2009 Adam Lambert's AI 8 Performances

So here we go: all-American white folks Alexis Grace and Brent Something Something, Anne Marie Boskovitch, Adam Lambert on a coked-up unicorn. Altogether, our total stands at 104 people.

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First up: Adam Lambert, whom Kara found to be too musical theatre still. Paula agreed, but then disagreed with herself. Simon didn't seem to like him that much, but he's clearly talented and can make money. Ryan blanches when he says he's chosen to sing "Believe" by Cher; he assures us it won't be horrible, and then it sort of is. Of course, it's horrible in the most fascinating way, like one of those sad slow piano covers everybody must do from time to time, and I can't say I didn't ask for these kinds of mash-up outside-the-box ideas. It's a little cooler in concept than it could ever be in execution, which seems to be Adam's specialty. Good thing his voice is Broadway-trained, even if it's a bit sharp throughout. Also, it is a good thing that he is a lady.

Do you believe in life after Adam Lambert? Matt Giraud, the Louisville dueling-pianist who reminded Simon of Elliott. He sings "Georgia On My Mind" on the piano, and rocks it out.
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Room 1: Lambert and Silver Lake cuddle creepily, and then Paula comes in looking possessed. Ravenclaw is the most obvious room so I won't waste time: overthought Lambert and Silver Lake, Mathlete Anoop, way-overwrought Danny and Jamar, Drama Mama and Giraud, a blonde girl we met earlier, and of course Blind Guy, Lil Rounds and Scott MacIntyre.
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But for serious, I can't believe how little we've actually accomplished here. From 72 to 54? What? Why not eliminate two rooms and be done? Because then there would be no Chair. And I do love the Chair. Whatever, my spirit is already broken this week. I hope for the Chair not only that Danny and Jamar will be face-off'd, but also that they will give Tatiana and Normund a couple of knives, lock them in a janitor's closet, and see what happens. Every single goddamn time Tatiana gets through, it hurts worse. It's like a Greek punishment myth, only instead of your liver growing back it's Tatiana del Toro.
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Here they are: Jasmine in a Pink Lady jacket, Dueling Piano Matt with dueling piano airguns, Jeanine whom I don't recognize, "Nick" making creepy Phantom Of The Paradise moves at the camera, Allison with the red hair, Kris that cute guy we never saw, Megan "Joy" Corkrey wearing a pregnancy dress with white fuzzy dice, Bear Porn Matt, Jesse Langseth looking like she's coming for Bella Swan at the Prom, Kai's horrible Snoopy-Ears hair, the suddenly frightening Mishavonna, and the always frightening Adam Lambert with a fake tan and thirty necklaces working it like they're storming Kiamo Ko and the rent is due.

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Next up: Kris Allen, who is so hot it's unbelievable and who will be singing "Man In The Mirror," which will be weird. I wish we'd seen more of him because if I have to look at these bitches for months and months, I would take this guy over just about everybody. Who knows if he has a good voice yet, but I'm rooting for him, because this job can be hard and get you down. It's not like every week you find out you broke some poor fat guy bad enough that he ended up in Playgirl. You know? It's those moments. Is this one of them? He's fine. He's a good performer, his jaw goes sideways when he sings which I always like, his pitch and control are very good. I almost feel like his voice counts against him because you have so many options for second-guessing yourself when the person looks like that, and you also have so many options for hateration if you feel like your chosen pony is getting dicked by this cute guy.
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Kara complains about his song choice, which is valid I'm assuming but we can't really know since this guy just came out of nowhere; Paula looooves him; Simon also loves him. Paula kisses him for agreeing with her. Simon admits he's not the best guy singer -- namedrops Danny, actually -- but that he is fabulous and commercial, which is better. There's the distinct feeling that Simon's addressing the under-the-radar thing by pumping him up, because he really does deserve to get through. Randy points out essentially that this is a great followup to Allison, and Ryan cannot take his hands off the kid, which is always a good sign. Oh, Kris. I do hope we will see you again. Next up, Megan. I'm half-expecting to see Ryan still attached to Kris after the commercial.
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...guess who's up next.

