American Song Contest, episode 6 (Brain Academy, Propagate Content, Universal Television Alternative Studios, NBC-TV, aired April 25, 2022)

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

At 8 p.m. yesterday I switched channels from MS-NBC to the flagship NBC network and watched episode six of American Song Contest, featuring the first of two semi-final competition rounds. The singers who had made it this far got to do the same songs they had in the previous round – it is, after all, called American Song Contest rather than American Singers’ Contest – and I found myself liking the stronger songs a bit more this time while the weaker songs came off less well. It didn’t help tuat the prodjucers of the song contest decided to front-load the show with five “inspirational” power ballads – “inspirational” in this case meaning not thinly (or not so thinky) veiled religious messages but overall songs about overcoming obstacles and triumphing over adversity. The show opened with Jordan Smith’s “Sparrow” (an O.K. song but I couldn’t help but compare it to the identically titled but far better song from Paul Simon on the first Simon and Garfunkel album, Wednesday Norming, 3 a.m.), which led show co-host Kelly Clarkson to comment that “we’d been to church” because of a vaguely cross-shaped set of lights on the backdrop and the sond’s clear derivation from the old 1905 gospel hymn “His Eye Is On the Sparrow: and the quote from Jesus in the Gospel According to St. Matthew that inspired composer Civilia D. Martin: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.” (Obviously that’s the King James version since a more modern translator would be highly unlikely to use the now-defunct British currency unit “farthing.”)

The next performers – Riker Lynch from Colorado (Feel the Love”), MARi from New Hampshire (at least I think that’s the correct typography of her last name, all caps except for the last letter) (“Fly”), Allen Stone from Washington state (“A Bit of Both”) and Ni/Co from Alabama (“The Difference”) – all did variations on the same “inspirational” theme, though “Fly” took on greater power because MARi is a “woman of size” who has her hair frizzed out like a Raggedy Ann doll, and she said that when she was a child she’d been belittled and fat-shamed by her parents, who regularly told her she would never amount to anything; and the two people who make up Ni/Co, Black man Colton Jones and white woman Dani Brilhart, dramatized their interracial relationship (the first time they were on American Song Contest they mentioned that they dated each other for two years before they started performing together) and did a song called “The Difference.” (The first time around I noted the irony that Alabama was the last state to get rid of the law banning interracial marriages; they didn’t repeal it until 2000, 33 years after the United States Suprene Court had rendered it unenforceable in Loving v. Virginia.) I was really repelled by Allen Stone’s performance, less because there was anything wrong with it and more because he looks like he beamed in from the 1970’s, when it was “in” for white guys with curly hair to sing supposedly “sensitive” but really dull ballads like this. The next performer – doing one of the so-called “Redemption Song” slots that brought back people who hadn’t made the semi-finals yet (and itself evoked a masterpiece by Bob Marley that was a far better song than anything that was being performed last night) wqas Ryan Charles from Wyoming doing a song called “New Boot Goofin’” that disappointed me on the first go-round because instead of a country-rap fusion like the recent hit “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus, it was a pure rap number, though drawing on country “tropes” for its inspiration.

The next song was “Held On Too Long” by Hueston, a singer from Rhode Island whose song I’d liked on its first go-round but I liked even better last night, mainly because instead of a feel-good “inspirational” number it dealt with one of the darker aspects of human life: in this case, remaining in a toxic relationship for far too long. I also liked the sheer soul with which he sang the song, reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp but still strikingly original. Tne next song was “Fire It Up” by Jonah Prill from Montana, a modern-day example of the kind of Southern-rock song that masquerades as “country music” today. Prill’s song isn’t bad, and he was sure fun to look at, wearing blue jeans and one of those T-shirts with the sleeves cut off and open down almost the whole torso. Between them, he and Ryan Charles (wearing skin-tight white jeans) were the highest-scoring contestatnts on my personal Lust-O-Meter but let’s just say I liked the singer’s looks much better than the song. Next on deck was the youngest contestant, 17-year-old Ada LeAnn from Michigan, doing a song called “Natalie” in which she laments that her boyfriend had been seeing another girl on the side – Natalie is his paramour’s name, though she began the song with an apology to any women out there actually named Natalie – which when we watched its debut on a previous episode, Charles had express the wish it could have been performed by a gutsier singer, like Janis Joplin, Grace Slick or Melanie (and the last two, at least, are still alive, though Slick seems to be retired) while it reminded me of Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party,” also a song by a realil-fe teenager about learning her boyfriend has been engaging in extra-relational activities, but Gore’s voice buzzed with anger and hurt while LeAnn’s seems more resigned and philosophical. This was one song I think I liked at least a bit better on this go-round than I had the first tome around, though it didn’t “grab” me emotionally the way Hueston’s song (also about a breakup but a far more socially and emotionally mature piece) had done.

The next song was an O.K. ballad called “Shameless” by Jared Lee of Massachusetts, and after that was the weird cultural mashup, “Wonderland,” by Alexa, who though she’s representing her home state of Oklahoma is drawing on the K-Pop style because her mother is Korean. She mentioned that she put a lot more work into rehearsing the dance moves than the song itself, and I had no trouble believing that; the song itself is an inoffensive bit of modern-day dance-pop but the physical production, buth of Alexa’s own dancing and the special effects (including images of clocks and other elements from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which inspired the song even though Alexa cited one of the film versions, not the book itself, for her inspiration), was stunning. Thus went the first of two semi-final rounds of American Song Contest, which will move on to another semi-final round and then th the grand finale two weeks from now – and though I’m as fed up with the repulsive antics of co-hosts Kelly Clarkson and Snoop Dogg as many of the people posting reviews of the show on imdb.com, the overall quality of the performances has been blessedly high even though most of the songs are mediocre examples of popular genres; over half of them were dance-pop of one sort or another, and all the artists except Hueston seemed to have avoided much emotional depth in their lyrics.