Okay, here's one I don't understand at all.

In all the times I have heard "Hallelujah," from Leonard Cohen to Jeff Buckley to Rufus Wainwright to k.d. lang, it has never occurred to me that my real question was, "How would Creed have handled that song?"

On last night's American Idol, Simon Cowell threw '90s-growl-pop-rocker Lee DeWyze the biggest meatball pitch right over the plate that he could think of, which is, of course, "Hallelujah." Not only has "Hallelujah" been performed on Idol before; it's been performed this season. It's the closest thing there is to a bulletproof song. It's so beautifully crafted and so inherently elegant that you almost can't wreck it.

Almost.

But here it is with an extraneous choir, extraneous orchestration, unnecessary split-screen camera work, and yet another vocal in which "make the song your own" is taken to mean "go up when the melody goes down, because that way, the song is bigger and louder and shoutier, and therefore obviously better."

Don't get me wrong; there's nothing wrong with Lee DeWyze other than fairly persistent pitch problems, which weren't really a huge issue in this particular performance. This is not the fault of a lack of talent on his part. But this arrangement — this particular way of delivering this song — is absolutely everything I cannot stand about the way Idol looks at music and what it tries to present as "good," all at the same time.

He doesn't even go one trip through that haunting melody line, which has the inevitability and sway of a lullaby when done well, without decorating it with flair that distorts its shape. There's probably not a song in the world about which it's more true that the simplicity of the melody is the melody. Goosing it with all this growly, bar-band moaning, like every line is going to end with the word "bay-baaaay," is unnecessary, distracting, and ruinous to the mood.

That's not to even mention how heavily the show's thumb is on the scale when the production of this number is so overwhelmingly designed to force the kind of "moment" that the judges keep instructing all the performers to have. When the judges gave Casey James the John Mayer song "Daughters," was it because they thought he would have a "moment" with that song? Of course not. You couldn't have a "moment" with that song if you sang it while performing open-heart surgery on an ailing Shar-Pei puppy.

But you can have a forced "moment" with "Hallelujah" even if you do almost everything wrong, which is exactly what happened.

Note: The explanation of the headline can be found in this discussion, for those of you who haven't been following our Idol coverage this season.