Adam Lambert, man. I hate him because I hate all Adams except Adam Pratt because all Adams make me type "Adama," every single time. I just did it four times. And I hate him because dude, calm down. You are everything people should and do hate about Broadway. Literally. But really, I love him because he is what you call "inner-directed." There's lots of people who are just so into being themselves, whatever that means, and most of the time that means being just enough of themselves so that people won't murder them, or being what other people have told them are themselves to bring them down from the actual crazy that their actual selves would cause them to be, which is how you get a Danny Noriega.
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But Adam Lambert has figured out a way to do this strange thing without restricting it to one weird note; the downside is that when people actually have the wherewithal to do this, it means they are nuts to start with, because a sane person would eventually simmer down or be put on medication. Some artists, though, are so talented and so deeply crazy that the crazy takes them through all the floors of that building like a Wonkavator of crazy into the sky, and they end up someplace new, and I do love that, but I also recognize that it's how you get a Nick Mitchell. Or a Chris Crocker. But so if to this heady mélange you add David Cook's smarmy vision of himself as this millennial artiste -- which is really the best case scenario for where Nate might end up -- you get Adam Lambert. Which is half irritating as fuck, half sort of nightmarishly awesome, and altogether worth watching.

He points out the whole thing about how working in theatre is a mixed bag because on the one hand it's live all the time and you're competing with just the worst people on Earth and not only do you have to watch out for ladders and the aftcastle but you also have to remember that the show must go on no matter how down you are feeling, so even little kids better fucking toughen up and act right because a million kids want your job -- all good things, which I really admire -- but on the other hand, it ruins you for film and TV because you're used to singing to the back row, making faces they can see in the cheap mezzanines, all that, and if you try that shit on camera you are ... Tatiana. So Kara told him he was too dramatic to connect with the song, and he realized he was going to have to fix it. But did he?

...Wow. I don't have the words to codify this experience. It's sort of like getting held down and... snuggled to death... by the boys of Bel Ami. I don't feel overwhelmingly violated? And I can't say I'm not enjoying myself? But it's like this: I am upset deep inside sometimes when a performer has this thing, I don't know what it's called but it's like they have a secret. Like that sneaky, gleeful look that people get when they're on drugs and you're not. I can't handle that in my musicians. I don't like Peter Gabriel, because I feel like there's something he's not telling me, or there's a joke I'm not in on. Björk is like the ghost of a secret with many secrets of its own in a little elf hill, so she's fine. When I was very, very young I hated Tina Turner because I felt like she had a secret. Jason Castro's brother had many secrets. I can't think of any other people on this show with a secret. Clay had no secrets whatsoever. Jessica Sierra had the opposite of secrets. Constantine's whole problem was not enough secrets.

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And with Adam, I feel like he is trying to tell us maybe that we are the ones with a secret. Which is so troubling, and made more so by the fact that possibly, he is right. I don't know what my secret is, but I think Adam Lambert does. And I am supremely uncomfortable with that. It's tempting to say that Adam is the gay Constantine, except that fails on several basic levels number one being that nobody in history is gayer than Constantine, and secondly because people responded either really positively or really negatively to Constantine, and my entire response right now is basically a lack of response, and fear for my life. And it occurs to me that they are both theatre people, and maybe there's an explanation for this behavior.

He is not really very attractive, if you take it apart. His skin, I'm going to stop mentioning because enough already, but then there's his stupid girl hair and all the necklaces and the prancing. Oh, Lord, the prancing. But he's definitely a person who is attractive because they are awesome, not because their face is particularly special. And then there's the whole sex thing he's doing, which is basically like an advertisement for this thing called sex, like have you heard about it, which was another main reason I hated Constantine. But there's something balancing it out a little bit. Maybe because he honestly seems like he knows what he's doing, or finds the blatant sex stuff hilarious -- which we know he does -- or just the "you know you've thought about it," kind of offhanded willingness to raise the bar Constantine set so long ago. It's like I always tell my sister: "Sometimes slutty is good, because boys are dumb."

