What Not To Sing (WNTS) Discussion

[Elliott]

Two performances with massive SDs tonight, apparently.

[kcostell]

I'm guessing Arthur's one of them.    I simultaneously loved and hated what he did there.  

Edited May 4, 2020 by kcostell

[Raphy]

49 minutes ago, Elliott said:

Two performances with massive SDs tonight, apparently.

Grace?

[totes4totes]

54 minutes ago, Elliott said:

Two performances with massive SDs tonight, apparently.

Gotta be Grace and Arthur

[Wallowalle]

Ratings are up! Julia is in sniffing range of 5 stars

[m1key]

Yay for Julia!! Hopefully she gets above an 80 once the midweek ratings get posted. I also love that Makayla has the 3rd highest rating but ONLY a 58? She deserved higher. 

[Wallowalle]

13 minutes ago, m1key said:

Yay for Julia!! Hopefully she gets above an 80 once the midweek ratings get posted. I also love that Makayla has the 3rd highest rating but ONLY a 58? She deserved higher. 

I'd give Makayla, Francisco and Sophia 10 more points tbh, all deserved 4 stars

[YeahRite]

1 hour ago, Wallowalle said:

I'd give Makayla, Francisco and Sophia 10 more points tbh, all deserved 4 stars

Agreed! Other than that, I agree with the five highest rated performances (so far) this week. Hope all five make it.

[holinessss]

this F4 for finale snaps 

[Sept390]

Just Sam that high? She's very pitchy for me

 

Did not expect Dillon to be higher than Arthur

[CarmenSandiego]

3 hours ago, Sept390 said:

Just Sam that high? She's very pitchy for me

 

Did not expect Dillon to be higher than Arthur

I’m just thrilled that Just Sam made a great recovery from last week!  But I didn’t really expect Dillon to be higher than Arthur either.

[Elliott]

On the flip side, I didn’t expect Arthur to be that high. Easily the worst performance of the season imo.

[sublymonal]

Was expecting Arthur and Grace to be the bottom 2 by a long shot. Don’t know how Louie ended up being so low.

[psterina]

Yes. Julia & Sam, deserve those high rating.    Awesome performances, ladies!!!!

 

[kamil24]

I didn't realize Grace was so disliked this week. I didn't even like her before this but it was one of the best of the night for me.

[ScarletDevilCCX]

10 hours ago, kamil24 said:

I didn't realize Grace was so disliked this week. I didn't even like her before this but it was one of the best of the night for me.

Same. She was easily the performance of the night and it wasn't even close. 

 

Well, no, it wasn't close until after the judges used their save. Makayla got close, but that's about it. 

[ScarletDevilCCX]

Also, let's see what our CSAB will look like.

 

Much to my surprise, 8 of the CSAB top 10 are actually in the Top 11. Since it was called a "save" despite the fact that Top 20 is usually a semifinal, I have to assume that they won't take an 11th contestant as a wild card. So Louis, Jovin, and Sam are out and Lauren and Kimmy are in. And since this will only be the first projected rating, they should both make Top 7, as Dillon, Grace, and Arthur get knocked out.

 

...Yeah I already hate this. I'm praying they do make it a Top 11, because that appears to mean Just Sam makes it, and she'd at least be able to knock Jonny out this episode. Can't do anything about the awful ratings from Top 20.

 

...Actually it'd be pretty close between Jonny's real rating and Kimmy's projected rating. 

Edited May 5, 2020 by ScarletDevilCCX

[joe14]

19 hours ago, kamil24 said:

I didn't realize Grace was so disliked this week. I didn't even like her before this but it was one of the best of the night for me.

Her standard deviation shows just this lmao. Some thought it was the best while others thought it was terrible lol. 

[ScarletDevilCCX]

3 hours ago, joe14 said:

Her standard deviation shows just this lmao. Some thought it was the best while others thought it was terrible lol. 

The weird thing is, I can almost understand it. While I personally felt it was gorgeous, she had a lot of things working against her.

 

First off, she sang a song that had already been sung on Idol multiple times, and sung well. Inviting comparisons to past contestants is usually a bad idea, and Kat McPhee absolutely knocked that song out of the park. This is, amazingly enough, the first time since then that anyone covered the song in the original Judy Garland arrangement in a performance show since then; the only other cover more recent than Kat's was Jason Castro doing the Israel Kamakawio'ole version.

 

Second, a surprisingly high number of people actually listen to what the judges have to say, even though they've proven to be fairly useless. When they're handing out over-the-top praise to so many contestants, anything less than that seems like a condemnation. And that's exactly what Grace got from Lionel--basically, "stay in your lane". I'm not really sure what this year's "agenda" is, other than continuing to push Alejandro and Gabby, but I know that they're not consistent in the "stay in your lane" mentality. They didn't criticize Jonny for doing "What A Wonderful World" last week, and they certainly didn't try very hard to push Laci Kaye back into the country box that they'd put her in last year (though that was probably for the best; in my opinion, she was much better when they were pretending that she'd countrified a song from another genre than when she actually sang country.) I'm sure that the real diehards, the ones who remember all the past performances and not just the especially famous/infamous ones, probably lament this whole mentality, because Idol used to force contestants to be adept at covering everything, but it's not really a bad thing. Lionel always preaches "musical identity", and he's not wrong; trying to please everyone might be good for winning the show but it's not going to sell records. 

