5/20/09

Idol thoughts....<sigh>

Well, I have some Idol thoughts for tonight's big season finale.  I have to admit I watched most of this year's season.  I did enjoy it (a bit), because they had people on that actually play instruments.  If you're able to play a few instruments, I think that makes you more of a total musician.  And if you're a total musician, I think that gives you a better chance to make it in the industry outside of Idol.  So watching a few of the guys bring out pianos and guitars was a nice change. 

As for the final two, I much prefer Kris.  I think he's an actual musician, where Adam is more of a performer.  I know it today's music world the performer is usually favored (as evidenced by many of the performances by other acts), including Paula's horrible lip sync and dance number.  Adam has done some interesting things with songs, but I question Bridget and I always have is how much help do they get with those alternate arrangements?  I doubt Adam is actually rewriting the music.  Do they just tell someone, "Hey, let's do it this way." and then 3 days later there's a new arrangement?  Or do they just dig up someone else's alternate arrangement?  Regardless, I think the judges put way too much emphasis on having them use different arrangements.  It's interesting every once in while, but it becomes tiresome after a while.  For instance, on disco night, not one person actually sang a "disco" song.  I thought that was the point of different nights, to show how you would sing different styles of songs, not how you use the same lyrics and a somewhat similar melody to sing a song that fits in with your performance style.  Oh well.

Between the two, I think Kris is the much more marketable musician.  He could do country or pop without any trouble.  He does the acoustic guitar, adult contemporary thing nicely.  Plus, he play instruments, which gives his performances something to look at.  I just don't know what Adam would do.  That squeal thing he does went out with wigs and spandex in the 80's.  How could you sit and listen to a 60-70 minute CD with him doing that? 

I just wanted to also make a comment about the atrocious last song.  It was horrible.  It was terrible.  It sounded like the end credits of The Little Mermaid 9, Ariel goes to College.  And did I hear them correctly that the winner has to use that as their first single?  Holy crap, I'd be hiring a lawyer to get me out of that one.  I think Kris tried to take a dive just because of that.  And the song was written to be sung in Adam's lady range, so Kris struggled with it.  Even Kara felt about about sending in the fix once she heard it.  What a terrible idea.

One of my favorite web sites, dialidol.com, actually has Kris winning!  It looks really close, with the margin of error putting both people in play.  If you don't know, Dial Idol uses automated dialing to measure the busy dial tones of each phone line, and then using that data to statistically predict how many people are voting.  For example, if you dial the number 10 times and it's busy 9 times, you're getting a lot of votes.  If it's only busy 2 or 3 times, you're not getting a lot of votes.  I haven't dug into the statistics of how he does it, but it's quite a method.  I believe his algorithm had predicted all of the winners so far, so we'll see how it works this year.

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