I don't even know where to begin. Trying not to piss on anyone. Trying to keep my cool on this one. And then there's that giant but to go along with that. The idea that Drew Ryniewicz, even in a week in which she still doesn't change up the tempo and just sits in a chair, wasn't still the obvious choice to be advanced is utterly ridiculous. Simon Cowell, albeit at the last minute, finally owned up to his responsibilities as Drew's mentor, and tried a last minute mea culpa to no avail. Nicole Scherzinger and his long time sparring partner Paula Abdul were having none of that.
I'll get to why they are wrong in a minute but the blame still lies first and foremost with Cowell. L.A. Reid can say he was just looking for the best performance possible and not who is on what team, but even if that is genuinely his real disposition on it, it still doesn't ring true. He might honestly believe it too but we all are guilty of partaking in the subconscious decision making process. It's human nature. And I don't fault L.A. for one minute for picking Marcus. All things being equal, and they actually weren't but it was still reasonably close enough in L.A.'s mind at least, he had to pick his own prodigy. That's all true and on point but Simon was still the one who ultimately set this entire course of events into sequence and so he still harbors the majority of the responsibility for everything.
Marcus has been wildly inconsistent for weeks; missing notes and hitting an upper register he really doesn't possess in the first place. Drew, while consistently low keyed and overly reliant on ballads (with Pia Toscano being the obvious comparison for both singing and shocking elimination reasons), still vastly outperformed Marcus on each night and had yet to have a bad performance. She was far and away one of, if not the most consistent performer of the entire competition. I'm not just talking about the live rounds either - the entire competition. And you're going to eliminate her despite that? Paula and Nicole are not owning up to their share of the responsibility they have to exercise the proper judgment and look at the totality of the two singers. And they clearly did it to spite Simon. They found this as a chance to get back at Simon for al the sparring they've engaged in during the show this season.
Drew was the most consistent performer of the entire competition. Marcus had been off kilter for weeks. He had already been in the bottom and my guess is that he had already been close to it before. Marcus really has had no realistic chance of winning the competition. Drew was a virtual lock for at least the Top 3, if not Top 2, and she was one of four people with a realistic chance of winning it all. Only Rachel Crow, Melanie Amaro, and Josh Krajcik have realistic chances of winning and that was still true with Drew in the competition. Marcus Canty and Chris Rene, who far and away has been the weakest contestant for about three or four weeks running now, are clinging to survival. They must now hope they can get enough of Astro's fans, assuming they even still stay tuned in, to jump over to them. Either that or the voting audience is nowhere near to being as sophisticated as the voters for The Voice and American Idol. Well, to a much lesser extent with Idol because let's face it, girls and women have ruined that show's voting process. They just vote for their favorite man candy otherwise Pia Toscano, Haley Reinhart, or James Durbin (my personal pick - he was by far the most dynamic singer in the competition and unique along with Casey Abrams and perhaps even Haley Reinhart) would have won it all last season.
You can't talk about this without being accused of being, or just actually being sexist about this process. You look at L.A. and Simon on this show, or Adam Levine, Blake Shelton, and Cee Lo Green on The Voice, or Randy Jackson and even the always adoring Steven Tyler on Simon Cowell's former show on American Idol, and they don't betray their emotions. It's kind of ironic actually that the women on the two shows that are accused of being meaner have the judges most likely to be ultra soft and weepy. The nicer show, The Voice, has the most emotionally even keeled judge in Christina Aguilera. Paula, Nicole, and Jennifer Lopez are all incredibly emotional judges and eliminations are always automatic triggers for water works. And the irony is that the visibly shaken Drew is normally the type to generate sympathy among the judges but it leads to the other problem that these shows have; the girls and women at home vote for the man candy and all this does is affirm that reality and it's pretty clear that Nicole and Paula both looked at the more visually appealing option to them, who they think that other girls and women would vote for, and they are probably so far in their own denial about this that they probably don't have the foggiest idea or clue that they are even doing it. Call me cynical all you'd like to but how many female winners have we had recently on these shows? Not many, I know.
Simon had the right idea in hopes of preventing more Pia Toscano like episodes from happening but the other unfortunate irony in this week's results is that the very fail safe trigger mechanism intended on preventing those kind of Chris Daughtry like disasters was its very undoing. Sure, it's even possible that those girls and women helped to outvote Drew had it gone to the tiebreaker (you know, that will of the people thing - even if the people themselves would have possibly have gotten it seriously wrong anyway), but the whole point of it is so that they save the most deserving person, not the least deserving mentor when there is fault to be assigned as Cowell himself finally manned up to, and we all know that the artists themselves on the show don't get to be total artists because they really don't have the final say in these matters and since we do all know it, let's stop punishing them for it.
This is also where The Voice might continue to fill a void in these competitions. Yes, it's still impossible for me to not have more loyalty to American Idol. It's still the mother of them all, and that will always make it special or even more special than the others, but the way that The Voice stands out isn't even the difference in temperament, and how much cozier it is between and with its singers, judges, and fans in how they all interact with each other (although Carson Daly, normally very loose and charismatic is surprisingly wooden on it). It's the voting structure. They take in consideration the voting the way it should be. The people get the majority say but the judges get a voice too - pun intended. They actually balance it. And yet, Paula, who went to the voters when it was two of her own acts, didn't do the same for Drew and Marcus last night. It's pretty clear that she knew that in all likelihood Drew was staying had that been the case and that she and Nicole were not going to tolerate that outcome.
Drew will be okay. In fact, like Pia Toscano and Chris Daughtry before her, it might end up helping her in the long term in terms of her post-show viability. And there's no doubt that her exit was a very painful trial and error exercise in how the eliminations are carried out on the show. So in a very screwed up way it might end up working out great for everyone and there's still very much of a chance of having a "no harm, no foul" like quality to this mess. Still, there are no guarantees and anybody, especially somebody who was not just viable but a favorite, for a guarantee in the form of a guaranteed five million dollar contract, has every right to be upset about such an injustice. And it's still just that; a major league injustice.
There's not that one entity to assign total blame to and the whole purpose is not to just create water cooler fodder for its viewers the next day at work. Sure, it's fun at the end of the week to begin your weekend discussing the latest outrage but at the end of the day, and perhaps Simon had to (even somewhat deservedly) learn this harsh lesson the tough way, it could be just enough for him to reconsider both this ultimately flawed elimination procedure and the entire purpose of the show and steer it back towards what he made it his $5 million mission to do in the first place - find the next major music star. He's probably learned that he and the show had already started to stray from its own genuinely authentic mission. Fortunately for both Simon and the rest of us, he still has the final say on that.
No comments:
Post a Comment