American Song Contest, episode 3 (Brain Academy, Propagate Content, Universal Television Alternative Studios, NBC-TV, aired April 4, 2022)

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

Lsst night my husband Charles and I watched the third episode of American Song Contest on NBC-TV, which was a curious departure from the formula of the last two. Partly it was because the show’s producers decided to show a tally of the judges’ ratings while the show was still going on – the contest format is that the judging panel of 56 music industry professionals each pick one performer as the best of the night, and that person gets added to the semi-finals, while the other three are chosen by adding the judges’ vote to the ones that come in from the public – in which the person I liked best, Tyler Braden from Tennessee, drew an early lead and kept it throughout the night. Maybe it was because Braden’s backstory was especially impressive – he was a Nashville firefighter until 2019, when he got a publishing contract as a songwriter and then a recording contract as a singer (that’s a common career path in country music; Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson both got their starts as songwriters before making records of their own). Maybe it was also because his song, “Seventeen,” was that good; though it owed a lot more to Bruce Springsteen or John Mellencamp than anything I’d think of as country music, it was a sweetly nostalgic ballad about the singer and his teenage girlfriend way back when (a subject Mellencamp also explored in his “Johnny Cougar” days).

Braden’s only serious competitor was a Black woman who calls herself “Nitro Nitra” representing Delaware, who did a song called “Train” that came off an awful lot like a modern-day Grace Jones (and I’m not alone in that: the show’s co-hosts, Kelly Clarkson and Snoop Dogg, also mentioned Grace Jones as a model for her act, not only in her music but in her costumes as well). I’ve heard better train songs than this, but it was quite exciting even though I think she (or whoever staged her act) way overdid the fireworks, the lasers and other distractions NBC built into the set on which the artists performed. (All the acts were brought to a studio in Los Angeles to perform, though there were watch parties back in their home towns so people could be shown watching them, sort of like the Winter Olympics in the COVID-19 era). The show was more consistent than the previous two episodes, but also a bit more monotonous: most of the songs fit neatly into the dance-pop genre that, along with rap (which was blessedly absent last night!), dominates American pop music today. The show began with Grant Knoche from Texas, who at age 10 was already in a boy band (a pre-boy band?) that made records and had hits, and he sang a song called “Mr. Independent” that might have worked better if the video effects crew hadn’t rigged up his number to feature endless duplicate images of him, sort of like Agent Smith in The Matrix and its immediate sequelae. It reminded me of the very funny scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian in which Brian is preaching a sermon, “You must all be individuals! You shouldn’t copy anybody else!” and they yell back at him, “Yes, we must all be individuals! We shouldn’t copy anybody else!”

The next song was “Now You Do” by Brittany Pfaltz, representing Louisiana, and a bit disappointing considering the incredible musical heritage of her state; like most of the rest of the songs on the show, it was a nice, professional piece of dance-pop in the modern style but didn’t really offer all that much. It didn't help that her costume and tghe overall saging of the number made it look like she was auditioning for a future Disney live-action remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Tyler Braden’s song was next, and as much as I liked it I was a bit resentful that the announcer introducing him and his state stressed Nashville and Tennessee’s country-music heritage exclusively and didn’t mention Tennessee’s other musical city, Memphis, where rock ‘n’ roll was born (I’ve argued that Memphis was the birthplace of rock the way New Orleans was for jazz), but then again, as I kvetched about in these pages before, the Memphis city fathers have turned the place into a virtual theme park for Elvis and ignored the rest of their city’s rich musical history. (They even allowed the old movie theatre converted into a recording studio by Stax Records to be torn down and turned into a vacant lot.) The next song was by Brooke Alexx, representing New Jersey (birthplace of, among other greats, Frank Sinatra, Count Basie and Bruce Springsteen), doing a baby-diva act on a quite clever song called “I Don’t Take Pictures Anymore” during which she threw off a succession of wigs. I liked the song overall, but it seemed ironic that a performer who’s relied on TikTok to build a fan base of millions should be doing a song called “I Don’t Take Pictures Anymore.”

The next song was by Ni/Co, an interracial couple from Alabama (which was the last state to have a law on the books banning interracial marriage, by the way; they didn’t repeal it until 2000, 33 years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Loving v. Virginia decision had rendered it unconstitutional). They consist of Black man Colton Jones and white woman Dani Brillhart, and their song was called “The Difference,” elliptically alluding to their racial difference; it was quite appealing but nothing special musically, and it’s interesting that though they were originally from Alabama (and they dated for two years before deciding to perform together), they’re now based in Los Angeles. The next performer was Ale Zabala from Florida – though she was actually born in Colombia and her parents moved her when she was about three – and while she boasted she was drawing on her Colombian heritage and would be singing a bilingual song, the actual piece she performed, “Flirt,” was yet another piece of ordinary dance-pop and it was entirely in English. I did like the staging, though: a bedroom set in which everything was pink: she was in pink, her backup singers were in pink and all her furniture was pink, too.

The next performer up was Jewel, representing Alaska and turning in a song called “The Story” that was, well, typical Jewel; she showed us a log cabin built by her grandfather and said it symbolized the values of hard work and independence she had learned from her family. A pity she couldn’t have come up with a better song – my reaction was, “It’s O.K., but I’ve heard her do better” – and like the previous episodes’ ringers, Michael Bolton and Macy Gray, she didn’t exactly blow away the competition the way other performers on the bill were afraid she would. The next performer was a man named Jesse LaProtti, representing South Carolina and doing a song called “Not Alone” that, like so much of the rest of the evening’s material, was a piece of generic dance-pop, though I’ll give him credit for a remarkably sweet soul-pop voice and if he’d been alive in the 1960’s Berry Gordy of Motown might well have signed him. The next act was an alleged rock band from South Dakota called Judd Hoos that has supposedly been in existence for 15 years, though the lead singer announced that he’s the only member of the original lineup still there. He talked about the South Dakota “street parties” at which they block off a section of street and bands play from a portable stage (hey, guys, we do that in California, too!), and once again their self-description was considerably better than their song, “Bad Girl,” a fusion of rock and dance-pop whose big line was utterly predictable: “You may be a bad girl, but you’re good for me.”

Afterwards Nitro Nitra performed and then we got someone called Sabyu from the Northern Marianas Islands (which, he said several times, didn’t become an official U.S. territory until 1975; also he explained that his name means "wise" in the Chamorro ppeople from which he comes), who registered quite nicely on my Lust-O-Meter but whose song, “Sunsets and Sea Turtles,” sounded like what Jimmy Buffett would have if he’d been Polynesian. There was one more performer left, Riker Lynch from Colorado, who said that his inspiration was surf music (an odd choice indeed for someone from a state miles away from any beaches!) and who did a song called “Feel the Love” that was, like most of the night’s material, inoffensive pop music but not especially moving. At least the American Song Contest producers dispensed with some of the sillier aspects last night – there wasn’t the horrible “halftime” break, and with 12 performers instead of the usual 11 (since there were 56 regions in the competition – the 50 U.S. states, five territories and Washington, D.C. – there was going to be an odd show out to get all 56 jurisdictions represented in the final program, and last night’s was it) they rushed things a bit, even though Jewel and Riker Lynch both suffered from having to wait through a commercial break between their introductions and their actual songs.