If there’s something that you can count on from America’s Next Top Model, it’s that an idea that gained some traction in a previous season, even an astoundingly awful one like “all supermodel wannabes should also have their own unbelievably Auto-Tuned single,” will eventually be repeated. Thus, last cycle’s All-Star bizarro music-video boogaloo was bound to reappear, particularly given that a CBS single is now part of the Tyra-whispered prize package for the winner. And reappear it did, in the hilariously painful faux Top 40 singles that both teams stumbled their way through. The whole episode had an element of studied strangeness about it, clashing with the usual cartoonish nature of ANTM. It was as if David Lynch had a hand in directing Spice World.
The first hint that things would be going in the YouTube-able trainwreck way was when All-Star winner and all-around crazy person Lisa D’Amato showed up the house, big earrings a-blazin’. In her life as an illustrious CBS-single owner and ANTM perfume spokeswoman, Lisa has apparently been penning pop singles that are crammed full of bad Tyra neologisms. Along with a leather-jacketed producer (and, no kidding, ex-Letters To Cleo drummer) Tom Polce—who looks like he’s been wincing for a solid month—D’Amato wrote two songs to be covered by the British and American teams respectively. These are exactly as bad as you hoped. Perhaps the only things that can match them in their over-the-top wrenching awfulness are the names that the teams choose for their girl groups: Fiercely British and United Sirens of America, both group titles that make Danity Kane seem like a sane choice.
Maybe it’s the accent boost or the Spice Girls legacy, but team U.K. does far better in the recording studio than the Yankees, despite being saddled with lyrics like “I’m the only fashion time traveler.” It’s the M.I.A. thing, you know? The Yankees, I’m sad to say, sound like flash-in-the-pan jokey hip-hop group Fannypack mixed with a 6th-grade-karaoke version of a Beastie Boys song. The chorus of their song, “Stop Drop ’N’ Tooch,” has an unfortunate shrillness on the final “raise the roof” that all the mixing in the world couldn’t mellow.
Luckily, the choreography session that the girls do is one of the most entertaining five minutes of the show I’ve ever seen. Tyra, always keepin’ it classy, comes armed with spandex pants that say “booty tooch” on the butt and a set of bottom enhancing pads for all the ladies. She then instructed the ladies on “the art of the booty tooch,” the delicate aesthetic of popping out one’s rear for a photo. Danger zones include the “hoochie tooch,” the “poochie tooch,” the “dookie tooch,” and the “smoochie tooch,” by which point I’m pretty sure Tyra was just grasping for things that rhymed. Her whole spiel reached the level of caricature; no Saturday Night Live sketch could touch the level of self-parody that scene involved. It was essentially an absurdist ass pep rally.