American Idol 2009: Finale
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that Kris Allen won American Idol Season 8 and Adam Lambert emerged as its star. Congratulations to Kris! While he doesn’t come close to the talent of Adam, he’s a great artist in his own right and a worthy winner.
Adam’s tracks in the UK iTunes store
The funniest moment of the night was when Ryan greeted bikini girl saying “I was gonna ask you what’s new, but I think I know!”
There were a lot of brilliant performances in the finale. We thought the best were Queen with Adam Lambert and Kris Allen, Adam Lambert with KISS and Cyndi Lauper with Allison Iraheta.
Final 2 Performance Show
The reprise
Even though we would have preferred a new song from each contestant, we were fairly happy with the songs Adam and Kris chose to reprise. Kris did an outstanding job, but we were a little disappointed in our boy Adam and didn’t think he nailed it this time. He was good, and he looked awesome, but maybe we spend too much time listening to his studio tracks and have unreasonably high expectations for a track we’re familiar with. In retrospect, we’d have preferred a reprise of Ring of Fire and the virtual middle finger that would have represented. We would have picked Mad World in Adam’s place too though.
The song chosen by a producer
Neither song seemed like a particularly good choice, but Kris did a decent, if bland, job with his and Adam totally blew us away. That was definitely the one high point of an otherwise disappointing show.
The vile, fluffy, mountains, rivers, jump-off-a-cliff track
We absolutely hated the song on performance night, but found ourselves singing it the next day. It’s annoying but it grows on you. Fortunately, the studio versions are much better than the live versions, and we really should support the idols (it’s not their fault…). Luckily Kara redeemed herself in the finale by thoroughly upstaging bikini girl with a cracking vocal and very impressive (not just for 39) bikini body of her own. pwned.
We’re not impartial here … UK people: go buy Adam’s version of the song! Even if you hate it :-) You can find your own way to Kris’ version from there (go up to the ‘Adam Lambert’ section … why not buy ‘Is Anybody Listening?’ while you’re there … and Kris Allen is listed under ‘also bought’). Those of you in the US are spoilt for choice, but we just get the two tracks from Adam and one from Kris in the UK (and we count ourselves lucky with that!)
Official websites
Video problems?
We know the American Idol videos don’t always load but as americanidol.com has only recently started serving video, we’re still including them in the hope they’ll get their act together soon. If you want to see the videos and they’re not loading up after a refresh, they’re all here: americanidol.com
