When my wife and I visited her cousin Joana, who had just undergone surgery to repair her torn ACL, we managed to catch the episode of American Idol where we witnessed Idol contestant LaKisha Jones get eliminated from the competition. Despite her enormous talent, LaKisha was voted off the competition, largely because of her inability to properly interpret songs from the musical phenomenon that is the Bee Gees. As any videoke veteran will tell you, Bee Gees songs are notoriously hard, and not only because of the key it is sung in. It's just darned difficult. Slate writer Jody Rosen makes the case regarding The hidden complexity of the Bee Gees, observing that:
The truth is, nobody did very well this week, in part because Bee Gees songs are deceptively hard to sing. Blake called Gibb, "one of the pioneers of dance music," which gets it exactly wrong. Gibb is an old-fashioned song craftsman—a composer of beautiful, harmonically sophisticated pop songs who would have held his own back in the 1930s with Gershwin and Kern and company. This is the funny thing about the Bee Gees disco-era apogee: They were playing dress-up, shamelessly bandwagon-hopping, writing the same great songs that they always did, and tacking on a dance beat. They were disco manqué. LaKisha found that out the hard way, when she tried to navigate the tumbling octave drops in the chorus of "Stayin' Alive." No amount of gospel bluster was going help her pull that off —"Stayin' Alive" is a song, and it requires a singer.
While fans might argue whether or not LaKisha deserved to continue on (and my wife and I are inclined to believe so), one thing is sure: I'm listening to some Bee Gees.
Photo Credits:
Picture of the American Idol Final Four contestants comes courtesy of New York Magazine
2 comments:
Oh... I wasn't able to watch last time. Thanks for this post! It's sad, LaKisha had to go but I really like Jordin. =)
Sad sad sad. She had amazing pipes, and a whole lot of passion. I hope she has a long, bright future sans American Idol. :-)
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