Via: Tuned In
Quick spoilers for last night’s American Idol results show follow: American Idol judges like to open up their criticism with a compliment (“You looked like you were having fun!”), so let me start by saying something nice about the ten finalists the show presented to America last night. I agree with Linda Holmes that it’s a relief that the show is going in a different direction this year, simply by not offering up one more “White Guy With Guitar” like the last half-dozen winners of the contest. That’s not about political correctness or musical bias; it’s just not very exciting going through a whole season knowing who’s bound to win. So, good on Idol for going in a different direction. But I wish to hell that different direction were also interesting. There’s talent enough in the five men and five women competing for this year’s confetti drop. (Lazaro Arbos, Janelle Arthur, Curtis Finch, Jr., Candice Glover, Kree Harrison, Amber Holcomb, Paul Jolley, Angie Miller, Burnell Taylor, and Devin Velez) But from what we’ve seen so far, we’re probably going to decide what kind of pleasant singer of ballads to choose from. There are the country ballad singers. The R&B ballad singers. The pop ballad singers. The singer who performs half his ballads in Spanish. The ballad singer who deals with a stutter. They’re nice. They’re competent. There are few rough edges. And they’re… zzzz…. It’s all perplexing when you compare Idol’s finalists to the last couple seasons of The Voice. Whatever you thought of The Voice’s finalists in the fall, for instance, they spanned a wide variety of genres and styles, they did uptempo as well as ballads, they generated a sense of excitement on stage and, as a group, they felt current. (Or at least distinctively retro.) Each of the finalists—Cassidy, Nick and Terry—had a sense of him- or herself as an artist as well as a performer. You felt, watching them, that they had listened to a lot of music and knew what they liked and didn’t. They
Read full story at: Tuned In
Posted: March 8th, 2013
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