Hey, Wannabe Idols! Make sure to sing Jacko songs at the auditions!

Oh yes...lose what little minds you have left....


Just a thought, but I got to wondering something. If it’s the height of summer, that means that hundreds of thousands of kids who sing like shit, and a couple hundred who sing pretty well, are converging on 6 American cities to sing the same dreck over and over auditioning for American Idol. Four of the auditions are already over (Boston, Chicago, Dallas, and Atlanta) but there’s still time to (waste) spend your money or your parents’ money and go camp out like some filthy hippie following the Grateful Dead in either Orlando next week or Denver the week after that.

Many of you are just trying to be a big enough asstard that Idol will put you on TV for a minute dressed like a fucking idiot or making a total fool of yourself. One or two of your friends will think you’re cool, but the other 300 million people in America will just laugh at you, and not in a good way.

Sadly, many, many more of you are going there because you think you can sing. I have news for you; you can’t. You sound like shit and will look like an embarrassing train wreck. Now, some of you will be such a ginormous train wreck that the pre-judges will push you forward to embarrass yourself in front of the actual Big Four judges on TV to fill in the blanks on the auditions shows since America loves to watch people fail epically.

Here’s a clue: if you have never sung in front of a large crowd, I suggest trying THAT before you audition. If you can’t do it, stay the hell home. Record yourself singing. If you sound like shit, stay the hell home. Your mom is not a competent judge of your talent; you could scream bloody murder to the tune of happy birthday whilst naked and smeared with elephant shit and she’d think you sounded good.

Dress appropriately but dress like yourself, with just a bit of panache. Don’t go looking like a circus freak or a crack whore, because that’s how people will remember you. “Oh you were the crack whore on Idol this year…how quaint!” And look, if you’re, shall we say, a tad thick in the middle, for piss sakes wear enough clothes to cover your rolls. Don’t show up on TV lookin’ like ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag.

Learn some songs. Preferably, learn something a bit unique. I’m terribly sick of hearing you people butcher Mariah Carey and Celine Dion. I’m sick of hearing the same five Stevie Wonder songs. Ladies, please stop with the fucking “Black Velvet”, okay? Allanah Myles was a one-hit wonder twenty years ago and that song has truly worn thin.

And no matter how tacky it’ll be, I just know that you pathetic turds are gonna try and milk the popularity-from-sympathy angle and sing an assload of Michael Jackson songs. He’s dead, and freshly so, so let’s milk that tit and ride that bandwagon, right? The judges will love it, right? Nahhhhh…they’ll think you’re a douche.


They want a pop star, so sing something that was popular, at least in the past 5 years. Please, guys, don’t show up in a pinstripe zoot-suit and croon shit from the 40’s. Frank Sinatra is dead and we already have Michael Bublé and Harry Conick. And all of you, quit singing shit that other Idol winners sang after they won. That’s just sucking up and it sounds stupid. You won’t score brownie points by butchering Carrie Underwood.

This will be the year that Idol jumps the shark. I feel it in my bones.

Idolatry and Shark Jumping

I feel a tad insulted today.

In what could be the best slice of irony that I’ve seen in a long time, Wednesday night’s American Idol episode featured a performance by judge/punching bag/Vicodin-munching rambler Paula Abdul, debuting her new single “I’m Just Here For The Music”.

For a show that’s ostensibly all about singing and vocal performance, isn’t it a slap in the face of every contestant and an insult to our intelligence for Paula to have the audacity to lip-sync her performance? It was painfully obvious that she was phoning it in, despite the lightning-fast camera-angle changes every 3 seconds.

Then again, there are currently thousands of people paying hundreds of dollars to watch Britney Spears basically grind up on a stripper pole miming a medley of her songs so the American public is just stupid enough to accept this chicanery.

Later in the same episode, Gwen Stefani sang live with her band No Doubt, and you knew it was live. Later still, Idol alumnus Chris Daughtry and his band debuted their new single, and they were also live.

It was a little over a year ago that Abdul last attempted to be relevant to pop music again with “Dance Like There’s No Tomorrow”, lip-syncing it on the Super Bowl while fellow Idol judge Randy Jackson mimed playing the bass like it was 1986 and he was still in Journey, minus the giant 80’s mullet-perm flat top.


At least Paula was sober during the show; a few of this year’s episodes made me wonder. She went off on these rambling semi-coherent rants, all glassy-eyed like she’d been chewing Vicodins like TicTacs.


Last night also saw a grave mistake by America by voting off Allison Iraheta, the high-schooler with the giant voice and even bigger potential and star appeal. I hope she fares better than another Idol contestant with similar cherry Kool-Aid colored hair. Nikki McKibbin was the hottest little sexy thing this side of buttered toast, and last year she was on Celebrity Rehab with Drew Pinsky. She was third overall on season one; Iraheta finishes fourth this year.

America instead has all guys as a final three.

By all rights, after butchering Aerosmith’s “Dream On”, Danny Gokey should have been sent packing. I like Danny and was sucked in by his heart-wrenching story of competing shortly after the death of his wife, but while I initially loved his voice I’m now finding that all his performances sound the same: pretty one-dimensional and limited by his gravelly voice. He can always sing jingles for Lens Crafters if he doesn’t win. I shit you not, there’s a website where you can buy Gokey’s myriad assortment of eyeglass frames, as well as other Gokey-related trinkets, with 10% of the sales going to the Sophia’s Heart Foundation, named after Gokey’s deceased wife. The site claims no affiliation to Gokey or the foundation. www.dannygokeygear.com


Kris Allen has a great voice and always surprises me by his creativity with arrangements and song choices, but he has the stage presence and charisma of a Styrofoam cup. Reminds me of a grown up version of last year’s runner-up, David Archuleta, who has a great voice and the stage presence of cat litter.


And then there’s the judge’s little darling, Adam Lambert. He’s pretty to the point of being effeminate, and while he’s super-talented, that caterwauling falsetto wail of his is like nails on my mental chalkboard. An unstoppable juggernaut, he’ll soon be overplayed on every Top-40 station in America. Get your eyeliner ready.


In my humble, yet correct, opinion, Idol jumps the shark every year and then reinvents itself. They caught shit for all the bashing they did to people in the audition shows, so they cut back on the bad auditions and tantrums, which was honestly the best part of the season really. They kept bringing on these musical guest judges and mentors who were completely and utterly irrelevant to today’s pop music, like Tony Bennett and Barry Manilow; great artists in their day but so far removed from the pop landscape that they stand out like whores in church…whores with extensive facelifts and fake tans.

This year they’ve been a bit better about their “mentors”, even bringing in guitar guru Slash this past week, and they’ve made attempts to boost ratings by bringing in various contemporary music artists to perform current singles during the shows. They’d never allow an aspiring rapper to be a finalist on Idol, yet they brought in Kanye West, and it was amusing that they let Jamie Foxx sing “Blame It On The Alcohol” to all the little kids watching. And of course they have to bring out any and all Idol alums who are releasing albums during the season, like Kelly Clarkson and the aforementioned Daughtry, and they brought in Carrie Underwood to spice up Country Night since mentor Randy Travis had the charisma of a lump of coal that week.

Honestly, I’ve been so bored this season that Paula’s drunken ramblings and her lipping of her new and instantly forgotten single were the true highlights. I wonder how much more exciting it would have been had they included Crying Emo Sissy Nathanial Marshall, Melodramatic Crying Nonstop Talker Tatiana Del Toro, and Wannabe Comedian Who Refused To Take This Shit Seriously And Blew It Nick “Norman Gentle” Mitchell?