But his voice is good, and can do backflips and your laundry at the same damn time, which is impressive. He has no sense of shame whatsoever, which makes me nervous but serves you well in this kind of game. He seems brilliant and unbearable and up his own ass, which are all attractive qualities. And slutty is, again, good. So I guess... I sort of have a crush on this little performance. Yeah, I gotta say: Put it all together and I am buying it. Or am I? I don't know. It's just ... weird. I'm sorry I keep spinning my wheels here, but I feel weird and crazy.

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Adam Lambert just basically did a Normund Gentle skit about dudes literally fucking -- to the tune of "Satisfaction" -- and I find I have no ill will toward him at all: it's "Tainted Love" all over again, but like the person holding the sledgehammer this time actually knows what to do with it.

Ugh, I'm so done. At least the 90-minute burnout didn't show up. Paula's like, "That was like not being here at all and instead being at the Adam Lambert concert," and tells him he's far and away the best this week. True, or not true. Simon's like, "I feel weird and crazy. True or not true. Either way, this is going to make people feel weird and crazy and act weird and crazy." Randy's like, "I AM IN LOVE WITH YOU." Then he makes a list of every boys' name he -- or I -- ever scrawled on a Trapper Keeper: "It's Steven Tyler meets Fall Out Boy meets Robert Pattinson!" I cannot believe that Randy Jackson just named Robert Pattinson as his number three crush. That is so magical. I want to watch Twilight with Randy Jackson. That is a lie, because obviously really I want to watch Twilight with Ryan Seacrest, but Randy can come.

And so then most awesomely that's exactly what happens -- Ryan's like, "Edward Cullen! He called you Edward!" -- and then even more awesomely Adam Lambert is like, "I know! My favorite book!" And it's... Is this what it's going to be like this year? Ryan and Randy and Adam squealing about Twilight and climbing all over each other? Is Adam Lambert the Peter Sarsgaard of this show and can turn everybody gay even your boyfriend? I know I, for one, feel a little bit gayer than when we started. Don't you? Thanks, Adam.

Usually at this point I give thought to who will go or win or die or whatever happens on this show, but now I just don't even have it in me. That got so bizarre so fast, just like I knew it would, but I forgot it was a marathon and not a sprint, and all I can say is that I will probably still be feeling weird and crazy this time tomorrow, and hopefully you will too. See you there.

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OMG so many. There are so many of these jerks. After Megan Joy Corkrey's cute shoes comes Adam Lambert, still wearing so much pancake all over his face it's like the Pillsbury Doughboy got him this job, if you know what I'm saying, and I think you do, then Matt Giraud does a little dance that says, "I don't think I really deserve to be here either, but let's do this." Then Alexis does some strange little vamping move off the stairs and looks exactly like Crista Flanagan in an ugly sexy-overalls type outfit that only works if there's some kind of Fosse in our future, a prospect about which I am of exactly two minds. What in hell is the theme?
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Adam talks about how he fled NYC to the West Coast, and that it has been rough as hell. He says if he'd done it five years earlier, he would have been killed by the horrors of LA. His adorable parents are like, "It's good to be happy with what you're doing, and also to make money." This little package has done more to make me like him as a person than all of the wiener-wagging freakshow cabarets that have ever existed. Way to go, show. And now he will be singing "Black Or White." My theory is that he will do it in some fucked-up way and I will go apeshit because that's what I like, but then I can't imagine this song without that signature guitar riff, which pretty much defines the song. I do know that I'm not deleting this off my TiVo when I turn in this recap, like I usually do, because at least three people have been asking me without any irony, on a weekly basis, when "that guy is going to be on that show" again. Which means the rockband hipsters and violinists of east Austin, at least, are on Adam's side.

