2009 Adam Lambert's AI 8 Performances

The final Tip Sheet
( Frank Micelotta / PIctureGroup for FOX )
When the Adam Lambert and Kris Allen go head to head on Tuesday night it will perhaps be the biggest cliffhanger of a finale in American Idol history. Adam comes into this finale the Goliath of Season 8, but Kris Allen’s David has been getting stronger and stronger all season.

Kris Allen has bested a slew of favorites to earn his slot in the finale, but does he have what it takes to win it all?

We’ve broken that question down into its basic elements to measure, fighting on many fronts, who has the right ingredients to become the next American Idol.

The Tween Vote
( Frank Micelotta / Fox )
Lambert has been an early favorite of the 10 – 12 year old girls who hold the fate of this competition in this hand, but “cutest contestant ever” Kris Allen has been growing in appeal until he’s matched Adam’s tween strength. However, Adam’s wild theatrical style speaks directly to the tween overlords, for whom dance prowess in a guy hold powerful sway.

Question mark: Will the tweens forgive Kris for being married?

The Edge: This category is very very close but we it to Adam by a nose.

Momentum
( Michael Becker / Fox )
Lambert has been an unstoppable juggernaut, week after week slaughtering the competition and becoming a national cultural phenomenon in the process. But Kris’ slow and steady rise has been perfectly timed to build to a crescendo just as we enter the finals. The excitement over this dark horse making it to the final round has turned into a frenzy of enthusiasm for the quiet young man from Conway.

The Edge: Kris- late surge floods the phenomenon.

Personality
( Michael Becker / Fox )
Both Adam and Kris score off the charts in “likeability” indexes, but they come at that from different sides. Adam constantly sunny and outgoing is his disposition, radiates bigger than life “star” while shy, humble Kris seems the boy next door. However, Adam’s polished demeanor might at times play as aloof to the Idol drama.

The Edge: Kris by a nose.

Geography
( Chris Cuffaro / Fox )
Kris hails from Arkansas, the heart of the Idol belt while Adam is a LA resident, hailing from the state which has only sent one other singer to the finals and never produced a champion.

The Edge: Kris, by a mile.

Genre
( Chris Cuffaro / Fox )
Adam has revamped the rocker genre, taking it back the Bowie/Queen era and updated it for a wild, aggressive new style. Kris hails from the burgeoning, John Mayer soulful light rock singer world.

The Edge: Adam. While Kris’ has introduced a new style to the Idol finals that will certainly have its fans, the electricity generated by Adam’s over the top performances will be hard to match.

Home Court
( Michael Becker / Fox )
While Kris might be able to create some magic if he can turn the giant Nokia theater into an intimate saloon, Adam’s gigantic style and theatrical background are tailor-made to take control of the finale stage.

The Edge: Clearly Adam

Backstories
( Michael Becker / Fox )
The rags-to-riches narrative is precious to many Idol viewers and although audiences have become much more open to accepting performers with performing history, Adam’s extensive theater background clearly takes him out of this main narrative.

The Edge: Kris by a mile; the nice kid from the small Southern town is Idol gold.

Cointoss
( Kevin Winter / Getty Images )
Kris won and elected to go second, by conventional wisdom the smarter move, but also the exact strategy followed last year by David Archuleta.

The Edge: Kris...although who knows how important it is.

The Undistributed Votes
( Getty Images / Fox )
Since the last vote, Danny Gokey has left the competition, which means his voters are up for grabs. Looking at the commonality between his background and performance style and comparing it with that off the two remaining singers, the landscape would clearly seem to favor…

The Edge: Clearly Kris

The tally
( Michael Becker / Fox )
With Kris Allen leading in six categories to Adam’s three, the perpetual dark horse suddenly emerges as the favorite. However, where Adam is strong, he is very very very strong. It is hard to calculate the impact of a larger-than-Idol phenomenon like Adam has become.

And there is still the little matter of the final performances to get through, where anything truly can still happen. Stand by for a finale for the history books as Season 8 draws to a close.

'AMERICAN Idol"-favorite Adam Lambert is about to rewrite the mythology of TV's most successful talent show ever.

