As Phillip Phillips celebrates his victory of Season Eleven, one can say he reflects his American Idol epoch perfectly. Let’s rewind a bit. What is an Idol epoch?

American Idol history runs in threes – specifically, three years. Each three year period has its own distinctive traits and model contestants that exemplify an era. Usually, there’s some of event in the Idol offseason that triggers the change from one era to another.

Sidenote: I’d first discussed the idea of Idol epochs back in Season Seven, holding up David Cook as the poster child of Idol‘s evolution. However, with hindsight, both WNTS and I both felt that what we’d described as the Second Epoch was too broad; Seasons 4-6 was split into its own epoch, putting DC into the Third Epoch. A full breakdown of all the epochs can be found at WNTS.

For the fourth era, it should be obvious what the event that triggered the Fourth Epoch was: Simon Cowell leaving. I’m not going to pretend that Idol would have been better if he had stayed around. It wouldn’t. By the time he left it was clear he had an alternate vision for what a show like Idol was supposed to be – and it was not one critics particularly welcomed.

His departure did leave a hole that had to be filled – and give Fox and 19E credit for it. The “easy” way out would have been to find another judge to replace Simon in the mean role. It might even have been another mean Brit- there’s a reason there’s a trope by that name. But it would have been a stupid decision to do so; Simon’s shoes are an impossible pair to fill, at least immediately.

What happened instead was Idol evolving and going in the completely opposite direction. The judges they brought in deliberately went easy on the contestants, and Randy Jackson basically turned into a parody of himself. (When you’re being mocked for your catchphrase on the Idol finale, that can be considered a sign it’s gotten stale.)

One other thing that changed in the fourth era was the improvement, in the quality of the singers who got through to the semis. Both this year and last year have had fairly good levels of talent that were at least better at avoiding trainwrecks; note how the season-by-season count of one or two-star WNTS performances puts Season 11 in such a good light.

In seeking to avoid Simon’s legacy, they went too far. When he wasn’t being a complete tool and/or jerk, he was the primary source of useful feedback from the contestants. Randy was inconsistent, Paula was loopy, and neither Kara nor Ellen both spent too much time fighting with the other judges. Consequently, when Simon praised someone, it meant something. So would-be Idols actually tried to get better, improve themselves, try new angles, etcetera.

This time, we’re seeing none of that. The judges are telling them right from the get go that they’re good, they’re brilliant, etcetera. In such a situation, wouldn’t you basically stick to what you were doing? So it is with the Idols – there’s no reason for them to experiment. So they end up largely doing the same sort of material week after week.

Consider the kinds of winners we got this year and last year. The real connection isn’t that they both were WGWGs; instead it’s that both Scotty and Phillip stayed largely the same all season long. Neither were they alone; this year Joshua was also a very strong example of this who got very far; another compelling case would be Colton.

That’s really what the Fourth Epoch is about. You can call it the Do What You Want Epoch. Musically, the chief requirement to succeed in this era seems to be just knowing what kind of singer you are and a willingness to stick to your niche for as long as possible. It’s a very different list of a requirements from the Third Epoch, which stressed flexibility, risk-taking, and boldness. For Idol frontrunners, the season may well be less of a weekly competition and more a months-long nationally televised promo tour under unusual circumstances, like oddball themes and cranky coaches/mentors. In such a situation, actual singing ability may matter less and less, as presumably all of the available contestants will meet some reasonable level of competence. The “intangibles” – out and out likability, the ability to appeal to he Idol power voting fanbase – this is where hey might be significant. That’s really why Jessica lost: yes, she was brilliant technically, but somebody like Phil has superior intangibles (and thus, more people would be lured to vote for him.)

The one thing that’s constant from both epochs, however, is that pre-show musical experience counts. All three Third Epoch winners had extensive pre-Idol careers; of this season’s finale Phillip had the superior professional experience. Jessica may have been singing since she was a little kid, but she had general done so in the context of a competition or a Youtube video. There’s still a world of difference from that to doing small gigs regionally. It’s not the kind of experience that helps you on Idol, apparently.

So now we have a decent idea of what the Fourth Epoch – and thus, probably next year – will entail. What will end the era? We don’t know. That’s too far from now to find out. Will it involve competition from either The Voice or X-Factor? Possible, but I wouldn’t rule out those shows to have the existential crisis of the sort that Idol had after Season Nine. The Voice is hampered by how many large egos. X-Factor has problems of its own, and is mismanaging its winner as well.

