Guest blogger Claire Meyerhoff sums up last night's results show:
Anoop lives to sing another week and I think it’s because of a certain little lucky charm named Kellie. Our own Carolina Cutie, Kellie Pickler, was the featured former Idol contestant on Tuesday’s kick-off show, and maybe, just maybe she used her Calamari Karma to sing Anoop to safety.
Or maybe Anoop was just lucky Scott was standing next to him in the bottom two.
Scott is going home. Scott, the mediocre crooner who seemed to sing the same song week after week. The judges always cut him a lot of slack and kept their criticism restrained – even Simon to a certain extent. That’s because Scott is blind and it’s hard to say bad things to a blind guy who week after week calmly handles the pressure of performing live in front of a massive audience.
The Scott Scenario highlights one of AI’s biggest problems: Sacrificing good singers for singers with good stories.
I was reminded of that while watching Kellie perform. She’s adorable, chock full of personality, wears the hell out of a tight little dress, but she is not much of a singer. Kellie made it pretty far on AI because of her story. Her dad was in prison, her mom was god knows where, and she fixed sandwiches for her grampy, with whom she lived in a little house in tiny Albermarle, North Carolina.
I think it was the year after Kellie that another young blonde auditioned for AI. Her “story” was that her father had shot and killed her mother or maybe her mother had shot and killed her father or her father shot her mother and her mother is now in a wheelchair or something like that. I remember the judges asking her questions and you could just tell they were HOPING this girl could sing at least as well as Kellie Pickler. She couldn’t. What a waste of a good story.
It seems the powers-that-be at AI are really pushing Danny Gokey. He’s a good singer, but is he any better than the guy who looks kinda like Justin Timberlake? The difference is, Danny Gokey is a widower and that JT guy, well, he just sort of looks like JT.
End of story.
Assistant Features Editor Adrienne Johnson Martin would like to have her life turned into an animated cartoon.