He was not a waitress or a college student or a church singer before becoming the run-away choice to win this year's edition of "Idol."

Before there was "Ring of Fire" and "Tracks of My Tears," Adam Lambert put himself through the Hollywood school of hard knocks.

Looking back, it would seem that everything he did was to make himself ready for that MGM musical moment when he first hit the "Idol" stage.

"I used to call him 'Apple Pie' because he was strawberry blonde and freckled and as cute as he could be," says Scarlett (just Scarlett), the featured singer of the LA glam revue "The Zodiac Show" who spent six months in 2002 with a 20-year-old Lambert, as part of a touring cast of the musical "Hair."

"Halfway through the tour, he had black nail polish, eyeliner, the hair and the fashion." She marvels, "He just kind of morphed into this rock star. It was fabulous."

In 2004, when Adam strode into his first rehearsal of "The Ten Commandments" -- an LA musical that starred Val Kilmer -- with his throbbing rock-star vibe, the director was worried.

"Adam was supposed to be a slave," Scarlet explained. "It was very worrisome."

But, come opening night, Adam's one big number -- "Is Anybody Listening?" --"blew the roof off the joint," she said.

In the Los Angeles company of "Wicked," where Lambert settled next, he played Fiyeros -- the prince who falls in love with Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West. In his duet with her, "As Long As You're Mine," Broadway actress Eden Espinosa told Broadway.com, "he was one of only two Fiyeros I know who would do optional notes higher than Elphaba's in the song!"

Next, Lambert went back to work with Scarlett, who invited him to take part in The Zodiac Show.

"He just blossomed in that moment," Scarlett says. Dressed in a stage ensemble of peacock feathers, glitter, and a tight corset, she recalls, "he sang 'A Change is Gonna Come' and he meant it.

"He felt what it was to be empowered, and to be everything without any restriction."

It was during that show that Lambert met up with a guitarist for Madonna, Monte Pittman, according to "The Zodiac Show" co-creator and director Lee Cherry.

For the revue, they co-wrote a song called "Crawl Through Fire."

Lambert's outrageous, gender-bending performance, immortalized on the web via You Tube, prepped fans for the photos of Lambert kissing men that turned up on the internet as soon as Adam made the "Idol" finals.

"It reminded us of Prince and Madonna," Cherry says, "the way you don't have any dirt on them because they wear it on their sleeves.

"It comes down to how that individual can transcend stereotypes," he says.

If "The Zodiac Show" helped Lambert connect to his bad-boy self, the West Hollywood-based Upright Cabaret taught him how to connect with an audience.

Adam hesitated when producers Chris Isaacson, and Shane Scheel, both 32, approached Lambert to perform at their cutting-edge cabaret in late 2006,

"The audience is so close, that's not really what I do," Lambert told them, "I'm definitely a bigger kind of act."

But once he worked in the more intimate setting, Lambert learned how to engage an audience up close.

"I think that's what's separating Adam from the pack on 'Idol,' " says Scheel, "that he knows how to look into that camera and engage America."

On New Year's Eve, after he'd been selected for "Idol" but before the show began to air, Lambert performed a 30-minute set on the Upright Cabaret stage, closing with a wild performance of Prince's "How Come You Don't Call Me Anymore?"

"There's a thing that people do at the Upright Cabaret," explains Scheel, "they throw shoes at the stage."

By the end, the audience was up on its feet, he said. Their stocking feet.

LET’S say you are an “American Idol” contestant with a criminal history. Let’s say you claimed to have had an affair with Paula Abdul. Let’s imagine that you are found to have posed for topless photos or been charged with identity theft.

These are not hypothetical scandals. Each has occurred during the eight-season run of the top-rated show. And each has duly been processed out of consciousness at a speed accorded most show business scandals — forgotten in the nanosecond it takes us to move on from the latest reality TV distraction and back to our ordinary lives.