Okay, I've been searching my soul tonight, and it's like this. Adam Lambert is not attractive to me in an actual way. Like, as a normal person he seems awesome, but onstage I get that same ooky feeling as Freddie Mercury, or looking at David Bowie's balls in Labyrinth. And I remember that lots of people thought he was attractive in that movie, and I think maybe this was in the same way as Adam Lambert, and either way I don't really get it. But the best way to say it, and I think you will know what I mean when I say this, is that Adam Lambert makes me feel like a young girl who has just discovered gay boys, and wants more than anything to see them kiss each other.

You know the feeling? Not explicitly sexual, just this extreme sense of intrigue and fascination. And it's not good or bad, this feeling, but sort of dangerous and simultaneously waaaaay over there where it can't touch me or implicate me in any way. I don't know what the young, straight male equivalent is, although I posit that it might also be Adam Lambert.
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See? Words, again, fail to properly and entirely express what Adam Lambert is like. We are struggling here with the limitations of the genre. I will say that there is catwalking, and just enough emphasis on the romantic parts of the lyrics that you realize the whole song is less a protest against monochrome colors like I always thought, and more about interracial dating as an expression of something or another. There are some explosions or something, and everybody in the audience goes insane the whole time, and all the lights are black and white. (Which ones? Doesn't matter.) And there's a part that is sort of like the apocalypse.

Paula keeps telling the contestants to "take it all in," and for once the crowd is so fucking out of their minds that it seems like a good thing to say. "Never in the history," Paula says of this show, have we seen anybody so comfortable onstage and performing. "Your innate ability to know who you are as an artist, and marry fashion with music," she says. They're both crying pretty hard at this point. I can't imagine what it is like in that audience right now. Something between Oprah and right before an electrical storm. I think I would love to be there, because insane crowds really do it for me, but I also think afterwards I would sleep for a week, grouchily. I'm getting tired just watching these people gnawing on their own arms and pulling out their hair like this.

And then Simon drives them even fucking crazier by pointing out that Adam is in an entire different league from the whole other 12, which makes him and Paula cry even more. Dude, if Adam Lambert won this show I would buy the world a Coke. The judges continue to freak out on him and tell him he could break the charts if he made a record today, and nobody can even fucking handle it, and Kara's like "you invented entire notes" and "I hope Michael Jackson is watching tonight."

Right before Adam actually combusts, Ryan runs in and does the Ryan thing that he does, which is stand back and stare him in the eyes so he doesn't crumble onto the stage with how intense everything just got, and Adam immediately calms down. Ryan holds one hand on the small of his back and gives the numbers, and Adam chills out just long enough to get the hell off the stage. I don't think I need to watch the actual performance again, because it did make me nervous a little bit, but I am totally rewinding the judges' panel. That was awesome.
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Matt G... singing "Human Nature"!

I'm just glad they played him after Adam and before Alexis, because really it's just like the show started with Adam anyway, and Alexis is obviously going to do something amazing too, so it's a nice little triple-shot where he stands the least chance of being swallowed up.
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So what have we got?

Way at the top I've got Adam and Allison, and Matt G.

I can't even begin to guess how it's going to shake out this week, though, because of the Danny/Scott factor and the fact that we all probably have MJ songs that we're especially attached to, that are different for everybody. I'm glad nobody sang "Bad" or "Billie Jean," because that would have been boring and gotten them unearned votes. I wouldn't even bother running an office pool this week, because there's just a lot of information we don't have yet. Eightball says "UNCLEAR" at this time, but this time tonight we'll know if anybody even needs to bother against Danny or Scott -- though I guess if you don't like their style of singing you could say the same about Adam and Allison, that they're coasting on a thing people respond to instead of actual talent. Mostly I'm just happy with how talented and fresh this crowd of folks is turning out to be.
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