Top 4: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

In which kids don't really sing songs from the Rock Hall

by Dave McAwesome

I'm filling in for Frank, so suck it. He'll be back when he gets back.

Brian Dunkleman is resting easy after Celebrity Fit Club: Boot Camp but here's Ryan Seacrest introducing "Coca-Cola and Ford present American Idol's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Night presented by Ford and Coca-Cola...and Ford." Where's the justice?

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is to Halls of Fame as MySpace is to social clubs. Everyone gets in and most everyone sucks. Here's your Hall of Fame: Hendrix, Page, Clapton, Lennon/McCartney, Townsend, Richards/Jagger. And we're done. Let's not pretend that all these other inductees actually made such an impact on this genre or to music at large that we need to recognize them outside of a 50th anniversary Rolling Stone magazine article.

David Cook kicks off the show with Duran Duran's "Hungry Like the Wolf." Skrrmv. That's how I spell "knocking the needle off the record." David Cook...starts the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame show with...Duran Duran.

Duran Duran play rock and/or roll? Er, no they don't. If we're going to have meaningless genre labels, we may as well use them. Duran Duran are about as qualified for Cooperstown as the Rock HOF.

Cook's performance is fine. It's not the original. It's not a rocked up version of it. It's very cover-band-ish. Just...nice. He also performs fifth and in the interest of efficiency, I'm going to address that now. "Baba O'Reilly" by The Who. What? No, not the...it's the one most people call "Teenage Wasteland." The one with the Jewish/gypsy music weirdness...no the OTHER one. It's the CSI: Des Moines theme song. Got it now? Okay. Anyway, the version sounds like if U2 covered it. Minus the tinted Bono shades. This is not an easy song to cram into a minute and a half. The mish-mosh way they end it is like sticking a Chevy--oops, this is a Ford show, so I'll behave...it's like sticking a Ford Mustang and a Ford Escort together in a car compacter. "Ooh, now I have a Muscort!" No. Now you have a crumpled metal cube.

The judges dig the Cookster.

Second and sixth is Syesha Mercado who sings Tina Turner's "Proud Mary" and Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come." Tall order. She does the whole 'I'll start slow then go faster' thing with "Proud Mary." Syesha gets an A for effort. She doesn't back down from taking on all the big, diva singers. Walking in Tina Turner's shoes is just as tough as trying on Whitney's coke-dusted spikes. But Syesha is just good. She's not bad; she's not the next Whitney. She's better than average. But she's not even better than previous diva belters on American Idol. She's just better than average.

On to the "A Change is Gonna Come." Randy didn't feel she hit it. Paula and Simon, on the other hand, loved it. Then Syesha's lone neuron begins to fire, and she opens her mouth. Syesha, apparently, "researched" the song (Wikipedia doesn't count as research, girlie). "I feel like I've changed a lot," she says, referring to her experience on American Idol. Okay, stupid, so you're comparing your time on a--let's call it what it is--a 46-episode Ford/Coca-Cola commercial to the civil rights movement? People died during the struggle for civil rights, you ignorant, self-important little brat. No one died on Idol.

Except for Jason Castro, who is on stage next to muff Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man."

Mulligan, dude. Mulligan. Castro completely blanks on a line and a half. He kinda half-hums/half-mmrrghrms through it. Damn it, Jason Castro. If you're going to do the Bob Dylan mumble, do it properly! Jeez. Lay off the weed, dude. Lay. Offa. The doobage. He recovers and finishes the song, but zee Damage? She is done.

Jason's first song was Bob Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff." If I hear one more white college kid tell me how much he loves Bob Marley, I'm going to fly him to that part of Jamaica outside the narrow tourist strip to see him "get up, stand up for his rights" while being gang raped by people the kid would never actually permit in his social circle back at Frat-ass University. Simon calls Jason's performance, "utterly atrocious." At first, I was all, "hey, Jason is so-so every week. If you've put up with him this long, you can't knock him for another invisible performance." Then I watched it again. It is terrible. I've never seen anyone bop their head with such a carefree air about shooting a sheriff. After Jason's Tambourine Man debacle, Simon advises, "pack your bags."

Little David Archuleta sang fourth and eighth. "Stand by Me" by Ben E. King and "Love Me Tender" by Elvis Presley. His problem is he...you know what? I'm not even gonna say. I'll leave Frank and the MySpace crowd to their hero worship.

Jason's the low man on tonight's totem pole. "Heh, dude, I bet you could build a giant bong out of a totem pole." Yep, have fun with that.