on his laptop and says, “I guess
it’s a good thing they didn’t draft Bon Jovi
to sing the theme from The Unbearable Lightness ofBeing.”
And this,
readers, is why I’ve kept him around for 12 years.
Phil leaves the
stage to bump knuckles with Randy. Pound it, Dawg! My
husband/partner/whatever pipes up again, “I’ll
give this to Phil. At least he’s improved. If
this were Top Model, he could win because that
shit's all about the arc of self-discovery and the
beauty of ‘becoming.’ Tyra would have yelled
at him all motherly once by now and he’d really
be turning it out in shoots.”
The conversation
in the room (some more friends are over and yelling
things over the songs, as usual) turns to Young
Guns II and BadGirls. As gays, we agree that Bad Girls was
the best because we like it the most when ladies
reappropriate the phallic.
The song ends and
the camera hits Randy. Before he can speak, my friend
Gary yells out, “Check it, Dawg! I shit my pants
during that! Paula, smell it!” What Randy says
in reality is much less interesting, and I choose not
to transcribe it. I like Gary’s vision of life
better. OK, I will tell you one thing Randy says,
because it’s in keeping with all the other
Randyisms that litter this landscape: He played bass on the
original recording. There. And he wrote “Billie
Jean” and half of Elvis’s songs and he
also knew the real Rambo. Meanwhile, for Paula, it’s
another glitter-and-lip-gloss night, so she’s
high on life and makeup fumes and loves him. Simon
gets booed. I don’t know what he says, but he gets
booed.
Commercial Time:
Don’t throw away that Coke cap. It’s got a
code inside it. And you can get THREE WHOLE POINTS
toward getting the one decent thing on their Web site
that you need 18,000 points to acquire. I know this
because I went there today and entered the code that I was
certain would bring about an instant trip to Hawaii
like the people in that other Coke commercial got. But
no. Three fuckin’ points. Meanwhile, Fergie is
still slutting it up for Candies shoes. A couple weeks ago
this would—and did—fill me with rage.
But now it just feels like I’m being beaten down
by a repeatedly abusive spouse.
Back to the show.
Jordin is here to make Bon Jovi feel old, granting my
earlier wish with the following line, “My mom is
gonna flip out!” Cut to JBJ, who’s now
simmering with a rage I’ve not seen since Ellen
failed to make the crowd laugh last week on the Idol
Gives Back show. JBJ, in the little interview bit,
marvels at her age and how he “couldn’t sing
half that good at 17 years old.” Oh, Jon, you
know that’s not true. You were great
when you sang “R2D2, We Wish You a Merry
Christmas” on that Star Wars album back
in the day. And false modesty is just as bad as being
conceited. Remember that.
Jordin takes the
stage in Rocker Chick 101 gear. She’s gonna go for
the Janet Jackson “Black Cat” thing, you
can tell. But she’s alternately limp and stiff,
awkwardly flat and unconfidently screechy, and—oh,
man, look at Paula, she’s either crying out in
pain or grimacing angrily or rocking out, it’s
hard to tell because they only show it for a second, but it
looks great, whatever it
is—and…and…I just lost my train
of thought. Yeah, so no Janet. This was more like LaToya.
She’s also having a Gina Red-Streak moment, but she
did it all over her head so that now it appears as
though those alien slugs in that incredible movie
Slither are inching their collective way out of
her skull. It’s rotten from head to toe, inside and
out, and she knows it, because when the judges take her to
task—I expect but don’t get to hear
Randy announce that he played keytar on the original
track—she owns up to it immediately, acknowledging
that she was way out of her element. To some people,
that may seem like a sympathy ploy, and I’m
sure it is, since nothing this girl does seems like
anything less than one long audition for her own Disney
Channel sitcom, one where she gets to sing at the end
of every episode. And you know what? I might watch
that if it happened. My 10-year-old niece got me
really into That’s So Raven a while back, and
I’ll tell you, it didn’t suck much at all.
After some
commercials LaKisha is ready to show off her truly New
Jersey-ish outfit that I assume is a tribute to JBJ’s
home state: black jeans and a black tube-top thing
with an eye-gougingly red stripe around the middle
that makes her look like a magician tried to saw her in
half. But here’s what’s great about
stupid clothes: If you have enough oomph in you, then
you can wear discarded tires from the junkyard and everyone
will get out of your way. So when she refuses to sit with
Seacrest to answer the viewer mail question because
she wants to show off her fatness while joking about
it while simultaneously presenting her gigantic
bazooms to the entire planet via satellite, you seriously
think to yourself, Yeah, you look amazing.
Now, normally
during this bit I say that Seacrest has received a question
from Somebody From Somewhere, but this week’s comes
from a chick named Kathy in Rowlett, Texas. I only
mention it because Seacrest butchers the name and
it’s a place I know well, as it’s where almost
all my relatives live. He pronounces it ROE-lette,
when in fact the first syllable rhymes with
“cow” and the emphasis is on the
“lette.” It’s a suburb of Dallas.
So thanks for that, you big dumb dummy. They pay you good
money for this shit. Get it together. I forget what
the question was.
One thing I love
about LaKisha this week is that she’s barely heard of
Bon Jovi. She says she’s seen him on Oprah
but has never listened to his songs. That means she has no
idea what song was a hit and what wasn’t, and
that’s good for her here. She picks something
called “This Ain’t a Love Song,” and
she sails through it unburdened by any cultural weight
it might have attached to it already because there
simply isn't any. In fact, she slams it down so hard that I
can’t even imagine JBJ singing it ever, not on this
planet and not on the one where he sings Christmas
carols to LucasFilms’ copyrighted intellectual
property. Moreover, I fear for the cameraman’s life
at the end of the song—he being closest to her,
I assume—because she just stops singing, all
superdramatically, before hollering out the last two words
of the number, and her face is all “Perhaps you
thought the game was on and you were kinda right
because I AM THE ONE THAT ANNOUNCED TO YOU THAT THE
GAME WAS ON BUT, SEE, NOW THE GAME IS OVER BECAUSE I SAY IT
IS AND IF I HEAR ANY BACKTALK ABOUT IT I WILL BEAT
YOUR ASS AND IT WILL STAY BEATEN FOR A VERY LONG
TIME.”
Oh, and another
thing? She also brings the essence of three-week-old J.
Lo back into the room by navigating a key moment in the song
to pop a squat right in the middle of shaking the roof
off the building. The only thing missing from
this performance is her lighting her own farts on
fire. Cut to her cousins in the audience going mental and
some kid in the audience holding a sign that reads,
“KICK IT, LAKISHA.” Simon actually
kisses her on the lips after Randy and Paula tell her how
amazing she is. I hope the wig wrangler backstage has
some preventive Abreva waiting for her.
So yeah, Melinda
is peeing her pants right now.
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Dave White is the author of Exile In
Guyville. You can find him at that MySpace address
he subtly dropped into the recap or at www.imdavewhite.com.