Let’s imagine, then, that among the assorted warblers and strummers and leather-lunged divas that have made up the renewable cast of hopefuls on the country’s No. 1 television show, you appear not as some talented hopeful with a shady backstory but as a theatrical creation with a message to sell beyond the usual will to prevail. You are swivel hipped and pillow lipped. You have an outsize talent and a fondness for Cher. You have blond hair dyed black and styled in an asymmetrical shag. At some long-ago moment, you gave in to your inner Maybelline girl.

You are Adam Lambert, the contestant widely tipped as a favorite to be the next winner of “American Idol.” And the only thing standing between you and riches and the chance to play arenas may be a question currently burning up the Internet: Can a gay contestant win?

Leave aside for a moment the answer to such a question, or even whether Mr. Lambert is gay. He may be. He may not. Fox, which owns “Idol,” is not saying; neither is the contestant himself.

What is notable is the intensity of the insinuations caroming around the Internet and in certain corners of the mainstream press — that and the fact that even asking whether a gay contestant can win a broadly popular reality show, whose survivors are selected by public acclaim, seems increasingly anachronistic in light of decisions in Iowa and Vermont to extend marriage rights to gay men and lesbians.

Still, ask they do. Pointing to “embarrassing pictures of Mr. Lambert circulating on the Internet,” photographs that show someone who looks uncannily like the contestant tongue-wrestling another man, the conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly inquired last week on his Fox News show, “These pictures that hint that he is gay, will they have an effect on this program, which is a cultural phenomenon in America?”

Cultural critics with a broader frame of reference than Mr. O’Reilly’s can easily contextualize Mr. Lambert in a long line of performers who tantalize the public with their talent and equally with their gender ambiguities. Think of Liberace. Think of Prince or Bowie or Elton John or K. D. Lang or Pete Wentz. “We have always had that person” on the pop landscape, said Aaron Hicklin, the editor of Out magazine. “The difference now is that previously the conversation about sexuality has not been as public. When Liberace was around, there was no real way to talk about this stuff.”

Now, of course, there is no way and no reason to stifle conversation about the signals Mr. Lambert appears to send in the form of song choices pilfered from the hope chests of anthemic divas (Cher’s “I Believe”); his bio (he was a child who enjoyed dressing up a lot but sports “not so much,” said his father in an on-air interview); and a theatrical style at times so arch that his country-night version of “Ring of Fire” evoked for Sarah Chinn, the executive director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, “Joey Arias channeling Billie Holiday channeling Johnny Cash.”

According to a Gawker post last week, the “applause-o-meter” had Mr. Lambert pulling way ahead. “Might we actually get a Kris/Adam finale?” read the item, referring to Kris Allen, a generic teen idol type with a waxed cowlick and a lopsided smile. “Might, also, we get a Kris/Adam somethin’ else?’ Hah, doubtful. No one sees Adam without his skinsuit on, except maybe that fetching, fey little blond character they keep cutting to and describing as Adam’s ‘friend.’ ”

Predictable as the snarky innuendo is, it also struck a discordant Roy Cohn note, coming in the week when Vermont’s Legislature voted to override a veto by the governor and recognize gay marriage, adding the Green Mountain State to Connecticut, Massachusetts and Iowa in a list of states actively advancing the cause of civil rights for gay people. “The entire system is changing so rapidly it is not to be believed,” said David Ehrenstein, a Los Angeles based film critic and scholar who writes the hilarious Fablog.

America’s heartland, he said, turns out to be politically contiguous to its notoriously liberal coasts. “Iowa is apparently infested with San Francisco values,” he said.

Even the White House made a point of inviting lesbian and gay families to join in an annual Easter Egg Roll.

Thus it seems plausible that a person with more than a toe peeking out of the closet might actually win the most hotly contested singing show on the planet. True, it took six years of public insinuation before Clay Aiken, the popular also-ran from Season 2, made the choice in 2008 to come out. When he did so, however, the anticipated career-stall never happened. The news was greeted with a collective yawn.

“I see us as living in the post-Neil Patrick Harris era,” said Mr. Ehrenstein, referring to the actor who in 2006 HeWhoCannot ameded online efforts to expose his sexuality by publicly declaring himself gay to People magazine. “He crossed the Rubicon. He did the ‘sudden death’ play. Supposedly you come out and your career is over. He came out and his career is in better shape than it ever was.”

