Kristy Lee is Going to Blow Simon Out of His Socks
For the second week in a row on American Idol, a handful of young-and-pretties hacked away at some of the best rock songs ever written--songs they, apparently in most cases, had never even heard before.
Our semi-local darling Kristy Lee Cook chose her song at random because she liked the title, "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away." If she knew the song, she would've known that it's a rich song straddling the divide between the personal and political, with a fairly difficult-to-sing-well (albeit sonically simple) melody line that dips far below her reachable range. We'll give her this, though: she managed to add a little tinge of country without going overboard like last week, making it her own. Still, it was eh.
Call us a snob, but this Seattlest firmly believes that musicians in this day and age should be as well-acquainted with the Beatles as writers should be with Shakespeare. How can you possibly get on a stage and try to be a pop singer without knowing even two Beatles songs? What is the world coming to?
Of course, Carly Smithson actually knew the song she was singing--"Blackbird"--the one tune we wanted to see done, and done right. She was wearing a nightgown, for some reason, and the audience was doing that arm sway thing that teenagers do to ballads....but it all came off nicely. Archuleta did "The Long and Winding Road" some real justice, and the rest of the contestants were very karaoke and bland. We kind of wish we could just cut to the chase and get 10 weeks of Smithson and Archuleta face-off. But alas, we must knock contestants off one at a time. And this week, honestly, it's anyone's guess. So many mediocre performances were given, although KLC has been in the bottom two almost every single week.