[CarmenSandiego]

1 hour ago, ScarletDevilCCX said:

The weird thing is, I can almost understand it. While I personally felt it was gorgeous, she had a lot of things working against her.

 

First off, she sang a song that had already been sung on Idol multiple times, and sung well. Inviting comparisons to past contestants is usually a bad idea, and Kat McPhee absolutely knocked that song out of the park. This is, amazingly enough, the first time since then that anyone covered the song in the original Judy Garland arrangement in a performance show since then; the only other cover more recent than Kat's was Jason Castro doing the Israel Kamakawio'ole version.

 

Second, a surprisingly high number of people actually listen to what the judges have to say, even though they've proven to be fairly useless. When they're handing out over-the-top praise to so many contestants, anything less than that seems like a condemnation. And that's exactly what Grace got from Lionel--basically, "stay in your lane". I'm not really sure what this year's "agenda" is, other than continuing to push Alejandro and Gabby, but I know that they're not consistent in the "stay in your lane" mentality. They didn't criticize Jonny for doing "What A Wonderful World" last week, and they certainly didn't try very hard to push Laci Kaye back into the country box that they'd put her in last year (though that was probably for the best; in my opinion, she was much better when they were pretending that she'd countrified a song from another genre than when she actually sang country.) I'm sure that the real diehards, the ones who remember all the past performances and not just the especially famous/infamous ones, probably lament this whole mentality, because Idol used to force contestants to be adept at covering everything, but it's not really a bad thing. Lionel always preaches "musical identity", and he's not wrong; trying to please everyone might be good for winning the show but it's not going to sell records. 

Yeah.  Grace made the same mistake Just Sam did last week — she chose a song that a former Idol contestant knocked out of the park (although at least this song wasn’t a coronation single).  But whereas Just Sam had enough support to overcome the song choice trap, Grace might not be so lucky.

[joe14]

Am I the only one who thought Grace just didn't sing it well. She might be the only person I thought had a better performance last week. Her and Makayla would have benefited from a song switch. I doubt anyone is thinking back to katherine's version from like 15 years ago while making the prediction. Lionel's "stay in your lane" comment was just a polite way of saying "you are not a belter. Let's not start now." Her score is not that shocking.

[Elliott]

28 minutes ago, joe14 said:

Am I the only one who thought Grace just didn't sing it well.

I didn't either. It sounded flat for most of it, and she was one the few (alongside Arthur and Jonny) who I thought did better last week. I will say it sounded a bit better when I rewatched the performances after the show to figure out my ratings, but she still sounded off for most of it to me.

[ScarletDevilCCX]

On another note, it feels like perfect games are becoming devalued by this format--has felt that way since the start of the ABC era, but it's even more pronounced this year, when I believe that the winner will only have 7 rated performances--and there's at least a possibility that someone will finish with a perfect game without making the finale; 4 contestants still have them active with a fifth one in striking distance if the midweek adjustments for this week bring him up a couple of points. Now, granted, three of the six perfect games already in the books had fewer than 7 rated performances, but...

 

By my count, 20 Idols lost their perfect game on their 8th performance or later. More than triple the number who actually left with a perfect game intact. Six more lost it on their seventh performance, which is I guess also notable because we're still just assuming that it's 3 performances apiece for the finale and also because last year they had the third round of the finale after eliminating the 3rd place finisher.

 

At 7 performances, this is by far the shortest season; Season 16 is next at 11, then Season 1 with 13, Season 17 with 14, Season 15 with 15, and Season 8 with 16 (by number of performances given by the winner.) Of those 20 who lost it in their 8th performance or later, only 6 still had it after 11: Clay, Elliott, Melinda, Adam, Candice, and Caleb J. Of those, only Elliott, Candice, and Caleb still had it after 13, and only Candice still had it after 15 (she lost hers on her 18th performance).

[muse273]

They've said they're not counting anyone as a perfect game this season.  Equating it to "perfect because the game was cancelled due to rain"

[ScarletDevilCCX]

Just now, muse273 said:

They've said they're not counting anyone as a perfect game this season.  Equating it to "perfect because the game was cancelled due to rain"

Ah, must have missed that. Good, I'm happy with that. I was about to write a follow-up post looking at it from the other direction, from how far from the end we were.

 

Which still has some merit because even without this season counting for data, these shortened seasons have been wreaking havoc. Through the first 14 seasons, the closest anyone got to a full-season perfect game was two episodes away, which is where Elliott, Adam, and Candice lost theirs. Seasons 15-17 each had at least one person with a perfect game intact at that point, although half of them had no chance at getting any closer because they'd just been eliminated (Jurnee/Jeremiah). And then this season alone, if it counted, would have added 4 more to that list, maybe 5 if Jonny's performance, a 48 on the overnights, is able to break 50.