Fox today outlined its plans for replacing Paula Abdul at the American Idol judges’ table, and somewhat unfortunately, they involve retaining the four-judge panel that was instituted on the show last year. The show is going to bring in guest judges! “Our intention is to have guest judges be female pop stars, female performers,” Fox Entertainment chair Peter Rice said. Signed for next season so far: A & R expert Katy Perry and tabloid fixture Victoria Beckham. Even though Beckham is more known for her stick-thin figure and the clothes she hangs on it these days, she was a Spice Girl, right? Uh, sure. Any Idol watcher knows that Fox will likely make some sort of misstep in selecting other people to round out the panel; as a sort of pre-emptive strike against that, we offer up five female pop stars whose presence would make the new-look Idol judges’ table even more farcical than it already is. More »
Hooray, I qualified to get a free MP3 of “Bury Me Alive,” the first single from the Carly Smithson/Evanescence dudes project The Fallen! And it sounds… like a big, vaguely gothy, mooky rock song, complete with chorus that’s a bit of a Xerox of that from that band’s 2003 track “Going Under.” This is not a complaint–“Going Under” was actually one of my favorite tracks the year it came out, and it was way superior to their big hit with that vestigial tail of a “rap” verse”–but I figured it was worthy of mention. Smithson’s voice sounds in fine form, if a bit studio-massaged, and the band sounds, you know, like a band trying to get on modern-rock radio. I hope it works, because as has been mentioned before, that format is way bereft of ladies. More »
The gates have been opened at the official site for The Fallen, the band featuring former American Idol Carly Smithson and a smattering of dudes who were booted from Evanescence. And the site’s even giving away a free MP3–although you have to sign up with an e-mail address and a mobile number, and then wait to see if you were one of the first 100,000 people to sign up and qualify for one of the free downloads. Dum de dum. More »
Yesterday’s news that former American Idol contestant Carly Smithson would be joining up with a bunch of ex-members of nu-goth outfit Evanescence to form a band called The Fallen apparently got Amy Lee, Evanescence’s figurehead / Billy Corgan character, in a snit. So she released a statement on her band’s Web site letting everyone know that hey, she is still around and making music under the Evanescence name, and she would like some of that press attention that all of the people she once collaborated with to go in her direction! More »
Carly Smithson–the 2008 American Idol contestant who was also the poster child for the record industry’s problems in a 2002 Wall Street Journal piece–is joining forces with all the dudes fired from Evanescence to form a new band called The Fallen, according to USA Today. (Any resemblance between the band’s name and the title of Evanescence’s 2003 breakthrough album is probably coincidental.) More »
I should probably preface my writeup of American Idol‘s results episode by saying that I watched it while on a cross-country flight, which meant that a) I didn’t have a peanut gallery to bounce my observations off until much later and b) I had to keep any bon mots to myself, since the woman sitting next to me got visibly weirded out when I gasped at the banishment of Syesha Mercado, and not Brooke White, to the Bottom Two Stools. (She was watching Animal Planet with the sound off, so maybe I caused her to think that a tiger was actually sitting in 8E.) And after Carly joined her in the losers’ club–even after that cutaway where Jason Castro was caught yawning backstage!–I was expecting Syesha to get dispatched quickly, what with her suffering the curse of being not all that bad and first on a trainwrecky night.
An update on David Cook’s album sales: “It sold 885 copies this week (all digital), or about half of what would be required to make the digital albums chart.” More »
