Last night I tried to play the American Idol Drinking Game TM I invented yesterday. Here are my notes:
-Show opens with “Short Stack” Seacrest pointing out phony sexual innuendo between Simon and Kara. Simon clearly doesn’t find this funny. Girlfriend and I drink. Could be a long night…
-Lee Dewyze sings some cheesy pop song I’ve never heard of. The lyrics have something to do with “dreams.” I remark that “dreams” should be a drinking cue, but GF is worried we’ll get too drunk. 
-Did I mention we’re already drunk and watching this on DVR at 1 am?
-I’m over Lee Dewyze. He has a good voice, but he’s so freakin’ cheesy.
-Randy thinks Lee has pitch problems. We drink.
-Meanwhile Alex Lambert is somehow becoming more and more endearing each time he performs. Very good song choice with, Ray LaMontagne’s “Trouble” though, admittedly, every time someone plays this song on the show I’m disappointed that it’s not “Trouble” by Cat Stevens (or Elliott Smith’s cover of it.)
-Simon suggests that Alex picture Randy in a bikini while performing. Not sure why anyone would want to do that. I think the point Simon’s making is that Alex needs to be having more fun onstage. I disagree. I think Alex’s deadly serious earnestness is what makes him lovable.
-Tim Urban completely butchers the Jeff Buckley version of the John Cale version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and the judges absolutely love it. Are they deaf?
-First of all, there should be a rule that no one can play this song anymore, not even Cohen. The Jeff Buckley version is so perfect, so sublime, so deeply moving, that any other version feels like a blasphemous parody of a sacred text.
-Secondly, Urban is some kind of psycho-Christian, and both changes an important lyric to suit his god-fearing needs (the line “Maybe there’s a god above” becomes “I know that there’s a god above”), and also completely misses the song’s incredibly obvious sexual subtext (or text?) This is not a happy song about loving God! It’s about sex, love, and pain as religious experience. Urban simply ignores the verse, “Remember when I moved in you/and the holy dove was moving too,” and apparently doesn’t realize what he’s saying when he sings, “It’s not a cry that you hear at not/it’s not somebody who’s seen the light/it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.” Do I have to spell it out for you Tim?
-Ellen runs onto the stage and hugs Tim because she liked his performance so much. This leads me to believe that Ellen is slyly playing the American Idol Drinking Game TM too.
-Andrew Garcia sings Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in a Bottle” in a desperate attempt to re-kindle the magic flame of his Hollywood week performance of Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up.”
-The judges don’t like it. Randy refers to himself as “The Dog”, and say’s “Pitchy.” We drink twice.
-Non-sequitur: Is there anything more humiliating than the part where the just berated contestant on the verge of tears has to futilely grovel for votes by holding up the number of fingers that correspond to his Idol 800 number (i.e. four fingers for 1-800-IDOL-4) ?
(Another non-sequitur: Is that really how you spell non-sequitur?)
-Kara tells Andrew that he’s already peaked. For once I agree. I still like Andrew’s voice, but he’s coming across as very one note and gimmicky.
-Casey James does a pretty good of generic folk/country song. GF is lost in his eyes. I drink. Judges like it, don’t love it. About right. Randy says, “For me.” More drinking for me. I think GF is asleep, dreaming of Casey James. I break out the whiskey. 
-Just kidding. I’ve been drinking whiskey the whole time.
-16 year-old Aaron Kelly sings a competent if nauseating power ballad about a father missing his son. GF opens her eyes, says, “I hate him,” goes back to sleep.
-Kara says the song is in no way relevant to Aaron’s life and she didn’t feel his connection to it. Simon disagrees. He thinks what Kara said is complete and utter rubbish. Simon thinks that if you keep telling contestants what they can and can’t sing you’ll confuse them. This is strange because Simon’s always telling contestant what they can and can’t sing, and attempting to pigeonhole them as very specific types of artists. Aaron says he was trying to tell the story, “kinda like the narrator.”
-Toderick Hall does a gospel version of Queen’s “Somebody to Love”. It’s surprisingly not terrible. Randy says Toderick is back. (Anyone else notice that Randy laughs before he says anything, good or bad? Why is that?) Kara thinks it was, “a little dramatic, almost like Godspell.” This is code for: “It was a bit gay.”
-GF wakes up for Big Mike’s performance of Maxwell’s, “This Woman’s Work,” which is really good, and involves falsetto. I like it whenever large people sing with high voices. We rewind and watch again because it really is good. Nice work big Mike.
-We also have to rewind Randy’s response like five times. Here’s my attempt to transcribe it:
“Dog. Yo. Hu. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, hang on, hang on, hang on. Really? Really really? Yo man, I got to give it to you again dog this is crazy! Yo listen. Listen. Listen For everybody, everybody that doesn’t know it was dope, it was unbelievable. I want to call Maxwell on the phone say Big Mike is knockin’ on the door dog-dog we’re ready but listen the last note for you to hear the chord I was like Oh, umm, whii-ah-what? Yo, Mike that was hot!
Here’s the performance, with Randy’s response:
-Kara is crying. It’s her biological clock talking. She says that as a woman who doesn’t have a child she can relate. To re-iterate, the song is about being a father.
-GF and I are drinking and laughing and almost vomiting, fading in and out of consciousness. Time to dim the lights.
For more, follow me on twitter @bubblesdepot
adam wilson
Adam Wilson’s first novel, Flatscreen will be published by Harper Perennial in Winter 2012. He is a former culture columnist for Blackbook, and a former TV blogger for Flavorwire. His journalism, criticism, and fiction have appeared in many publications ...
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