It’s Idol Gives Back week on American Idol, and my reviews are posted. The plan to leverage the show’s fan base (and advertisers) for charities in the U.S. and Africa is greatly appreciated. It’s also greatly weird, in the context of a show that is, most weeks, a tough-nosed, cruel-to-be-kind competition. There was a strange dissonance, seeing Simon touring a poverty-stricken area of Kenya and saying, “This is just intolerable” and “This is quite literally hell on earth” in exactly the same tones he usually uses to disparage a bad Whitney cover. Perhaps self-conscious of how it would sound to rip into a contestant singing for charity, the judges all sounded a little like Paula Abdul last night. It made me wish Sanjaya were still around, to see Simon forced to be unsnarkily nice to him.
My bottom three this week: LaKisha, Blake and Chris (though that last one was a coin toss with Phil). Going home: LaKisha. But Blake is very, very vulnerable–and frankly, I may be in denial about his chances because (1) I like him and (2) I want to believe that America won’t vote him off for singing that Godless pinko song Imagine. You may say I’m a dreamer.