Idol Over

No dice, looks like David Cook took the Idol prize. I thought if Archuleta won, we'd get to see a Stage Dad-inspired meltdown from the kid sometime around 2010. Lots of tantrums, credit card debt, binge drinking in Vegas, therapy, so forth. Alas, no. Still, the kid can sing and I'm pretty sure he'll have an album out within a year.

This was the first year I tuned in to Idol, though my viewing of the karaoke contest began to dry up once baseball season started. The hockey playoffs next guaranteed that I wouldn't see all of the final episodes, but I saw more than enough.

Cook Wins
I didn't understand what all the Idol hype was before, and now I see it's the same old draw: the chance to make it big. Shows like that never go out of style, they only change into something else. Now we have So You Think You Can Dance, and America's Got Talent. Canada's got its own version of Idol, as do several other countries. Even Afghanistan has their own version, which is actually quite cool: a woman made it to the top three. Only a few years ago, she would never have been singing in public, let alone on TV. A few years later, and she's entertaining the masses for a shot at five thousand dollars. Five thousand!

One thing I do have to say is that the American Idol producers treated the losers pretty well. I thought they would have put them out to pasture immediately, but tonight they brought a bunch of them back to sing with stars like Bryan Adams and Donna Summer. I didn't even know Donna Summer was still around, but she still sings well.

Tonight Cook sang a good cover of ZZ Top's Sharp Dressed Man. He's got definite chops and we'll be hearing a lot of him in the coming years.

Now back to the hockey game.