In any case, I hope to see you all next year (something that even the Idol mother ship can’t claim nowadays). I’ll be haunting Twitter, as well, follow me at @theidolguy. Until then, Idol Guy, out.

Idol finales tend to be a very mixed bag musically. There’s plenty of bad – crap “Winner’s” Songs that are giant booby prizes, reprises, and doubtful song choices – but there is the occasional diamond in the rough.

What they aren’t is decisive. No Idol contest has been won or lost on the basis of how well someone sung on finale night. The only season where you might be able to dispute that is Season Seven, but that came in a year with a fairly evenly matched top two.

Neither contestant really had a great night. Jessica Sanchez had the best individual performance of the night with The Prayer. For all the praise she gets with the big songs, technically she’s just as sharp – if not better – with the more restrained, subtler songs like The Prayer. The one negative is that I don’t think Jessica was able to impart the gravitas that the male half of the song usually brings to the table, but overall it’s a relatively minor nitpick.

However, Jessica also had the worst song of the night – and it wasn’t even her fault. Change Nothing was so bad, it almost made me nostalgic for a Kara DioGuardi special. Jessica was uncomfortable with the entire song, and it clearly showed. As for I Have Nothing, there’s not much to say about it. It was a big ballad done competently, but how many times have we seen this before? Also, Jessica ended up self-confined to the Ballad Ghetto with all three of her performances ending up that way. She may not have had much choice in the reprise, given how her non-ballads have not been all that good. But she picked

It’s not like Phillip Phillips had a much better time, either. His best song was his coronation song Home, but that comes with two huge caveats: Jessica had a much harder song to deal with, so Phil was that much less likely to screw up. What really bugged me, though, was he did so little singing. After the drum corps enters, he basically did some (mumbled) humming, and the last line. That was it. He basically had training wheels for his coronation performance. Overall, it was a great performance, but as a pundit I cannot given it full credit. And how appropriate that in a season full of ridiculous overpraise and standing ovations… we got exactly that on the last competitive performance of the season. It was good, but not that good.

Like Jessica, Phillip had one stinker and one so-so one. His Billy Joel reprise was… surprising. Of all the performances he has to choose from, he chose that? It was another trademark Phillip Phillips performance, with the highlight being Hot Saxophone Girl again. Stand By Me was a completely and utter mess. Bad song choice and Phil did it remarkably poorly.

It’s hard to say who had a better night. Jessica’s peak was higher than Phillip’s, but her trainwreck was also worse. You could argue endlessly about who “won”, but to me it looks like a tie. At best it’s a razor-thin victory for someone.

Bowing to the Inevitable

A narrow win for Jessica was not what she needed if she had any chance of winning. She basically needed to pull out three outstanding songs and hope Phillip had an off night. Obviously, that didn’t happen.

There was one telling moment in the show which may have told us why Jessica really had no chance of winning. It was when she was trying to justify her pick of Change Nothing and she basically said that she chose it because that’s what she thought an Idol winner’s song should be. Palm went to face at that moment and I thought, “oh god.” I’ll delve into this more deeply tomorrow, but: one distinguishing characteristic of this Idol epoch is that the finalists are largely left to their own devices and free to do what they want.

Someone like Phillip who appeared to have a good idea of where he is musically can do well in that climate; someone like Jessica (or, perhaps more correctly, someone close to her) who doesn’t will struggle. Jessica had the best pure vocals, but she never seemed to figure out how to make the most of it on the Idol stage. In a very real way, unwittingly or not, it was Phillip who figured out the rules of Idol in a way that otherwise superior singers did.

What’s more interesting, actually, is how Phillip and Jessica handle their post-Idol debut albums. In normal circumstances neither Phillip nor Jessica have any business recording an album in the short timespan that being in the Idol top two calls for. Phillip, with his reluctance to compromise on even small items (remember how he defiantly wore grey on Billy Joel night?), might have trouble with the give-and-take process that will accompany an Idol winner’s album. Jessica has the opposite problem: it’ll be tempting to hand her a pile of generic ballads with a couple of change of pace songs for variety. But that’s not a recipe for success – either commercial or critical – and would be a disservice to her exceptional talents.

