(Above: The audio of Ricky Braddy's lovely but overdone "A Song For You.")

by Linda Holmes

American Idol's Top 36 contestants have officially begun the process of asking for your votes, beginning with last night's performances by the first group of twelve.

What have we learned?

We've learned a little about bad arrangements, a little more about oversinging, quite a bit about just how dangerous unsteady nerves can be, and a very large amount about unforgivable disrespect for Carole King.

Let's have a chat, after the jump...

 

Jackie Tohn: Jackie put on Olivia Newton-John's pants from the end of Grease for a disorientingly lifeless rendition of, of all things, "A Little Less Conversation." She managed to surgically remove all actual energy from the song without disturbing her own overblown dance-and-bounce moves, making it a little like watching a gymnastics floor exercise accompanied by "Chopsticks." Grade: D

Ricky Braddy: One of a few contestants who'd been little-seen during auditions and Hollywood, Ricky came out needing to make a statement, and he decided to go with "I can sing really loudly." He chose the lovely "A Song For You" and performed it well, but he hit a common pitfall where cutting a song down to 1:20 results in something that sounds like the out-of-context last 1:20 of an epic seven-minute performance. Let's call it the Unearned Fortissimo Problem. Grade: B

Alexis Grace: Alexis has made the wise marketing choice to put a streak of pink in her blonde hair, which gives people something to hold onto — she becomes Pink Hair Girl in a sea of Forgettables — and she managed a respectable, if American-Idol-like, performance of "Never Loved A Man." It was overcooked, but not unpleasant, and on this particular night, that made her above average. Grade: B+

Brent Keith: Idol has a very strange relationship with country music. Country-flavored artists tend to do pretty well — Carrie Underwood has probably eclipsed Kelly Clarkson as the show's most successful winner — but the judges can't relate to country music at all, and Simon Cowell openly despises it. Brent's decision to sing "Hicktown" in a very "Hicktown" kind of way was a bit of a rebellious choice, in that if this is the guy you are, you might as well just say so. But in the end, the performance was competent and forgettable, and he didn't have the showmanship to pull off something that's about 40 percent novelty song. Grade: C

Stevie Wright: There's really no nice gloss to put on this one: it's probably the worst performance at this stage I've ever seen. It's not because she doesn't have ability, and it's not entirely because she chose a really dumb Taylor Swift song. It's because she was so cripplingly nervous that she couldn't breathe. She was taking gasping breaths in the middle of lines, her voice shook constantly, and the only things that sounded right were things where she could belt a little. If you've ever heard a really anxious person sing karaoke, you've heard all this before. I feel guilty doing this to a high-school student, but: Grade: F

Anoop Desai: His name is so much fun to supportively yell that I want to be supportively yelling it for a while. ("Anooooooop!") He's got a great voice, but "Angel Of Mine" (a Monica song) was a really dull choice for a guy whose whole pitch is that he comes off kind of preppy and clean-cut but has a surprising level of soulful energy.

But! There's a good reason Anoop felt comfortable with this song, and what you need to know is that he was a member of the UNC Clef Hangers. Seriously. "Clef Hangers." Look!

Listen to the screaming and hooting. You can completely understand how he concluded he should sing this song. Unfortunately, the Idol band and arrangements fell substantially short of the support provided by the Clef Hangers (which surely means...something). It was definitely a disappointment, though not a disaster. As the judges pointed out, he has great likability and could certainly squeak through, but it's not what the Anoopians were hoping for. Grade: B-

Casey Carlson: The winky-winky, cutesy-poo way Casey delivered "Every Little Thing She [Oh, Wait, 'He'] Does Is Magic" would at least make it seem like there should have been some upbeat energy to it, but there wasn't. She was another perpetrator of the evening's worst sin — overselling everything — and the little alterations she made to the melody were not improvements. Grade: C-

Michael Sarver: Everyone's favorite oil-rig roughneck came out with Gavin DeGraw's overdone "I Don't Want To Be," which literally would have been one of my "I hope he doesn't sing this song" wishes for him. He's got a good voice, but when you're an oil-rig roughneck, you make a better impression on an audience by demonstrating that there's more to you than, you know, being the kind of guy who would belt out "I Don't Want To Be" on karaoke night at the Oil-Rig Roughneck Bar-N-Grill. Grade: C+

Anne Marie Boskovich: One of the only times when I lose my TV-watching temper with the Idol judges is when they start telling contestants things that aren't true that they dress up as The Wisdom Of The Ages. Such as: "Natural Woman" is inherently a big, huge, blowout of a song that you cannot sing without a big, huge, blowout voice. Look, judges: Aretha Franklin didn't write that song; Carole King wrote that song, and Carole King does a phenomenal job with that song playing it down, down, down. Seriously, watch her sing it sometime. What went wrong with Anne Marie Boskovich's version of this song was that it was boring, not that it wasn't "big" enough. Grade: C

Stephen Fowler: There are songs that seem to me like relics, and the fact that "Rock With You" contains the line "we can ride the boogie" sort of relegates it to that category for me, so I'm not sure why it's still being performed on this show, but here it was. He was fine. He was competent. He will not make it through. It's really not a song that makes people fall in love with you. Grade: C

Tatiana Del Toro: Tatiana is this year's official female weirdo, with the hysterical crying and shrieking and that laugh that will make your fillings vibrate on a primitive frequency that echoes something at Stonehenge and makes the world spontaneously die. And I'm exaggerating only a little. So with all the hype over what an unhinged loony-tunes she is, she comes out and does a totally average rendition of the super-old-fashioned "Saving All My Love For You"? It's like seeing Satan do the Electric Slide. It's...fine? Grade: B-

Danny Gokey: Danny is the guy whose young wife died recently, making him the feel-good story (in the sense of a feel-bad story) of the year. It would be easy to just wish him gone so the uncomfortable public grieving could come to an end, but the problem is that he's kind of a good singer. In a burst of bitter irony, his performance of Mariah Carey's powerfully gooby "Hero" was one of the less gooby performances of the evening, and one of the less emphatically oversung. And at about 10:05 p.m. last night, I claimed the copyright on all versions of the phrase "The Goke Is Okey-Doke," so don't try to put it on your audience sign and steal my idea. Grade: A-

My prediction? Danny and Alexis go through as the highest-vote-getting man and woman, respectively, with the third spot (for the next highest vote-getter who's not one of those two) available to Anoop, Tatiana, or possibly Ricky Braddy in a melismatic upset.