Another One Bites the Dust on American Idol

The contestants perform with Queen musicians Roger Taylor and Brian May.

So last week, speaking in the context of singers with big voices, I warned never to cover Freddie Mercury unless you have the goods. The diabolical American Idol producers must have been thinking the same thing: last week was Queen Week. Each of the remaining six contestants had to cover one Queen song, and we got to find out who had the goods and who didn’t.

Dave Matthews wannabe Phillip Phillips.

Had the Goods:

• Jessica Sanchez sounded great on the non-rocking half of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The rocking half, not so much. (It was a weird arrangement to start with. The scary Jessica face floating on the screen behind her didn’t help.)
• Skylar Laine slayed “The Show Must Go On”— if you can get over the twang on a song that didn’t call for twang. No, the show must not go owe-won.
• Joshua Ledet sang a crazy-good rendition of “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.”
• Hollie Cavanagh did a passable job on “Save Me,” but perhaps there was something Freudian in her song choice.

And who failed to deliver?
Had No Goods:

• Elise Testone on “I Want It All.” Tambourine!? Really? Is this The Partridge Family?
• Phillip Phillips sang “Fat Bottomed Girls.” It was a big fat bomb. He was pitchy in the way a rowboat is pitchy in Sea State 9. If not for the backup singers mostly drowning out Phillip, the already ill Ryan Seacrest might have cashed in a return-trip meal ticket all over the judges.
• For the second half of the show, the contestants got to pick any song they wanted, and each went boldly into his or her own wheelhouse, as Randy Jackson would say. Phillip chose—surprise!—a Dave Matthews song. Randy lavished praise on him as a true artist, assuming artistmeans “sounding exactly like someone else and singing that guy’s songs in exactly the same way he did, right down to the baritone sax and insistent violin.”
• When Ryan teased that Elise was going to sing Jimi Hendrix, I thought she’d choose something just up her alley, say, “Crosstown Traffic” or “Manic Depression.” Nope, she waded into the obscure end of the Hendrix pool with “Bold as Love”—a bold choice, but not a bold delivery. What was she thinking? The song is mostly about the guitar and not the singing. (John Mayer does a nice cover of it, showing it can be done.)

Another feature of the show was brief vignettes of the idolettes talking about each other. There was the usual teasing and picking on personal idiosyncrasies, but Phillip was downright mean in his comments. As the six contestants were returned to the Couch of Safety or relegated to the Stools of Doom, I expected Phillip to wind up in the bottom three. Between two wretched performances and his caustic insults of his fellow singers, I thought the voting public would finally tire of him. No such luck. He didn’t even wind up in the bottom three. As I predicted, reality finally caught up with Elise.

As for Phillip, those biting insults, coupled with his allegedly faking illness to avoid having to appear in yet another lame Ford music video, tells me he has a serious attitude problem with the whole AI thing. He’s too much of an artiste to have to participate in any effort to, you know, help the company that is actually paying his bills. Given his whole shtick, perhaps the best Twilight Zone-ish ironic ending would be for Phillip to win the whole shebang so that he will forever be branded an American Idol champion, eternally celebrated as a commercial creation sustained by the adoring attention of teenybopper girls.

One final point. I’m getting a little tired of J-Lo lecturing Hollie on how to just lose herself on stage. Turn off your mind and just sing, J-Lo says, something she apparently has no trouble doing — the mind part, that is. But if J-Lo had half the talent of Hollie, she wouldn’t have to rely on Auto-Tune on all her songs. I’d love to hear her under the exact same conditions on a live stage. I suspect we wouldn’t all get goosies.