In any case, I wish them luck. As a practical matter, both of them have won, since they both get a shot at earning fame and fortune in the music industry. May they both sell well.

Your winner of American Idol is…. Phillip Phillips.

Coming into the results show there was only one sure thing: whatever happened, outrage and wails of “he/she wuz ROBBED!” would result. And so it was with Joshua Ledet leaving Idol stage this week.

Joshua had a lot of positives – if you make it to the top three of any Idol season, you’re doing something right. Joshua may well have been the best Idol contestant of this particular type – the big-voiced male contestant with strong R&B leanings. He may well have had the biggest male voice in many, many years of American Idol. He does what he wants to do supremely well, as we saw just last week with his James Brown song.

But for all his talent, there are good reasons why he didn’t reach the top three despite Jessica having an off night. One Joshua couldn’t do anything about. More than Jessica, and maybe even more than Phillip, Joshua’s brand of music is very much an acquired taste. When he brings out all the tools at his disposal, the results can sound off to people who may not be particularly fond of his style. See Imagine this week and You Raise Me Up last week. His voting base may not have been all that strong, certainly not against two strong fanbases in Phillip and Jessica. (His patently retro style did not help, either.)

What definitely did not help was all the constant overpraising that was far, far, far exceeded anything we have seen on Idol before. Joshua was good, but not “best singer in decades” good. All it did was annoy other fanbases (and inspire them to vote hard), cause an oh-god-not-this-again reaction from more casual viewers, and expose the judges for being utter idiots. None of those were good for his chances.

Ultimately, though, none of the things that led to Joshua’s exit were his fault. He sang well, his song choices were not terrible, and he kept to his artistic roots. He made a few missteps, but none of his mistakes were all that threatening to his Idol tenure. I’m not sure anything he did would have changed things. He got caught between two rabid fanbases, and there’s not much someone can do about that.

Boys versus Girls, too?.

From the pure point of view of the season’s “storyline”, this had to be the most appealing scenario. Think about it. (Read this and the next paragraph the way, say, Ryan Seacrest would.) Jessica, torch-bearer of what was argued as a field of women decidedly better than the men. The last female standing, with golden pipes worthy of big-noted divas like Mariah, Celine, and Whitney. Singing since she was a little child, she’s now on the brink of achieving her dreams.

On the other hand, Phillip. Heir to the WGWG mantle, displaying persistence in the face of injury, doing his own thing stylistically – and being praised for it. He has been a juggernaut, not ending up in the bottom two or three at all this season.

It’s as powerful a contrast of two contestants as you could find this year, especially so if one recalls last year’s Country Idol finale. This should be a better finale than that one, and we shouldn’t see a ratings dip from this week to next (like you had for last year’s performance show.)

I’ve been saying for a while that Phillip is the prohibitive favorite to win. I stand by that statement. For top 2 voting, how well they sing is basically irrelevant. The fanbases are locked in and will vote like mad. Can Jessica win? Sure, but it’s a hard path to win. The theme will not help: it’ll be a reprise song, a Simon Fuller pick, and their single (if they win). None of those are likely to produce an all-time performance from Jessica.

If her fans are looking for some reason to believe she will win, here’s this. Nigel Lythgoe basically confirmed something that I’d suspected earlier: the voting this year is very tight.

RT @akrands: @dizzyfeet did jessica and phillip dominate the votes each week!?[NO IT HAS CHANGED WEEK ON WEEK, JOSH, SKYLAR, COLTON, ELISE!]

— Nigel Lythgoe (@dizzyfeet) May 18, 2012

So this year’s vote totals are higher overall, but relatively close together – meaning Jessica has less relative catching up to do. It may be that it’ll end up a case of “too little, too much” for Jessica. Still, it should be interesting to watch and see how the finale turns out. If Jessica can pull out the win, it’ll be the most remarkable run in the history of American Idol.

The Fourth Epoch: What Is It?

Let me shamelessly plug my upcoming end-of-season editorial. Idol history tends to run in three-year epochs. Each epoch tends to have, as you’d expect, a distinct flavor of its own, both good and bad – but a recognizable one. Season 11 represents the midpoint of the Fourth Epoch, so by now we should know what kind of time we’re in – which is what I’ll talk about, and what it means for the future of Idol.

