American Idol - The Top 11

I started writing this post on March 22nd, commenting on the Top 12 elimination of Lacey Brown. Tim Urban definitely should have gone home, but Lacey wasn't so much better, so as long as Urban goes sometime soon, it's not so bad. But we may have another (though far less humorously entertaining) Sanjaya. I just hope he doesn't give another fairly good showing like he did with "Hallelujah," or we'll never get rid of him.

I apologize, I missed last week's commentary, but of course I was again disappointed that Tim Urban stayed. Paige Miles was probably the worst of the Billboard Number Ones week (what happened to teen idol? I'd heard that was the theme), but she had a few excuses. Not enough that she should have stayed much longer, but enough so that she should have been on the Top 10 tour instead of Tim. Maybe. If they could have taught her to actually say the words and not just breathily expel the vowels sounds of the lyrics.

There were a few other surprises last week that completely changed around some of the standings for me. I don't have my rankings list on hand, but I know that Crystal Bowersox was the clear winner. It was a surprise to me because she finally went all the way to Janis Joplin, which she's been playing with every single performance, and I expected it to be less satisfying for that. Instead, she showed that she is not just a Janis knockoff---why she's even using that sound is puzzling to me, since she's much better than it and could handle a great deal more. But she showed the ability to transcend Janis and definitely to transcend this competition with last week's performance of "Me and Bobby McGee."

Casey James stayed near the top, Aaron Kelly climbed very high, Lee DeWyze inched up in the top tier, Siobhan Magnus continued a slow descent, and Didi Benami slid quickly to lower-middle levels with me after that disturbingly blah performance of "You're No Good." What a terrible song choice for her. And she's not staying with the broadening of vocals she started a bit with Stones week. If she goes bad to the silly scratchy Mae West/Betty Boop singing, she's not going to last long. Katie Stevens also returned to her face-pulling and bigger-than-me inexplicable song choices. I beg to differ with the judges on the appropriateness of "Big Girls Don't Cry", because to me it has a mature pop sound and I'm not sure how a song sung (co-)written and sung by a 32-year-old is "young" enough for a 17-year-old. But there were worse performers than she, and I was surprised she ended up in the bottom three over them---like Andrew Garcia, who needs to quit doing whatever he's doing and go back to the basics. He's nearly as bad as Paige with his treatment of lyrics, but instead of skipping the consonants, he's popping each word out like a little bb. The result is the same: you lose the meaning and therefore the effect of the lyrics.

I'm looking forward to tonight's Top 10 performance, although R&B with Usher isn't really a favorite theme of mine. It seems like American Idol is slipping this year---Miley Cyrus and Usher as mentors? I hope they're saving some really good people for later.