Making History All Over Again… And Rewriting It A Little, Too

noah | January 16, 2008 12:15 pm
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Last night the seventh season of American Idol kicked off with a Philadelphia-based audition episode that had its share of indignant rejectees, oddly boring Hollywood-round participants, and bitchiness-by-the-numbers from Simon. But what was more interesting to me was one thing that wasn’t in the episode–particularly in the opening credits, which were apparently getting a big revamp this season.

And really, that revamp wasn’t all that noticeable. The credits were a little longer, but the Tron look was still intact, as was the whooshy theme music that played as Contestant X rode up the CGI elevator, past winners from former seasons. Well, past most of them, anyway. Did anyone else notice that there was no “floor” representing Season Five winner Taylor Hicks? I know that he just got dropped, and that the show’s contempt level for him was pretty high–when one auditioner said she had worked as a backup singer for the gray-haired soul singer, everyone at home could hear Simon’s eyes rolling back in his head–but really, what a snub. In addition to that, the banner behind the contesants also cleverly put him all the way over to the right, far out of camera range. (Ruben Studdard’s picture got the flush-left treatment, which meant that reminders of him were saved for auditioners’ big exits.) I realize that Idol‘s powers that be may want to believe that Season 5 stopped after Chris Daughtry got booted from the show’s ranks, but really, viewers’ memories aren’t that hole-riddled.

You’d think that the near-elimination of Hicks from the show’s lore–and its ever-declining ratings–would give the hopefuls pause, but you’d be wrong!

THE WINNERS: A total of 29 people made it through to Hollywood, but the truly victorious people last night were the producers who were hired by the show to dress up the contestants’ backstories. The guy who lost 200 pounds! The single mother whose daughter is suffering from Retts Syndrome! The frizzy-haired nanny who’d never seen an R-rated movie! The cage fighter/horse enthusiast who lives in a log cabin! The 20-year-old who’s already talking about selling records 30 or 40 years after he dies! Whether or not we’ll see another second of any of these people during the Hollywood Round episodes is up for debate–although I did like the voice of the last guy in that list, if not his choice of song. (Dude, a word of advice: If you want people to remember your voice, you may want to pick a better vehicle for it than an Uncle Kracker tune.)

MAYBE HE SHOULD HAVE DONE THE NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL SONG INSTEAD:Milo Turk, a “39-year-old” from Atlantic City, got through the door because of his song “No Sex Allowed,” which was meant to be a message “for the children” but really sounded like it should have been a “funny” bonus track on an old Kill Rock Stars compilation. Best line: “Sex is weak, and love is strong.”

HARDEST-LUCK CONTESTANT: That would have to be 16-year-old middle linebacker Temptress Browne, who has a wheelchair-bound mother that she takes care of, a dog, two cats, 10 kittens, and a completely atonal voice. And no sense of pitch, either, because when the judges tried to gently let her down, she started crying big, fat tears that made me scrawl in my notebook PLEASE NO MORE OF THIS.

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF SLICK: Another spotlighted loser with pets was Alexis Cohen of Allentown, Pa., who describes herself as being “like a pirate” and shares a studio apartment with her mother and two pets. She’s studying to be a vet and she likes to cover herself in glitter as an everyday thing; her audition song was “Somebody To Love” by Jefferson Airplane, which she sang like a woman possessed by the spirit of Grace Slick. Not bad, but definitely not Idol material, yet her polite dismissal (which even had praise! and a suggestion that she head to the ’60s cover-band circuit!) led to her going off on a tirade that started off with her calling Simon “a big fat bad word” before leading into her actually using said bad words. As a counterpoint, the producers then cut to Simon, who compared Cohen’s looks to “William [sic] Defoe,” which is why that term was in the top reaches of Google Trends for most of the past 12 hours.

MOST ILL-ADVISED TACTIC FOR “STANDING OUT”: The Leia-tressed young lady in the above picture is Enfield, Conn. resident Christina Tolisano, who may have been saved for the second-last audition because of the ability to tie in that Star Wars-themed Family Guy DVD to her definitely-honed-by-the-Internet persona. She goes to conventions. She is going to name her children after George Lucas characters. She says “Duh” a lot. She brags about men at conventions being interested in her, even though she doesn’t wear a lot of makeup. You may not be surprised to hear that her audition did not go very well in the judges’ eyes, although her singing wasn’t really all that bad while she stayed in the lower registers of “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me.” But it ran off the rails when she hit the higher notes and she got the boot, prompting her to go on a slew of profanity-ridden tirades–in front of her grandparents!–about phonies and fakes and pretty girls. She’s so going to be back for the “Idol Gives Back” episode, isn’t she? (A side note: There was a lot of bleeped-out profanity last night, including one really classy guy who said “Fuck American Idol” while carrying his baby away from his botched audition. Gotta love that Philly style!)

PAULA ABDUL OUT-OF-IT SCALE: N/A. I’m being easy on her because you’d be pretty shellshocked, too, if someone a) dedicated a song that was all about stalking you, even if it had the lulz-worthy line “If she were a bathtub, I’d caulk her”; and b) got a full-body wax to impress you. And this was the first audition episode. Tonight: Texan drag queens!

Idolator’s American Idolatry archives [Photo: AmericanIdol.com]

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