"Don't Audition for American Idol"

I can only assume that Fox was too cheap to go hire some actual aliens to make a show-opening American Idol logo crop circle in the middle of Omaha (part of what people in television call “the flyover states”), where Tuesday night’s audition show takes place. It’s undoubtedly the work of some poor postproduction drone in Santa Monica who sat in front of a computer until 4 in the morning making a cornfield look authentic and was then expected to be back in the office by 9 the next day to digitally erase age spots from Jack Nicholson’s face for the Blu-ray DVD release of The Bucket List.

The credits roll. And no, I wasn’t mistaken, The Boogie’s head is completely chopped off of his torso as the fame elevator rises past shots of the other Idol winners. And I don’t think it’s too paranoid to say that this is clearly intentional. Why, I don’t know. And really, I don’t care all that much. But I think it’s odd. I’m sure the folks on “The Boogie Board” have opinions on the subject. Oh, yes, no lie. It’s called “The Boogie Board.” I just learned this recently. Someone started a fan board and my stupid nickname for Taylor Hicks is responsible. You really never know who’s paying attention. Naturally, I’m honored.

The camera pans over wide-open fields and rolling clouds. Eek. Rolling clouds now remind me of that frightening “Anonymous” video that’s going around, the one that’s making ominous robot-voiced threats to the Church of Scientology. It took someone even scarier than Tom Cruise to make that video. and now I don’t know whose side to be on. But that has nothing to do with this show -- for now -- so I’ll get back on topic.

It seems that there are no buildings where people can go to do things in Omaha, because when Seacrest does his little voice-over about the strong music and art communities that exist there, the camera cuts to (a) three kids playing violins on a sidewalk and (b) some dude wearing a belt and suspenders and an apron painting on a canvas that’s sitting on an easel. In the middle of a brick road. His painting is of a building. The title of that painting is “This Is My Now. And Right Now What I Need Is a Building to Do This in So That When It Rains My Painting Won’t Get All Wet.”

Then Seacrest talks about how Omaha is most known for corn. True. Disturbing, genetically modified corn. And if you’ve watched this odd little documentary that came out last year called King Corn, then you’ll know that that Frankencorn is in virtually everything you eat and drink now. It’s been subsidized out the ass and so now food manufacturers use synthesized versions of corn in everything from Coca-Cola, American Idol’s biggest sponsor, to, well, touch something in your kitchen that’s not an organically grown piece of kale. That. The thought of it makes that cheeseburger in a can that’s been floating around the Internet all week sound appetizing.

Things that are bothering me already about this audition episode:

1. No Paula. Her plane was delayed.

2. Randy’s red freak-out shoes.

3. Simon’s very visible and floppy dong outline in his jeans when he is shown walking toward the camera. To the left, FYI.

That’s it, really. The other things that bother me about this show are ongoing. So let’s get to the INs and the OUTs…

The INs:

1. The staggeringly cute 21-year-old farm boy from Stout, Iowa. They give him multiple chances to remember the words. That’s what hotness gets you in life, way more chances than you deserve. It doesn’t even matter that he’s got weird hair gloop happening or that he’s got tacky double-pierced ears.

2. The arm-wrestling girl. She takes on Seacrest. Nice guns, skinny host-man. But it turns out that they’re mostly just for decoration, because she kind of takes him. Then she sings. She’s very, very, very country. Her voice, I mean. She’s got that vintage female country holler, the kind with the yodel-yelp punctuating it all over the place. In other words, the kind of country singer I love. Simon and Randy, however, are not interested in this. Simon says that she sounds 50 years older than she is. Randy explicitly states that he hates the yodel-yelp. Good going, judges. Here, I have a time machine. Let’s all get into it and all go tell Kitty Wells that she sucks too. Still, they give her a gold ticket. But not before Randy advises her to knock off singing like a country singer. Then Paula wants to arm-wrestle her.

3. The sweetly low-voiced girl who sings a Norah Jones song and who auditions for Simon, Randy, and Seacrest (Paula is forced to stand outside and do Seacrest’s job for five minutes). Seacrest asks her how her “interview” went. I don’t know exactly what interview that is, but I can guess. It’s fairly clear that out of the 10,000 people who show up for these things, about nine of them actually get in to see the judges, and those nine are people who manage to jump through whatever arbitrary hoops are set up by producers and story editors and whoever else. There are message boards with all this information on it, but I’m not interested enough in behind-the-scenes stuff to go find out about it. In any case, Simon tells Seacrest not to say shit like that on-camera.

4. A montage of good singers who make it through, each one getting about three seconds of screen time. One of them goofs on-camera and says she wants to be America’s Next Top Model.

5. The girl who cries because her father doesn’t approve of her desire to SING! Then she sings. Gets the gold ticket. Cries. All two dozen of her family members are happy. Dad’s not there, though. Seacrest calls Dad with the good news. Father love restored. TV makes everything better.

6. What hath Daughtry wrought on America besides that shitty “I’m Going Home” song and bad fashion choices? It seems that more and more “rock” people want to come on Idol and do their “rock” for the judges. Cut to a guy from Tulsa who looks like what would happen if Daughtry put a baby into Blake Lewis’s Easy-Bake. Out would pop this guy. Black and gray argyle sweater vest. Stupid hair going in a million directions and dyed partially red. And he’s got that scratchy “rock” voice. Great. I hate voices like that. If you are going to be in a band, I have the man you need to emulate. And his name is “IT.” IT is the guy behind the visionary behind Swedish outsider black metal band Abruptum. That dude just growls and moans and shrieks. Anyway, this “rock” person may go far because Nickelback is still the law of the land.

7. The Gay One. And by calling him the Gay One, what I’m trying to get across is that he’s the first of the many, many, many gays we’ve seen on this show over the years who’s actually walked into the audition, announced his gayness (“My mom always said she raised the perfect homecoming queen. Too bad it wasn’t one of her daughters”) and then sung well enough to get the judges to give him a ticket. Now, I know that there was some gay last season who’d been in some U.K. boy band and there was some press about it. But we hardly ever saw him, and he never said, “Look here, everyone, for I am a poof.” But this guy is full-on homo. It’d be interesting TV if he progressed. Usually the only gay we get on this show is baiting between Simon and Seacrest. And as much as I love that and need there to be more and more and more of it, it would also be unusual and maybe not awful to have some small-town fag going all the way.