American Idol and The Latoya London Syndrome
Latoya London. Remember her? She was part of the trio of Divas along Jennifer Hudson and Fantasia Barrino on the third season of Idol. It doesn’t help being in the same trio with the only Idol contestant that after coming on 6th place went on to win an Academy Award, a Grammy and more than 20 additional awards.
Maybe you don’t remember this but she was never seen on Idol before the public vote performances. It was there when her awesome rendition of “All by Myself” put her in the spotlight, with even the judges giving her a standing ovation. It was one of those moments on Idol where I thought: “Wow, this girl is great”. She did well in the competition, her performances were good for the most part, her vocals flawless almost every single time. But… she lacked something, and Simon made sure to remind us almost every time she was on screen, Personality. See, she had the talent, but in shows like these it pays to show a special something, that something that will make people talk about you the next day while they are at work and go on with their daily lives. Fantasia did it that season and she ended up winning the prize. Latoya ended in 4th place behind two other girls which were good but in my opinion not as good as her. David Cook did it in his season, bringing songs that everyone knows to a whole new level. Adam Lambert did it by switching it up so much that he was barely recognizable from one week to the next and even through scandalous performances outside of Idol it is paying off, his first album “For your Entertainment” has already gone Gold, selling more than 500k copies.
Idol producers and judges are notorious for “pimping” some contestants. These are the ones that you see in almost every episode since the beginning of the season, you see them in the TV commercial spots and they usually bring a sad story to give them a little push. This can work in two ways, it can make or break. It can make you fall in love with someone’s talent or get awfully tired of them by the time they hit the Top 12. The latter happened to me with David Archuleta two seasons ago, I got very, very tired of him. Sometimes the producers do this because these contestants show to be more marketable or because their stories will work good on TV for ratings, some times it is because of sheer talent.
This season, there are several contestants in the Top 24 who I know nothing about. I mean, they may have shown them but compared to, for example, Andrew Garcia and Casey James, they have barely received any screen time. Michelle Delamor and Paige Miles are two that at the moment are suffering the “Latoya London Syndrome”. Either their performances weren’t memorable enough to show or they were shown and well… they weren’t memorable to me. Maybe they are the best in the competition and we don’t know it yet. Maybe the producers want us to be as surprised with their performances as we were several years ago with Latoya. It brings freshness and excitement to the show if that is the reason behind it.
I guess we will have to wait and see, many say that a girl will win this season.
Who knows? We may be in for a surprise.
I leave you with Latoya London’s performace of “All by Myself” which Simon Cowell called: “A superb, outstanding performance“.
(Click here if you can’t see the video)
