Fantasy Idol Results- A Poor Man's Didi Benami

Pretty low key night compared to last week's epic save spectacular. Seacrest spent no time getting rid of Garcia before any of the guest performances. Speaking of...for as much as I loved Adam Lambert as an Idol contestant last year, and a mentor last night, his original stuff is less than fantastic. I'm as likely to download his album as it is likely that Tyson would eat a pickle. We also got a nice duet with Brooke White of season seven and Justin Gaston of If I Can Dream. Gaston seemed really nervous, but satisfactory, and Brooke as Dan Feinberg said via Twitter "remains a poor man's Didi Benami." Once the rest of the bottom four was created (Michael Lynche, Tim Urban and Katie Stevens) the young Connecticut hopeful was sent packing. Ho hum, just another day. The save did its job once again. It kept somebody in the competition longer than they deserved.

Rizzo is now eliminated from play as Katie was his last contestant. Larry continues to kill it with the rock boys and Turban Tim. Tyson takes a hit with the loss of Garcia and Mags and I take a few more strides towards second and third place.

Fantasy Scores

The Rock Bodega
Casey James- Safe (29)= 29
Janell Wheeler
Tim Urban- Safe (29), Bottom 4 (-8)= 21
Lee DeWyze- Safe (29)= 29
Week 8= 79 Total= 251

You're Coming With Me Leather
Andrew Garcia- Bottom 4 (-8), Eliminated (-16)= -24
Paige Miles
Aaron Kelly- Safe (29)= 29
John Park
Week 8= 5 Total= 109

The Curlgar
Ashley Rodriguez
Joe Muñoz
Haley Vaughn
Siobhan Magnus- Safe (29)= 29
Week 8= 29 Total= 85

Splash Downs All Around
Todrick Hall
Crystal Bowersox- Safe (29)= 29
Tyler Grady
Michelle Delamor
Week 8= 29 Total= 84

Diabolical Haters
Didi Benami
Lilly Scott
Lacey Brown
Michael Lynch- Bottom 4 (-8), Safe (29)= 21
Week 8= 21 Total= 76

HashTag Katie Stevens Is Only 16
Katie Stevens- Bottom 4 (-8), Eliminated (-16)= -24
Jermaine Sellers
Katelyn Epperly
Alex Lambert
Week 8= -24 Total= 19

American Idol- Don't Treat Lee Like a Lady

Simon Cowell- "Watch the show back and realize this is the night your life may have changed forever."

Sure MamaSox was the best of the night by a mile and she continues to have wow moments week in and week out, but let's take a week off from the Crystal Bowersox show to focus on some dudes that made Idol watchable through an entire episode again.

As Simon said at the top, this was a great week for Lee DeWyze. The cool, quiet one took an oldy but a goody and turned it into a contemporary gem. The Cornelius Brothers' Treat Her Like a Lady is well known by most and because of the great sound to his voice, he was able to flip the song on its head without changing it up to much.

Obviously Andrew Garcia took my advice from last week. Thanks for reading Andrew. He cut all this crap about doing different things and got back to his bread and butter. Acoustic rearrangements of popular songs. Of course this wasn't as good as Straight Up, but he's back on the right track. The judges praised him for getting back to who he is even though they are the ones who told him to go away from this style a few weeks back. Once again, you guys are morons.

Big Michael Lynche gave us a big cheeseburger with no cheese this week. The corny winks and movements were to a minimum because of the soft and tenderness of the song he chose. What shined through? His fantastic vocal ability. He's not my cup of tea, compared to Lee or Andrew, but there's no arguing that he's pitch perfect every week.

Two girls that I liked tonight. Of course my MamaSox, whose big surprise was playing the piano. Although she had to concentrate on looking at the keys, it didn't take away from her fantastic performance. When she stood up and the song picked up, I think all 30 million people watching smiled along with the dreadlocked queen. And shoot me but I liked Didi Benami once again. She wasn't as good as the past two weeks, and I wish she had slowed the tempo down a bit, but her voice is so unique that I love it every time.

Here's my bottom three for the week. Now obviously this isn't who will be in the actual bottom three, because both Siobhan Magnus and Aaron Kelly have big fan bases already, but my worst three performances of the night belong to the glass blower, the tiny loser and Mr. Smiley Tim Urban.

As JJ tweeted last night, "finally someone puts magnus in her place." Now unlike JJ, I've liked her in the past, but last week's Superstition was annoying and this week's Through the Fire was flat out terrible. Her lower register sounded awful and when she went up higher with the "through the fire" lyric I wanted to pull my ears off. El Pres over at Barstool simply posted, "Siobhan just ruined my vacation and I haven't even left yet."

