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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 and Valentino. 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 Young Guns 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 of Being.”
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 Bad Girls. 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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