American Idol Week Two: Sucking Slightly Less

First off, I'm kind of bummed about last night's ejection of Alexandrea Lushington, the vaguely spazzy 17-year-old hippie chick who turned intolerable soft-rock into tolerable R&B two weeks running. On Wednesday night's show, she managed to make me like a Chicago song OK, which is some sort of creative alchemy, and the fact that she's fallen while beyond-bland glee-club doof Luke Menard still stands is pretty much unconscionable. Actually, the persistence of Menard is just mystifying. Who's voting for this guy? Are all the acapella groups in America banding together via message board and turning themselves into a so-far indestructible voting bloc? Menard has demonstrated a total inability to understand or translate the songs he's chosen, and his stage-presence is just a vast dead space. At this point, I'd probably enjoy watching him fall down stairs. I know we're only two weeks into the voting part of the show and all, but I'm genuinely pissed that I'll have to spend another two minutes of my life watching him and his dead man's grin mangle some other song next week. Other than those complaints, though, I'm not mad about last night's eliminations. We've also lost one of the show's near-endless stable of interchangeable blonde chicks, and the utterly detestable self-important frosted-tip fratboy fuckface Jason Yaeger is gone as well, surprising nobody except apparently Jason Yaeger. I'm probably happiest about fake-bald desperate-to-rock boyband vet Robbie Carrico getting the boot. Fun as it was to hear the judges harping on his lack of authenticity, whatever the fuck that could possibly mean in this context, that guy had zero swagger; it was like watching Kevin Federline's chump cousin singing Foreigner.

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