May 20
The finale airs on the east coast in about five hours so this post isn’t exactly timely. Plus, it has a very short half-life as it will be either pointless, wrong, or both once the winner’s announced… but I figure that since I threw up an article at the season’s beginning I might as well add one at the end.
If I were betting money I would have to go with Adam, but I wouldn’t give him better than a 3:2 chance of pulling it out. If I were the only one to decide, Kris would win. I originally had Adam ranked fifth, but I didn’t expect his ridiculous surge in popularity over the middle weeks. They keep talking about Kris as the underdog, but I had him as a lock for the top three because he is predictably super popular for a lot of reasons. I still think that Kris is a better singer than Adam, and is definitely the album that I would be more likely to buy, but Adam has that random uniqueness about him that will probably be enough to give him the win. He sings way too high to be routinely listenable (the 2-minute doses on Idol definitely play to his advantage), and most of his songs are about finding a few spots to belt out a low-soprano wail. I like him just fine, but he seems to me a television novelty toy: fun to play with a few minutes at a time each week… but over the longer run people will get bored. He’s a much more flamboyant (somehow), worse-singing Taylor Hicks. People will be happy to see him win, but one year later he will be massively outsold by several of the other contestants that he beat (Kris, Allison, Scott… jk).
Still, I will give Jim his props for somehow picking Adam from the jump (even if he doesn’t win tonight, I would not have expected him to be in the finals).
As for the actual final performances, I think the whole night was a pretty big letdown. They each sang three songs, and of the six one was really good, one was pretty good, and the other four were verging on brutal. I don’t understand why, on the final night before the final vote, the contestants have almost no choice as to the songs they sing. The first of the three for each was their favorite song from earlier in the competition, and in both cases this was by far their best performance of the night. The second pair of songs were selected by Simon Fuller (the show’s producer) and he must have a boner for the classics because he picked two old songs, neither of which suited the singers’ voices.
Finally, both were forced to sing an original song written by Kara, and I am fairly sure that she is the only person in the world who thinks the song is good. Worse than that, though, the song was clearly written for a singer like Daughtry or David Cook. It was outright brutal for the voices and styles of both Adam and Kris. I assume the various producers are hoping that the new song will be the first hit single for the winner, but there is absolutely no chance of that happening. Most shameful of all, Idol fans were left finishing the night with two of the worst performances of the worst song of the entire season. Aside from an egomaniacal Kara (who obviously loved both performances), none of the judges actually judged the final performances because it was just so blatantly unfair to the singers. Why didn’t they just do the finale like they did last year, when David Cook completely dominated Collective Soul and stole the Idol crown?
In all, Kris’s first song (Ain’t No Sunshine) was easily the best of the entire night – and his best performance of the entire season. Adam’s first song (Mad World) was the second best of the night. The other four songs were, for me, equally forgettable and ranged from merely mediocre to downright horrible.
I’ll be fine no matter who wins, though. Both are good and deserving, a fact which is in itself a bit surprising based on my early season outlook.