Eric Sager
American Idol-watching potato chip addicts love exploding their phone bills into smithereens through the act of repeatedly voting for mildly entertaining people they view as critical cogs in the cultural ecosystem. Not enough of them voted for Blake Lewis to get him past Jordin Sparks (expectant parents, would you kindly consult dictionary.com for the correct spelling of given names before you proceed any further) in the sixth season, possibly because the American public is finally ready to let go of boy bands and synch up to the rest of Western civilization, but more likely because Lewis scared the straights into thinking he’s going to break into their houses because he likes to beatbox like some sort of wild animal.
CBS Records used to use a team of 15-year-old girls to test incoming demos from bands the label was thinking of signing. If some Muffy didn’t like her assigned band within 15 seconds, the demo got thrown in the garbage. Blake Lewis might pass the 15-second test on style, but substance-wise his stuff is about as interesting as watching wood decompose. Only when he drops the coquettish Funky Bunch nonsense and Maroon 5 been-there-done-that does he make any impact, such as late in the game on the electropop sundry “1000 Miles” and, well, when he beatboxes a drum n bass rinseout on “Hate 2 Love Her.” “Gots To Get Her” may impress your great grandmother if she still remembers “Puttin’ On the Ritz.”
The reason most American Idol finalists fail is because they’re thinking Vegas before they’ve even got a couple of records in the can. Even Pitchfork.com would have to pay some props if one of these people got a contract and promptly fired the horn players in favor of, I don’t know, filth-caked winos trying to play harmonicas or something. As with all the alt-rockers getting seriously drug-addicted before their first half-cocked EP has barely cooled on the street, it’s all backward-land. Idols splash into the show-biz piranha-tank with no history or horror stories, empty husks readily vulnerable to extinction when computer animation designers finally achieve genuinely hot-looking people.