We’ve all had times when we want a second chance at something – a do-over, in short. Frankly, can we have one for the top 3? Maybe somebody can “creatively” lose the voting results. Maybe it can turn out that the graphics were wrong somewhere. Maybe there was a breakdown in the AT&T voting system. Frankly, I’m looking for just about any excuse to have a do-over for this week. This was a dismal top three episode. This is a week which is usually good for all-time best performances. It’s safe to say, though, that we will not be remembering any of this week’s performances in that particular pantheon.

Only Phillip Phillips really had anything close to a good night. He was helped out by some good song choices and some song arrangements which worked around his strengths and weaknesses. We’ve Got Tonight was particularly good; this much more subdued Phillip is a better taste to my ears than the normal Phillip we get. Disease was just okay for me – to be honest, it was the Blonde Saxophone Chick and the bongoes that made this song for me. Beggin was a more… traditional Phillip. At least it was entertaining and upbeat. Overall, Phillip had song choices which fit him well and arrangements/staging that worked with him, not against him. The Idol gods (also known as the producers) were working in his favor.

The two big voices left, well, they both had off nights. Joshua, though, had a less disastrous night. Imagine was his best song, but even then I do not like what he did with it. Some songs, you can retool and rework dramatically and it works. Imagine is not one of those, partly because it’s as much a philosophical statement than it is a piece of music. To use a car analogy, it’s like taking a beautifully designed Italian supercar then adding a hot rod paint job with flames, blinged-out rims and lights, and a giant stereo system. Technically, Joshua sang it well, but the direction he took it was not good.

His other two songs, though, were not as impressive at all. I’d Rather Go Blind had the feel of a dated lounge/nightclub performance. As far as Joshua’s vocals, they weren’t bad – but we’ve seen him better. It just felt completely mediocre. No More Drama could not be ironically named; if anything it was too dramatic. It never got into any sort of flow for me, and Joshua bouncing around did not help either. The jacketless part had as much shouting as singing. For Joshua, it was a weird night overall.

And poor Jessica Sanchez…. oy. All three of her songs had significant issues, to say the least. Put even more bluntly: she stunk on top 3 night. I’m not 100% sure if the two “picked” songs for Jessica were this year’s equivalent of the infamous Hit Me Up, but if it was: by Idol standards, it was a subtle bus. But they did her zero favors.

Let’s start with Mariah Carey’s My All. What happened to that “don’t make Jessica sing stuff too old for her” edict? Can anybody with a working brain cell tell me that lyrics like these are age-appropriate?

I’d give my all to have
Just one more night with you
I’d risk my life to feel
Your body next to mine
‘Cause I can’t go on
Living in the memory of our song
I’d give my all for your love tonight

It isn’t. I’m not a prude, but come on! Age-inappropriateness aside, it was just too much for Jessica. It’s a ridiculously tricky song that is as demanding as anything in the Mariah songbook. She might have had a chance had this been a single-song week, but doing something like this on a three-song week… it wasn’t going to work. And it didn’t.

As for I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing… it may be the single dumbest song choice this deep into an Idol season. Why in the name of all that is good in music did she to pick that – and turn it into a putrid, generic-sounding, robotic ballad in the process? She sucked out everything that was good about that song and turned it into a completely forgettable ballad. Which she didn’t even sing emotionally! This song saw the return of robo-Jessica. Bad song choice, bad idea to re-do it as a ballad. Completely ridiculous.

The logic behind I’ll Be There escapes me. I know Jimmy Iovine likes to up the degree of difficulty for his picks – but this was bordering on unfair. Even if she had done it well (which she didn’t – the changing voices in mid-song part sounded odd), it would have done nothing for her. We know she can do ballads just fine. But singers today cannot sell by ballads alone. Neither is it a winning formula for Idol success.

To sum up the night: Phillip got good song choices and did okay, even if you take into consideration degree of difficulty. Joshua had an erratic night, and Jessica threw up what may have been the worst top three performance in Idol history since Jasmine Trias. Now, can somebody lose those voting results pronto? Joshua and Jessica are both infinitely better than what we saw last night.

Choosing Between Big Voices

This week was always going to be a choice between Joshua and Jessica. Barring a disaster from Phillip, one of them was going to go. As it turned out, it was Jessica who had the disastrous night.

Yet that may well be the one thing that will save her. She had the kind of night that propels fanbases to yell “Save Our Idol!” and vote like they’re possessed. It’s not going to hurt her vote total at all.

On the other side, