American Song Contest, episode 7 (Brain Academy, Propagate Content, Universal Television Alternative Studios, NBC-TV, aired May 2, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 I watched the next-to-last episode of the American Song Contest on NBC and then what was at least supposedly the last episode of the show that came on after it, The Endgame. The American Song Contest episode was the last of the two semi-final rounds and it featured 11 of the 22 performers that were culled from the original 56 (representing all 50 U.S. states plus five territories and Washington, D.C., an amorphous “Federal District” that is likely to remain so because the Republicans in general and their Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, in particular are dead set against admitting it as a state because that would almost certainly mean two more Democratic Senators). The people who performed last night included three of my favorites from previous episodes – North Dakota’s Chloe Fredericks (doing a song called “Can’t Wait to Make You Love Me” which she said was about a breakup, though she left the gender of her ex unspecified and I suspect it was a woman, not a man); Tennessee’s Tyler Braden (doing a song called “Seventeen” that reminisces the first woman he ever loved – not the one he recently married – in a style reminiscent of early John Mellencamp when he was still called “Johnny Cougar”), and American Samoia’s Tennelle (doing a song called “Full Circle” that was about carrying the torch for future generations). Fredericks made a big deal about being Native American – her parents came from different tribes but apparently the same nation – and she struck me as sounding like what Tracy Chapman would have if she’d been Native instead of Black.

The others were O.K. but not especially interesting, at least musically – though some of them brought engaging visuals to their performances. The opening act, Christian Pagán from Puerto Rico (and I love the bi-religious nature of his name, marrying “Christian” and “Pagán”!) doing a song called “Loko” (he means “Loco” but chose that variant spelling) which, as my husband Charles said when we watched his previous performance together, was good but not all that different from Ricky Martín or Marc Anthony. Then John Morgan from North Carolina came out with a traditional country ballad called “Right in the Middle” – the only thing wrong with it was his drimmer, who was way overplaying and sounded like he was driving a heavy-metal band instead of a solo country singer (and I found myself remembering that the Grand Old Opry didn’t let drummers on their stage until 1959 because they didn’t consider drums a country instrument). Morgan apparently has already reached the first stage of a successful country-music career – he’s written hit songs for other artists, including Jason Aldean, though he hasn’t had any hits of his own as a performer. The next song was a nishmask of R&B and soul from a Black man from Kansas named Broderick Jones, called “Tell Me,” and like a lot of the other songs on American Song Contest (the ones from Chloe Fredericks, Tyler Braden, Tennelle and, from the first semi-finals, Hueston – who, like Fredericks, did a wrenching song about a real-life breakup – excepted), it was well crafted but also pretty bland.

The next song was “Green Light” by the New York woman singer Enisa, one of the so-called “redemption songs” that scored a slot on the semi-finals even though it didn’t get enough votes either from the critical jury of music-industry professionals or the viewers. If I were straight I’d have found her skin-tight silver lamé costume and her sexy dance movements quite nice, but bereft of those trappings it was just another modern-day dance-pop song. After the Fredericks song (which blew me away both the first time it aired and this time) came Michael Bolton from Connecticut – our friend Peter, who was watching with us, had a hard time believing that the tall man with close-cropped grey hair was the same Michael Bolton as the one who burst on the scene 34 years ago with long, curly locks, though both times I liked his song, “Beautiful World,” and especially liked the fact that he wasn’t singing with the overwrought emotionalism that had led Los Angeles Times reviewer Robert Holburn to write about Bolton, “If I were to review Michael Bolton’s concert lasyjsy t night the way he sang it, every other word would be in ALL CAPITALS and every sentence would end with an EXCLAMATION POINT!” (He also wrote that the one thing Michael Bolton’s audience would get from him was that they’d explore the soul songs he’d covered by the original artists, Otis Redding on “Dovk of the Bay” and Percy Sledge on “When a Man Loves a Woman.”)

The next performer up was Grant Knoche from Texas doing a song called ‘Mr. Independent” which he said he’d done a home-made mash-up with “Miss Independent” by the show’s co-host, Texas country singer Kelly Clarkson. (He played a sample and the two songs worked surprisingly well together.) Grant Knoche had so much going for him on the gorgeous male hunk department it was O.K. that the song was a respectable piece of country-flavored pop. Next up was an act from California named Sweet Taboo, three young Latinas (two of whom sing while the third one raps – the semi-finalists were blessedly free of rap artists other than Wyoming’s Ryan Charles, whose “New Boot Goofin’” was a pure rap song rather than the mix of rap and country one might have expected from. his origins in America’s smallest state by population) who did an appealing but nothing-special song called “Keys to the Kingdom” in both English and Spanish. The last three performers featured were Tyler Braden and Tennelle doing their great songs, and in between them the organizers cole sandwiched Stela Cole from Georgia doing a song called “D.I.Y.” Co;e did a funny bit in which she showed off an attempt to build a birdhouse and something to do with shelves, reflecting her alleged D.I.Y. talents, that was a good deal better than the song she sang. Overall, the American Song Contest has featured a lot of quite pleasant music but little that actually qualified as great, and Charles had wished that the producers had showcased a greater range of styles, including jazz, rather than the bland mix of country, dance-pop and occasional bits of rap that dominated. Then again, one of the 56 jurors, the program director for I Heart Radio, announced after one of the previous episodes that the winning song will be showcased in heavy rotation on I Heart Radio – which probably explains the narrow range of genres represented. It wouldn’t do to have a jazz number or any other sort of music that wouldn’t comfortably fit into I Heart Radio’s playlists!