Idol's Top 12: Hey, You've Got to Hide Your Ability to Sing Away

UGGH!

You know, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the Beatles night American Idol waited seven years for, when it finally happened, was a thousand times suckier than last year's "British Invasion" theme that featured basically every conceivable artist BUT the Beatles. Alas, it is true. Tonight sucked bad. Why? With a couple of notable exceptions, every single song chosen was either:

a) a great song, impossible to reinterpret satisfactorily, or
b) a shitty song, not worth attempting to interpret because it's shitty.

But first, some important announcements from Ryan. There are new opening credits. They look a lot like the old opening credits, but - dare I say - even more cheap and cheesy-looking... like the result after someone's Dad spent Christmas afternoon futzing with the family's new, user-friendly opening credits creator software. There's a new set. It looks a lot like the old set, but with a mosh pit. I'm like, FINALLY, after years of my strongly-worded letter writing campaign, they finally got on that mosh pit thing. Thank God. Because you know, for a while there, I couldn't mosh to these songs.

Most importantly, this week marks the transition into a new phase of the competition, and the point at which the contestants traditionally receive makeovers. Unfortunately for us, Tyra Banks and horse's manes remain uninvolved.

Syesha Mercado performs first. Syesha's makeover has been given to her courtesy of one Vanessa Huxtable. She sings "Got to Get You Into My Life." The performance is typical of tonight, in that it sucks. Simon tells her it's better than last week, which is a lie. Oh, yay. I can tell I'm going to love tonight.

Chikezie is next. Chikezie's makeover consists of an argyle vest. He and Ryan reminisce about how he really thought he was going home instead of Danny last week, and for a minute I think he's about to be Melissa McGhee'd. Oh, I could not have been more wrong. He starts the song on the floor with a small bluegrass band, consisting of a banjo, a fiddle, and a tambourine. Then suddenly here we've got Chikezie, with his perfectly Ruben Studdard voice and appearance, borrowing an outfit from Blake Lewis, copping Katharine McPhee's on-the-floor-with-the-band opening from "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" and then doing a routine straight from the Taylor Hicks Dance Academy while the audience flips out and all mic stands within a six mile radius cower in fear. The overall effect is TOTAL CHAOS. I am rendered speechless by the highest concentration of Idol self-reference I have ever seen on stage at one time, Ryan Seacrest is stammering and sputtering to get the numbers out and really, the whole thing is awesome.

Ramiele Malubay has not received a makeover, it seems. But no matter, what happens next is a walking embodiment of every reason I was dreading Beatles night. She sings "In My Life" and dedicates it to the friends she's made on the show who have left (read: all of them). I might have to switch horses in my office pool now, because this performance is just unforgivable, and the judges say as much. Remember Billy Joel night, when Carmen Rasmusen sang "And So It Goes"? Okay, the vocals aren't as bad as that, but the overall effect is. F minus.

Jason Castro failed music. I might have to stop blogging about his performances, because I feel a seriously irrational amount of hatred toward this guy ever since the "Hallelujah" debacle. Here's the thing: this was, at one point, a show about singing. Jason is not a good singer. At all. His technique is not flawed; it is nonexistent, and it seems, purposely so. Like that's his thing, is to not really be able to sing well. Now, in the real world, plenty of people have become legendary songwriters and performers without having good voices. But you have to have something, and Jason has nothing. Sure, he looks like he has something, with the hippie hair, and the guitar playing, and the goofy shy whatever, but those little souvenirs of what individuality supposedly looks like do not add up to the type of personality, the type of artistry, and the type of sheer star power you need to have in order to get away with not being able to sing. Paula, on the other hand, "can feel [his] heart." I give up.

Carly Smithson and Amanda Overmyer are roommates. This suprises me not in the least, because they both look and act like 45-year-old alcoholic divorcees. Carly says she's going to sing "Come Together" and really change it up. She then does, you know, the opposite of that. I don't get it. This song was originally recorded as a funk/rock song, with electric guitars, and some yelling. She sings it as a funk/rock song, with electric guitars, and some yelling (although in her case it's throaty, Sheryl Crow style yelling). Is this changing it up... because she's female? Because she's wearing a blue dress? Or is there some softer, gentler version of "Come Together" that all of the judges are more familar with and that's why they're so blown away by this? OH MY GOD BEATLES WEEK SUCKS SO BAD.

