While I haven’t been recapping American Idol the past couple weeks, I have still been watching. Last Wed. night’s elimination round episode featured a performance by Fantasia. It was a pretty strange/freaky number with an awful song title (”Bore Me”). Fantasia bopped and gyrated all over the stage, and her three back-up singers gyrated behind her in a line, with their butts hanging out of their mini-mini-mini-dress outfits. I didn’t personally like it, but it was amusing…the best thing, tho, as every AI watcher knows already, is Simon’s visual reaction near the end. It was utterly priceless and absolutely hysterical.

I don’t know what he was thinking - that he hated the performance, or just that he was wondering how the sponsors were going to react to those almost-naked butts on the dancers, but oh, it was a classic Simon/American Idol moment. I can watch it over and over and still giggle each time.

If you’re a browser of YouTube, you can find videos of the full performance or some much briefer ones that consist mostly of just Simon’s reaction. But if you happen across this post months from now and those are all gone or have been yanked, I also made my own “Simon reacts” video clip.

Simon Cowell is about 60% of the reason I even watch American Idol. He rules.

EW.com has a video-interview with Michael Johns on their website. It’s split up into three parts and isn’t a bad interview. It’s nice to see Michael talk in a casual, relaxed fashion about his experience on American Idol and his possible future. I’ve seen a few other interviews this week, but I like this one the best so far. He’s such a cute goof-ball. In part 2 and part 3 of their interview, EW.com gets him to sing two lines (one line each time) of a song Michael would’ve performed had he not been voted off. It’s not him singing, mind you - it’s more as if he was in your living room and he broke out into song for about 3 seconds.

I recorded one of the very short audio snippets of him singing one of those lines, so if you don’t want to download/watch the videos just to hear that one 20-30 second bit, you can hear it (mp3) by clicking here to my file. But if you’re a Michael Johns fan, you’ll probably want to see the videos in their entirety. You can see them on EW.com’s Idolatry page. If they’re not on the top of the list anymore, just page down.

I’ve uploaded some mp3’s of a few of the male singers songs that they’ve sung so far on the show. These are NOT the itunes versions - they’re recorded from the broadcast itself, so you’ll hear audience clapping at the end and the sound isn’t “CD quality” etc. But if you’re like me and just want a quick version to remind you of the performance, they’re fine. I did insert a fade-out over the audience clappings to make them less jarring when repeat-looped forever. :)

You can access/play them from my largely empty & generic media gallery, which is where I occasionally dump files I feel like sharing. They use Window Media Player embedding.

The songs include:
David Archuleta - Imagine;
David Hernandez - Papa Was a Rolling Stone;
Michael Johns - Light My Fire (Top24 version);
Michael Johns - Bohemian Rhapsody (Hollywood week version, includes him introducing himself b4 singing);
Luke Menard - Killer Queen

I know Luke Menard’s version of “Killer Queen” was pretty much universally panned, and my initial reaction to his performance was also a horrified “ewwww.” But the funny thing about music is that sometimes, if you go back and listen without any visuals, you begin to realize that vocally, it’s not anywhere as bad as you might have first thought. It’s amazing how watching the singer on a stage can really affect how you perceive the vocals. So while I don’t think Luke Menard can hold even a burned-out candle to the great Freddy Mercury, if you listen to his vocal without having to watch Luke’s uncharismatic stage presence, it’s actually not too bad.

Btw, as a website notation: I’m not planning to upload all the performances from the show - this isn’t meant to be a major file-site, it’s a blog. Har. I had these offhand and thought a few people might be interested, so up they went onto my server. My media gallery is empty because it’s a new installation, and I haven’t gotten around to either transferring old stuff from previous galleries or putting new things up, yet. Hence, there’s no separate link to it on this blog page, since it’s, y’know, not worth visiting on any general basis. To be honest, I may never get around to doing anything with the media gallery beyond a place to put files that I’ll refer to from this blog. *shrug* :)