It is worth remembering how radical a shift this is in the public consciousness and that a half century ago, in the 1950s when the film producer Marina Cicogna first found herself in Los Angeles, as she recently told W magazine, studios forced Rock Hudson into bogus relationships with women and obliged gay actors “to lie from morning to night.”

In 1959 Liberace, the camp artifact best known, as one critic wrote, “for beating Romantic music to death on a piano decorated with a candelabra,” sued an English newspaper for libel for implying in print that he was gay. Given his taste for lacquered pompadours, rhinestone jumpsuits, white mink coats and pneumatic male personal assistants, it is hard now to imagine Liberace believing his public was deceived. But then it is still hard to square shifting public opinion with that of an industry that forces its gay talents to hide in plain sight.

When asked on the witness stand whether he was homosexual, Liberace emphatically told a judge: “No, sir! I am against the practice because it offends convention and it offends society.” He won the suit and damages and then, much later, was named in a $113 million palimony suit by his partner Scott Thorson.

“For a long time, gay men were very sensitive to being associated with effeminacy,” said Mr. Hicklin of Out. “It was highly objectionable, an example of stereotyping and caricature.”

Being photographed in drag or, as Mr. Lambert apparently was at the Burning Man Festival, wearing makeup and a thigh-high halter dress revealing enough to bring a blush to the cheeks of J. Lo, is far from a career-killer these days. “There was a common set of signifiers in theater and TV and popular culture that implied gay,” Mr. Hicklin said. “Gay men came to embrace all that because it came to feel far less threatening to be labeled in that way.”

Also, somewhat unexpectedly, heterosexuals took up the playfulness of gender ambiguity. “The gay thing got derailed by the way many straight guys started playing with image,” Mr. Hicklin said. Metrosexuals followed homosexuals out of the closet. Pete Wentz posed for the cover of Out. “Pete Wentz wears makeup and clearly is confident enough not to be threatened by any assumptions his fans or nonfans might come to,” Mr. Hicklin said.

Like Mr. Lambert — whose more steadily assertive gender games are likely to reach an apotheosis this week when the “American Idol” contestants are asked to perform their favorite movie song — performers are now free to treat real or putative gayness as another show business tool, a peekaboo game, a ploy. So-called low forms of sex relationship that entertainment industry codes once kept from being depicted on movie screens are now so routine a feature of pop culture that when “Saturday Night Live” recently parodied the proliferating pop references to sexual experimentation in a sketch titled “The Fast and the Bi-Curious,” the Entertainment Weekly critic Ken Tucker slapped the show down for using jargon that “feels old and overused.”

Unlike other reality shows, said Joe Jervis — a gay activist blogger whose recent mention of Adam Lambert on his site Joe My God generated 50,000 hits from people searching the term “Is Adam Lambert Gay?” — the contestants on “American Idol” aren’t voted off their little show business island by one another. Love them or hate them, it is up to America to choose.

“The show is squarely in the hands of the viewers,” Mr. Jervis said. It is just that vox populi aspect of “American Idol,” he said, that demonstrates radical changes “in the popular view of openly gay people.” That may be. But it is certainly also worth noting that a Revlon habit is no surefire tip-off to gayness, latent or otherwise. Ask Marilyn Manson. Ask Devendra Banhart or Brandon Flowers or any of the other members of groups sometimes called “eyeliner bands.” For that matter, why not ask KISS?

Adam Lambert is the “theatrical” one.

The former San Diegan, who performs tomorrow night for a place among this season's final 12 contestants, got tagged with that label by judge Simon Cowell after singing “Bohemian Rhapsody” during an audition in San Francisco.

Lambert's reply: Thanks for the compliment.

“I am theatrical,” Lambert said in a phone interview. “In the current pop scene, lots of performers are going in that direction, more theatrical in appearance, in camp value. So I don't consider it derogatory at all.”

