Wait, What Idol?

So, I've been watching the American Idol auditions, which aired their last episode this evening. Quite frankly, I could care less about the actual American Idol program...there will never be another Kelly Clarkson. What I do like, though, is seeing the bad auditions, because it's fun for me to see people who sing even worse than I do, and to see them have freakish hissy fits when the judges tell them even though their grandma may have been telling them all their lives that they were the greatest singers known to mankind, they really don't have the slightest bit of talent and were quite honestly inventing their own notes as they went. I know I'm a bad singer, mainly because I can hear myself. Can't these people hear themselves?

This audition round has been a disappointment for me, though, because they've been showing fewer of the bad auditions and the weird auditions...mostly because they're hoping to streamline the process by making sure people like Sex (remember Sex, tried out several times for both American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance) don't turn up hoping to be on television.

Tonight though, they showed auditions from New York and San Juan, Puerto Rico. That's right...they're holding auditions for the next AMERICAN idol in a country that refuses to become a U.S. state and whose inhabitants do not consider themselves to be Americans. Which makes a ton of sense.

Here's the best part: the contestants from Puerto Rico were all made aware that, while they could sing whatever they liked for the auditions (providing that they had prepared at least one song in English), they would be expected to sing only in English on the program. Of the auditions I saw, a lot of the hopefuls sang really well, in Spanish. But then, when it was time for them to offer up their English-language choice, it was a disaster. Their spoken English wasn't strong enough for them to understand what they were singing, and they were concentrating too hard on getting the words right to get the musical part of the singing right.

Of a couple thousand wannabes, nine made it through to Hollywood. Nine. And at least one of those was an American who spoke English with no accent--and the accent was the reason Simon gave for their holding auditions in Puerto Rico!!