David Cook sings "Eleanor Rigby," and he does "change it up." Maybe that's what Carly said in her interview: "David Cook is going to really change it up tonight. I, meanwhile, am going to look old and desperate as usual," and they just edited it funny? David Cook's makeover involves him either growing a soul patch, or having one glued onto him. He' snot attractive, and I have trouble looking at him and his big baby head, but the performance is good. Actually, I love it. Only on a theme night whose idea is so inherently bad could my two favorite performances come from Chikezie and David effing Cook.

Brooke White sings "Let It Be," and while she's as subpar a singer as Jason Castro, she has actual, detectable substance, and while it suffers from the same problems by nature as the rest of this insufferable Beatles night, hers is one of the only performances that doesn't make me want to gouge my own eyes out. She really is lovely. There's a big sign in the audience with a picture of the twins she used to care for, that says "We [heart] Brooke but we miss our nanny!" and I actually get a little choked up because, man, how did those two infants make such a good poster?! She must be an awesome nanny.

David Hernandez had a "makeover" in that his former job as a fully nude gay stripper was removed from history and replaced with a totally lame former job as a server in a pizza bistro. D-Nandez apparently took an entire course on the Beatles in college, and so, armed with his vast knowledge of the history, context and implications of the entire Lennon/McCartney catalogue, he chooses to sing... "I Saw Her Standing There." Umm. Yeah. He really should have dropped that class. It is supremely ungood. This performance reminds me of when John McCain lost the 2000 primary and then spent the next eight years systematically abandoning every single thing about him that I liked. Like John McCain and I in early 2005, D-Nandez and I are now officially in a fight. I HATE BEATLES WEEK.

Amanda Overmyer's makeover involved one curling iron and the entire cast of Steel Magnolias. She has heard her song, "You Can't Do That," for the first time ever this week, and that makes both of us. I was thinking, there has got to be some serious cash incentive for letting the producers saddle you with a crappy or obscure song you didn't really choose, because who in their right mind would actually select a song they had never heard before, from a list of some of the most well-known songs in 20th century musical history? Maybe Amanda was smart here, though, because the fact that I don't know this song makes it an order of magnitude more palatable to me than most other things we've heard tonight. Well played, Amanda.

It is at this point that I ran out of ba-doops.

Michael Johns sings "Across the Universe." It is exactly as expected, with constipated faces and all. David Hernandez really should have sung this song. It's not that bad though, and may in fact be my favorite Michael Johns performance... I mean, I know that's like being the funniest appearance by Carrot Top in a television commercial, but still.

Kristy Lee Cook talks at incredible length about how she is a country girl, and we see even more footage of her riding horses and training for cage-fighting. We get it. Her performance of "Eight Days a Week" is utterly hilarious - she has reimagined it as a country song, which in theory should be a good application of feedback the judges have given her, but in actual execution sounds like one of those songs that plays in the background during a wacky montage in some buddy comedy when the main characters are experiencing a serious of hilarious misunderstandings in a small town in the South somewhere. For this, I kind of love her. Who would have thought that Kristy Lee Cook would be my Kevin Covais of 2008? She "farts with her eyes" throughout the entire performance, and Simon rightly calls it horrendous. I call it my new ringtone.

David Archuleta goes last, to absolutely no one's surprise. He explains that he doesn't really know the Beatles' music (oh man) and accordingly, will be singing the Stevie Wonder version of "We Can Work It Out." Do you already know where this is going? He chooses a key that is SO too low for him that the first few words of every line disappear completely, but that becomes secondary when he then proceeds to forget half the words to the song anyway. MCGHEE'D! It's really awful no matter how much the judges try to skirt the issue of how awful it really was, and we end the night with a level of suckage approximately equal to that with which we started.

Well, I'm glad they finally got that Lennon/McCartney catalogue. That was some really great TV right there, on opposite day. The good news for the contestants is that their odds of being voted out (1/12) have decreased dramatically since last week (1/4). The bad news for me is that I had to watch this show, and that I'm now living in an unsettling version of reality where the most enjoyable performances of the night came from Chikezie, David Cook, and Kristy Lee Cook. Join us tomorrow night, when the Pope ceases to be Catholic.