American Song Contest, episode 8: Grand Final (Brain Academy, Propagate Content, Universal Television Alternative Studios, NBC-TV, aired May 9. 2022)

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

Last night at 8 I watched the final episode of the American Song Contest – it wasn’t a great show and all the music fit more or less neatly into the various genres that are popular now (R&B, neo-soul, country-pop and rap though no rappers made it into the “Grand Final” and that was definiktely O.K. by me!). The 10 finalists performed their songs – the same ones they’d played before, which may be why the ratings for this have been disappointing (at least with American Idol and its clones,the contestants perform different sings every week – though when Jennifer Hudson didn’t win American Idol it was because she bomoed out the week everyone had to do a song by Barry Manilow, and Hudson’s out-front soul voice was a huge mismatch for Manilow’s self-pitying whines). But some of them did strike me as more righteously and emotionally performed this time around – including Allen Stone’s “A bit of Both,” which won the jury vote but not the overall contest. Stone wasn’t at the final award due to a “family emergency,” though his song was represented by footage of his dress rehearsal, and given that he prefaced the song with a long interview segment about how his mother has been fighting cancer for two years it wasn’t hard to figure out what the “family emergency” was. (GHere’;s hoping his mother gets better and lives long.)

The overall contest winner was AleXa’s (that’s how she spells her name) “Wonderland,” a song whicn drew on AleXa’s multiracial and multicultural heritage – her dad was from Oklahoma but her mom was from Korea, and for a while she lived in Seoul and absorbed the K-Pop style to liven up her song. AleXa’s win was more evidence that ever since the revolution in live pop concert performing sparkied by Michael Jackson and Madonna in the early to mid-1980’s, the visual component of live music has become as important, if not more so,than the actual music. AleXa performed wearing a headset with a microphone attached – she moves around way too much during her performance to use a standingi mike the way Sinatra did – and her song grew on me a bit once she explained in her interview for the semi-final show that it was based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland – and though it hardly uses Carroll’s imagery as well as Darby Slick did when he wrote “White Rabbit,” first for his then-sister-in-law Grace Slick’s first band, the Great Society, and then for the Jefferson Airplane after the Great Society broke up and Grace took the song with her for her new band, it’s still as effective piece of material, especially with AleXa’s spectacular dance moves and her (or whoever did it for her’s) choreography.

The “grand final” of American Sonmg Constest began with performances by its co-hosts, Kelly Clarkson of Texas and Snoop Dogg of California (Snoop Dogg performed on a stage emblazoned with the logo of his label, Death Row Records itself an indication of how rap music in general and the “gangsta” style out of it Snoop Dogg comes frim in particular celebrates crime and anti-socila behavior) and then they went into the contestants, starting with the venerable Michael Bolton from Connecticut doing his would-be inispirational anthem “Beautiful World.” Then, came the song I was rooting for, Chloe Fredericks’ “Can’t Make You Love Me,” which is not a plaintive ballad like Bonnie Raitt’s song with a similar title (the only difference was that Raitt prefaces it with “I”) but a searing song of emotional complexity/ Both the song and Fredericks’ singing of it wowed me from the get-go since I first heard it on the second show of the series March 28, and like a number of the other performers she got better and more impassioned over time. Next up was “Mr. Independent” by Grant Knoche from Texas, a nice enough song but nothing soecial (though Knoche’s slit-down-the-sides shirt offered me far more of a charge than his song!) His last name, by the way, is pronounced :Kuh-NO-kee.”