Lambert, 27, grew up in Rancho Peñasquitos. He moved here from Indiana with his parents when he was 1 and attended Deer Canyon Elementary School, Mesa Verde Middle School in Poway and Mt. Carmel High School, where he was in theater, choir and jazz band. He has one sibling, a younger brother.

He said he's wanted to be an entertainer since he was 10. He took private voice lessons and appeared in musicals – “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” “Grease,” “Chess” – at the Starlight, the Lyceum and other local venues.

His voice coach, Lynne Broyles, and Alex Urban, artistic director of the Children's Theatre Network (now MET2) were influential mentors, convincing him he had talent, Lambert said.

After high school, he moved to Orange County for college – and lasted about five weeks. “I just decided that what I really wanted to do was try to work in the real entertainment world,” he said. “Life is all about taking risks to get what you want.”

He moved to Los Angeles and did the starving artist thing – cruddy apartments, cruddier paychecks – and landed an understudy spot as Fiyero in the cast of “Wicked.”

In the last couple of years, he said, “I've been branching out, doing my own music.” He was in a rock band, did session work, “and it's just been kind of a natural progression. I know now that I want to make it in the recording industry.”

“Idol,” of course, is a rocket ride to making it like no other. The show draws millions of TV viewers each week, and by the end of the season the top contestants are household names – no small thing when it comes to selling records and concert tickets.

Lambert said he's been watching the show, now in its eighth season, since it started. “But I never really pictured myself on it.” Friends from “Wicked” pushed him to try out.

Under a new “Idol” format this year, the final 36 contestants have been put into three groups of 12. The first group went last week, with the top three voter-getters moving on to the next round.

Lambert sings tomorrow in the second group. He said he's not allowed to reveal his song choice beforehand. Another local contestant, Westview High student Arianna Afsar, is in the third group, which goes next week.

Even though some contestants who get knocked out at this stage will be brought back in two weeks for another chance in a wild-card round, the pressure to nail the song or go home is enormous, Lambert said. But he feels ready.

“One of the reasons why I waited to audition until I was older is because before this, I would have crumbled,” he said. “I've got more experience, I'm used to being in front of a crowd, and I've just grown up. Once you get to a certain point in life, you can handle more.”

Even being called theatrical.

Who knows how honest the vote tabulations on "American Idol" are? After all, no outside source verifies them. But no matter how Fox and the producers of the series managed to get here, they now have their most culturally potent finale ever in the showdown between Adam Lambert and Kris Allen.Each embodies an archetype of musical and sexual identity at least as old as television. And the choice viewers and voters make this week will have something very important to say about where we are as a nation and what kind of pop star we are willing to celebrate and embrace.

Allen is a direct descendant of Ricky Nelson, the youngest son of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, of the white-picket-fence 1950s sitcom, "The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet." A 1956 episode of the NBC series featured teenage Ricky Nelson forming a rock group to play at a high school dance. His first recording, "A Teenager's Romance," sold over a million copies in the real world.

Ricky Nelson - with his crew cut, penny loafers, V-neck sweater and guitar - was a sex idol all right. The female teen demographics for the series went through the roof once he started the band and launched a singing career. But he was the safe, TV-and-parent-approved version of teenage sexuality in the 1950s - chaperoned sock-hop dances in the high school gym with no slow, pelvis-to-pelvis-grind dancing.

The icon of that era from which Lambert descends is, of course, Elvis Presley, who in those same 1950s was recording songs like "That's All Right, Mama" and "Hound Dog." He was either being kept off network TV altogether or shown only from the waist up because of the nasty things censors thought his hips were saying to teenage girls.

It goes without saying that Presley was a sex symbol, but the difference between him and Ricky Nelson matters just as it does with Allen and Lambert.

Presley was nonparentally approved, bad-boy sex in the back seat of a hot car parked down by the deep, dark river with lots of pelvis-to-pelvis grinding in the midnight hour.

Lambert's best performances embody that sense of transgression and then some. The "then some" includes many of the rock transgressors who have come since Presley: Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Prince and, perhaps, even Cher (this is not the place to argue about where camp meets transgression with her).

