Well, I did not get the top three I had hoped for. I don't know if there is a single singer left on Idol who I really hope wins the competition, but there is one person who I do hope does not win: can you guess who that is?
Before the eliminations began we watched our Ford music video set to "Move Along," with the singers jumping out of magazines and billboards and things to chase after a car. Haven't we seen a video pretty much just like this a few weeks ago? I'm just saying, I bet I could come up with ten unique video concepts. Here's one: the idols hop in their Ford and go to a petting zoo singing something from Pet Sounds. Pay me, please.
The top four sang "School's Out" with Slash accompanying them, and the song was shockingly antiestablishment for Idol. It really did seem to rile up the teenagers too, because after the line "School's been blown to pieces", Allison pretty much punched Danny in the chest while she sang, and he looked like he wanted to kick her in the back. How were Slash's licks and riffs, you ask? One word: hot. And he wore the top hat. Without it, I realized that he is about Seacrest-high.
Ryan then chatted with the contestants a little bit. I thought was kind of a dick to Kris, asking "Don't you feel like you should be here?" obviously egging Simon on to tell Kris that we don't want the contestants to be humble (which isn't true. Confidence and humility are not mutually exclusive.) Danny earned back a few points with me, admitting that the screeching final note during his performance was last night was terrible and hilarious. For that reason though I wanted him to be eliminated more than ever since it would have been delightful to have him leave the show on that note.
Then, ladies and gentlemen, Ms. Paula Abdul performed to her song "I'm Just Here For the Music." I wasn't expecting Paula to come close to singing live, so I wasn't surprised when she used an autotuner and at one point a prop microphone in addition to her head mic (she recycled both the rocking microphone and the red banners from her "Dance Like There's No Tomorrow" video). Paula's body looked fantastic but I was a little let down by her dancing. Her bevy of male backup dancers and the moves in general smacked of second-rate Britney Spears or Madonna. Paula just looked a teensy bit rusty up there but good for her, regardless, it was nice to see her doing her thing, even if the performance had some super-cheesy elements like a fake tabloid cover featuring Paula and Simon being torn in half IN FRONT OF OUR VERY EYES. Also, Idol went back to flashing random words on the screen during performances. The producers really need to cut that out.
Then the producers rolled a pretaped No Doubt performance although I don't know how it could have been much worse had it been live. Gwen Stefani was obviously singing, because if she weren’t, she'd sound much better. She talk-shouted "I'm Just a Girl" and the weird thing was that she looked exactly as she did when that song started making the band famous way back when, with her muscle shirt and the pushups and everything. No Doubt is a band I've never been able to hate but there was something not quite right about this tribute to itself from so long ago. Also, this tour to promote nothing smacks of "I need to get away from my kids and my band needs some money." Maybe not, though. Maybe it'll be a great tour and they're just saving their good stuff for the road.