American Idol- Sabotaging the Guys

If the girls night was underwhelming, last night's top 12 guys was brutally awful. I really could care less if any of eight dudes went home tonight. That brings me to the worst conspiracy idea the Idol producers have had yet. So it's pretty obvious that they want a girl to win this year, and that they want at least three girls in the top four. I'm assuming this is because the guys have been so dominant recently with Lambert, Allen, Cook and Archuleta all being in the past two finals.

Even if Simon hadn't said that it's the year of the girls we all would have seen the writing on the wall. What did they do? They booted out a number of very talented guys before America gets to do the voting so that there is no way for them to outshine the females. Most notably it was Jeremy Purifory and Thaddeus Brown, but I'm sure there were plenty of others. I knew that these two were a couple of the best before they were cut and after watching last night's group of misfits it was even more obvious that it was a good move by the producers. Who knows how many other great voices were out there that the editing cut out because they didn't want us to even know about them. Now I'm going to have to listen to Aaron Kelly and Joe Muñoz for multiple weeks? Bootleg!

As for last night's judging, I think they all took another step backwards. Hey guys just a head's up, you can't tell people it wasn't good because you didn't change anything and then tell them it wasn't good because you changed the song. You can't have it both ways. If you want to just go on feeling that's fine. A song can just not have sounded good. If you reasoning for why it was bad doesn't make sense then don't come up with one. Just say it was bad. That would have a lot more substance.

And now we get to my newest gripe with the show. I'm sick of all these people who bring guitars with them on stage for absolutely no reason other than to look like you have a guitar with you. At least Lee DeWyze and Casey James attempted to play, but the background music was so loud that it makes their little strumming moot. Michael Lynch, on the other hand, didn't even touch the strings on his guitar while on stage and that is just like slapping Jason Castro in the face. Andrew Garcia, like Castro and others from the past two seasons, used his guitar with a purpose. One out of four ain't bad I guess.

And so we get to the performances.

There are seven contestants I could care less about. Before we get to them, I have to mention the one that needs to go home tonight. Tim Urban may have put forth the worst performance in live American Idol history. As JJ said to me last night, I just felt so bad for him while he was up there destroying Apologize. Like Katie Stevens last night, Urban attempted a song done by one of last season's greats. The current champion killed the One Republic song less than a year ago and instead of killing it, Urban butchered it last night (such a different slang meaning for such similar words). Every time he attempted to go into the falsetto part I wanted to kill myself. I really want to know who was watching him during rehearsal and said "yeah this is a good idea." Somebody with a sick sense of humor that's who.

Now to those I could care less if they left or moved on...

Aaron Kelly- uninspiring performance with a weird country twang
Jermaine Sellers- though showed some potential he screamed through most of this
Joe Muñoz- very boring, but would've been good at a karaoke bar
Tyler Grady- sounded like a big voice but couldn't tell with that horrid song
John Park- I might have fallen asleep during this one
Michael Lynch- again the non-guitar playing did him in for me
Alex Lambert- he sounded like me trying to copy someone's voice while I sing in the car. Like me, he failed.

There were three contestants that I enjoyed but were less than impressed with. Todrick Hall's take on Kelly Clarkson's Since You Been Gone was interesting. He seems to be a fantastic performer (with his dancing background) and he showed that he definitely has some ability with his voice. I liked the sound of Lee DeWyze's voice even if it seemed to just be a homeless man's David Cook. And Casey James was very copy cat of Brian Adams in his performance and not really that powerful, but I still really enjoyed it (especially as he laughed through the first two lines because of whatever shenanigans Kara and Randy were up to).

And there was the moment that the judges were drunk, because I don't know what they were thinking with their assessment of Andrew Garcia's fantastic performance of Sugar We're Goin' Down. They didn't like it because it wasn't like what he did with Straight Up at Hollywood Week. Wait, what? He did the exact same thing! And it was fantastic! In my opinion he booked his ticket to the top four with that one performance. He changed up the song while showcasing his guitar playing and his vocals, just killing the whole thing. Unlike Simon I was absolutely not one bit disappointed with that.