And this is where things get most interesting with Lambert. After the sexual revolution of the 1960s, there was hardly an aspect of heterosexual behavior or identity that was widely considered to be transgressive any more. But then came androgyny with Jagger, glitter and glam with Bowie, and whatever with Prince.

Lambert channels all of that, and it is at the heart of what makes him so dynamic to watch onstage. He is a self-contained drama of identity reminiscent of the great Japanese actors who with each pass of their hand-fans would assume a dramatically different identity.

In the middle of sounding exactly like Steven Tyler on an Aerosmith song, he'll suddenly soar into a falsetto scream somewhere up in the Holy Land of Patti LaBelle, and he'll stand there looking contemptuously like he could hold the note forever if he wanted to.

Which brings us to gender and sexual orientation. (You knew we were going to wind up here, didn't you?) After having everyone from Simon Cowell to The New York Times acting like it was all right to just assume Lambert is gay - in part because of his dyed blue-black hair, earrings, painted nails as well as the ability to hit those LaBelle-like notes - we have now come to a kind of don't-ask-don't-tell relationship with the 27-year-old singer from San Diego and his sexual orientation.

All Lambert will say on the topic is: "I know who I am. I'm an honest guy, and I'm just going to keep singing."

All anyone connected with the show will say is what Cowell told TV Guide: "We've obviously never had an issue with it, and nor should anybody else. It's a huge step forward for the show."

Not really. Coming out or not is absolutely a matter and right of the individual, not any media outlet. But to flirt with gay identity and present personas infused with gay identity as Lambert has consistently done, and then decline to talk about it, might suggest to some that gay identity is something that cannot be talked about openly, that it is something to hide.

And that kind of thinking is further suggested by the fact that the "American Idol" producers offer only sketchy details of Lambert's personal life while they give us lots of Allen and more of the recently eliminated Danny Gokey's world than anyone could possibly want.

If Lambert is gay and he says so, it could be a "huge step forward for the show." But either way, it will be watershed if he is the one chosen the new "Idol" by viewers this week.

For more than five decades, prime-time network TV has taught us to embrace the safer, less dangerous and daring model of behavior - Arthur Fonzarelli instead of Marlon Brando's leather-jacketed character in "The Wild One."

This is our chance to choose the artist rather than the mere performer - the musical tightrope walker willing to break taboos and cross boundaries. Do we dare?

David Zurawik from The Baltimore Sun has made (on the 15th of May 2009, just discovered by me…) an interesting analysis of the phenomenon of Adam Lambert vs. Kris Allen, comparing their individual appeals.
Zurawik claims that each of them represents ‘an archetype of musical and sexual identity at least as old as television’.

Elvis Presley vs. Ricky Nelson

The icon of that era from which Lambert descends is, of course, Elvis Presley. (…) He was either being kept off network TV altogether – or shown only from the waist up because of the nasty things censors thought his hips were saying to teen girls.
It goes without saying that Presley was a sex symbol, but the difference between him and Ricky Nelson matters – just as it does with Allen and Lambert. Presley was non-parentally approved, bad-boy sex in the backseat of a hot car parked down by the deep, dark river with lots of pelvis-to-pelvis grinding in the midnight hour.

And after this comparison, the author continues to analyse Adam Lambert, comparing him to Jagger, Bowie, Elvis, Prince, Steve Tyler….

Transgression and falsetto

Lambert’s best performances embody that sense of transgression. (…)
And this is where things get most interesting with Lambert. After the sexual revolution of the 1960s, there was hardly an aspect of heterosexual behavior or identity that was widely considered to be transgressive any more. But then came androgyny with Jagger, glitter and glam with Bowie — and whatever with Prince.
Lambert channels all of that, and it is at the heart of what makes him so dynamic to watch onstage. He is a self-contained drama of identity reminiscent of the great Japanese actresses who with each pass of their hand-fans would assume a dramatically different identity.
In the middle of sounding exactly like Steven Tyler on an Aerosmith song, he’ll suddenly soar into a falsetto scream somewhere up in the Holy Land of Patti LaBelle — and he’ll stand there looking contemptuously like he could hold the note forever if he wanted to.