The next act up was “The Difference” by Ni/Co, the real-life interracial couple from Alabama, featuring white woman Dani Brilhart and Black man Colton Jones. (They're certainly not to be confused wth the great cult artist Nico, who sang on the first Velvet Underground album and recorded her masterpiece, Drama of Exile, in 1981, five years before her death). They’ve lived in a number of different places besides Alabama – Jones was born in Atlanta, GeoNi/Co rgia and they have lived in states as diverse as Mississippi and Oregon – but L ilied the fact that Alabama, the last state in the U.S. to repeal its ban on interracial marriage (ini 2000, 33 years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the approprlately named case Loving v. Virginia that bans on initerracilal marriage were unconstitutional: a ruling threatened by Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which flatly rejects the idea that the U.S. Constitution guarantees Americans a right of personal privacy), was being represented ini the American Song Contest bi an interracial couple. (And by an interracial couple featuring a Black man and a white woman instead of the other way around à la Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard: for some reason, I suspect due to the legacy of mixed-race babies produced when slaveowners seduced or raped their slaves, for some reason American raicsts are less likely to be bothered by a Black woman and a white man than a white woman and a Black man.) “The Difference,” a title reflecting the differences between the two members of Ni/Co (who were already a couple personally before they started tp perform professionally), is hauntingly performed – Dani’s and Colton’s voices blend unusually well – though like “Beautiful World” it aspires to anthemic status without quite achieving it.

Next up was “Sparrow” by Jordan Smith of Kentucky, wh o’d already won a TV singing contest show, The Voice, and his song reflected the quote from Jesus Christ that God watches over everything, including the fall of a sparrow. The quote had already inspired a much better song, “His Eye Is On the Sparrow” by lyricist Civilla D. Martin and composer Charles H. Gabriel from 1905, but in his interview segment Smith thanked the pastors of his church (a husband-and-wife team) for inspiring his song. In fact, a lot of music on this show reflected its origins in the church! After that came the film clip of Allen Stone’s “A Bit of Both” – which I liked better this time around than I had the other two – and then one of my favorite songs from the series, “Full Circle” by Tennelle from American Samoa. Then came the explosive performance by AleXa, and afterwards came one of my favorite songs of the night, “Seventeen” by Tyler Braden of Tennessee. Braden was a Nshville firefighter until he decided to pursue a career in music, and like a lot of other country artists he originally won a songwriting contract to produce songs for other people and then a record contract on his own. (Many of the biggest names in country music, including Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Roger Miller, got their starts that way.) I still think “Seventeen” owes a lot to John Mennencamp, especially the songs of reminiscence about his teen years he wrote and recorded under the “John Cougar” pseudonym, but it’s still quite beautiful and haunting even though on a previous appearance Braden announced that he’d recently got married, almost certainly not to the woman his song was about!

The final contestant was Riker Lynch of Colorado with his party anthem “Feel the Love,” and Lynch brought his wife on stage and did a few dance steps with her/ After thatthew show offered a su rprise guest, Jimmie Allen (born in Delaware but now a resident of Tennessee), an African-American country singer who won Best New Artist at the 2021 Country Music Association awards. His song, “Down Hume,” was nothing special (and hardly as good as the haunting song of the same title by American Spring, consisting of Brian Wilson’s then-wife Wendy and her sister Carrie, from a stunningly beautiful album he recorded with them in 1972), but I was glad that in his lyrics he name-checked Charley Pride, the first real Boack country star who reached his career peak in the 1970’s even though Pride’s label, RCA Victor, was so skittish that at first they wouldn’t put his picture on his album covers and there are reports that audiences gasped in shock when MC’s announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, Charley Pride,” and a Black man walked out on stage. I’m glad I stuck out watching American Song Contest until the end even though I normally approach “contest” shows of thys type like the proverbial plague. At least I got to hear five truly great songs over the course of the run, three of which (Fredericks’ “Can’t Make You Love Me” – which Kelly Clarkson liked so much she said she wanted to record it, and I hope she does – Braden’s “Seventeen” and Tennelle’s “Full Circle”) made the finals. The two that didn’t were “Held On Too Long” by Hueston from Rhode Island, a quite good breakup song reminiscent of Sprinigsteen and Mellencamp; and “De La Finkiera” from Las Marias of Arizona, a beautiful piece of traditional Mexican music sandwiched in the middle of all the dance-pop, electronica, rap and country that dominated the musical fare.