Tim Urban and Aaron Kelly are just self explanatory. Neither one can sing. They both use a disgusting amount of vibrato. Kelly chose Ain't No Sunshine, which might have been Kris Allen's signature from last year, and it was so bad I don't even know if it can qualify as the same song. Urban is just so bad he's not worth talking about. Simon did his annual "oh it doesn't matter what we say anymore because they're gonna vote you through anyway" thing which was a great jinx and I think Urban goes home tonight.

That leaves me with only two performances that I neither liked or hated. Katie Stevens was once again blahh, but her vocals are always decent. She's a good singer just not an artist in any sense of the word. Casey James is just so uneventful. Kara was absolutely correct wrong when she said, "I think you've got more range in you." That's the main thing holding him back. He has no range and it shows in every flatline performance he gives us.

My order of the night
1. Crystal Bowersox
2. Lee DeWyze
3. Andrew Garcia
4. Michael Lynche
5. Didi Benami
6. Casey James
7. Katie Stevens
8. Aaron Kelly
9. Siobhan Magnus
10. Tim Urban

American Idol- He's a No Soul Man

Simon Cowell- "You sucked the soul out of that song."

And that quote, in a nutshell, explains what has happened to Andrew Garcia since the first week of the semifinals. After completely killing Paula Abdul's Straight Up during Hollywood Week, Garcia came back with a similar acoustic rearrangement to Fall Out Boy's Sugar We're Goin' Down. I thought it was a great performance, if not up to par with the ex-judge cover. The judges, on the other hand, destroyed it and did so again the next week.

They pushed him to do different things, and he began shying away from acoustic rearrangements, and completely lost his guitar for the next three weeks. It was these empty performances that have Andrew on the verge of being ousted before the top 10. He sucked the soul out of the performances because the judges gave him horrible advice for many, many weeks. Don't get me wrong, it's Andrew's fault for listening to these yahoos, but I still place most of the blame on the fabulous four behind the table.

Garcia took on Marvin Gaye's I Heard it Through the Grapevine during Billboard Number Ones week and failed to show any type of improvement. My girl Miley Cyrus helped Andrew out the door by telling him to drop the guitar during her mentor session. We all know that Miley is a comic genius, but her skills as an Idol mentor were less than stellar tonight. My prediction is that Garcia goes home this week.

Andrew definitely wasn't the worst this week. That's why he will be joined in the bottom three by Paige Miles and Tim Urban. They were by far the two worst of the night. Seriously Paige's Against All Odds was one of the worst vocals I've ever heard on the show. Urban was equally as awful during Crazy Little Thing Called Love if only for his horrendous slide across the stage (and complete lack of vocal ability).

Out with the bad, in with the good. The one that Pops affectionately calls "Boxer shorts" was once again the best of the night. Crystal Bowersox did Me and Bobby McGee miles better than Janis Joplin. I had actually never heard it before (crazy I know because I like old music), so I YouTubed it and watched how it wasn't even close to how unbelievable MamaSox was tonight. She is on another level right now people. And what's this? She claims that she's "got big plans for next week." Oh boy.

The other three I liked tonight were (in order) Didi Benami, Lee DeWyze and Mike Lynch. I really don't get what the judges didn't like about Didi tonight. She was theatrical? Isn't that what you praised Adam for last year? And Siobhan as recently as last week? And Didi wasn't even as over the top as them. I loved her performance of You're No Good and judges can't stop me from voting (even though I don't).

I thought Lee wasn't good when he went first, but after watching everyone else be worse, he got better and better as the night went on. He wasn't as good as other weeks, mainly because his rendition of The Letter just didn't feel like him, but the sound of his voice makes up for that.

Will Kieffer's black cousin, or Big Mike Lynch as the Idol faithful like to call him, recorded another fantastic vocal performance this week. His When a Man Loves a Woman even reduced many of his over confident gestures that had me hating him last week.

Katie Stevens and Aaron Kelly both scraped by and really give me nothing to say about them. The other two mediocre performances of the week came from Casey James and Siobhan Magnus. It's pretty difficult to not get me to love the Back to the Future song, but that's exactly what Casey did with Power of Love. He's just so boring and robotic. Power of Love? How about a little power of voice Mr. James. 'Cause you haven't shown any.

And finally we get to the judges favorite who is starting to really irk me. This week she chose one of the most repetitive, boring songs out there in Stevie's Superstition. Note to Siobhan: You can't half ass your way through the entire song and then just scream at the top of your lungs at the end and think you're gonna win me over. It's not only predictable, but really annoying to watch at this point.

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.