American Idol Recap: New York and Puerto Rico Full of Promise

This week has been rough; three sequential nights of bad singing, cheesy narratives and young moms with big dreams.  As palatable as Wednesday night’s episode was – with its relatively high quotient of good singers and relatively low quotient of not at all entertaining nutcases – tonight there was a guy dressed as an iPod who we had to watch be crazy for five plus minutes of prime time programming. It was hard not to fantasize about the Tivo’d Australian Open tennis just one click away. For the sake of keeping things civil between us and American Idol we’re going to let the padded out nonsense from last night slide (as well as that day-glow, noose-like scarf Paula was wearing) and just talk about the singing, because between Puerto Rico and New York City, some decent contestants did emerge.
 
The first Hipster American Idol could be Jackie Tohn, a downtown girl in beat-up Air Jordan’s and a stripy shirt who grew up in the entertainment industry.  With her trusty guitar nearby Tohn delivered a version of Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours” that made us hate that song slightly less. She’s got a great, rumbling, bluesy voice we look forward to hearing much more of.



 


We should strongly dislike Melinda Camille, the shoeless hippie who says she just wants to uplift humanity with her singing, but we just can’t. She’s nice. She’s sincere. She can really sing. And she’s arguably the most beautiful contestant the show has ever seen and not in a Carrie Underwood way. She’s interesting looking and not in a that means you’re actually ugly way. Simon even winked at her on her way out. As Cher Horowitz, that’s an unequivocal sex invite.


 


Guess what? It has occurred to the Idol producers that this whole Latin music thing is kinda hot. The judged gave golden tickets to two contestants who sang in Spanish. Patricia Lewis Roman first attempted a not-so-great karaoke rendition of “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” but it was her take on a Spanish standard that impressed the judges. Jorge Nunez has one of those in-your-face voices that Paula, in a rare moment of actual expressed thought, likened to Marc Anthony’s. Look, we’re not huge fans of Jo Lo’s scary skinny hubby but someone with Latin chart crossover potential could totally win this year. Not that either of these contestants seems to have top ten chops.