Rose Knows

Q: Kris Allen. Over Adam Lambert. Really?

A: Apparently so.

I don’t usually pay much attention to American Idol, but this year I’ve had a lot of couch time to fill. Still, I think I could have addressed the final outcome without watching a single episode. It was a numbers thing, plain and simple.

Since Fox doesn’t release vote breakdowns, the best I have to work with is DialIdol.com reports. DialIdol uses an admittedly unscientific method of sampling Idol voters, but their predictions are usually spot-on.

Accounting for margin of error, the penultimate week’s voting breakdown showed a virtual three-way tie. With one of those performers eliminated, this theoretically leaves a third of the votes up for grabs.

The eliminee, of course, was Danny Gokey. Danny Gokey, who was as wholesome as he was bland. I mean, the guy looked genuinely thrilled to be singing with Lionel Richie during the season finale. Danny Gokey has no Elvis in him.

The majority of Gokey’s votes were not going to go to the guy who seemingly spent the whole season auditioning to be the new lead singer of Queen. If they couldn’t vote for the guy who might get through that godawful “No Boundaries” song with conviction, at least there was a finalist who could almost make it through with a straight face. You know what Adam was probably saying to Kris at the very end there? “Congratulations, man. Have fun singing ‘No Boundaries’ every night!” Isn’t it curious how Idol’s judges say they want to find an original voice, and then the producers make the winner sing some boring pseudo-inspirational pablum every single year? Oh, show. You’re funny even when you don’t mean to be. But I digress.

When I say that most of Gokey’s voters were going to prefer Kris over Adam, I’m saying that from a purely stylistic perspective. The is has nothing to do with personal style or sexual orientation, and everything to do with the fact that Adam Lambert’s style is about as opposite from Danny Gokey’s as one can get. Kris Allen’s performances just sound more like Gokey’s. The finalists were both one-trick ponies, which is not a bad thing to be when you’re trying to make music that people will buy. Judging from the vote, more people prefer stripping-down to amping-up.

Much has been made of the sexual orientation issue. (Adam’s not officially out, but he’s not exactly in, either.) I don’t think it affected the voting. Idol’s viewership skews young. There’s no reliable way of tracking Idol votes by age, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the younger viewers are the most active voters. Older viewers have other things to do with their time, like watching their 401(k)s dwindle, or voting for Dancing with the Stars.

Meanwhile, recent polling shows that the younger someone is, the more likely they are to support same-sex marriage. For example, the take-away from a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll:

Sixty-six percent of adults under age 30 support gay marriage. That drops to 48 percent of adults age 30 to 64 – and plummets to just 28 percent among senior citizens.

I don’t think it’s a big leap to infer that if someone supports same-sex marriage, they’re probably cool with the overall idea that someone might love, and/or lust after, someone of the same gender. (Note that I am not implying that if someone is against same-sex marriage, they’re homophobic – though if you take a look at the poll, I think you find a significant correlation.) There may be a segment of the Idol viewership that wouldn’t vote for Adam because he wears eyeliner, but the demographic odds are that they’re pretty small. In other words, they didn’t not vote for Adam because he looks like an ersatz Freddie Mercury. They didn’t vote for him because he sounds like one. They’d rather go with the ersatz singer of the Plain White T’s. And that’s just a matter of personal taste. Not my taste, but I’ll take either one of them over the ersatz Lionel Richie. That would just be wrong.

Q: Who actually sang and played the instruments on “That Thing You Do”? — Katy

A: The singing I can tell you: Lead vocals were by Mike Viola of The Candy Butchers and, more recently, the fine collection of writers who worked on Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. (Also a major contributor: Dan Bern. He has nothing else to do with this answer, but I will always link to Dan Bern when I have an excuse.) Adam Schlesinger, who wrote the song right around the time Fountains of Wayne was forming, sang backup. (Incidentally, he also wrote a bunch of the faux-80s songs for Music and Lyrics and was nominated for a Tony for the music for Cry-Baby. Which also has nothing else to do with this answer, but that’s obviously no deterrent to me.)

The instruments… there, I keep running into dead ends. The best I can come up with is, “session musicians”. The actors in the movie were well-schooled in playing their instruments on camera, but there’s no indication that they also performed on the released soundtrack.

I’ve trying to hunt down a used copy of the soundtrack CD so I can take a peek at the liner notes, but I haven’t had any luck so far. If anyone reading this owns a copy and can glean anything about the musicians from the packaging, shoot me the info and I’ll post a follow-up.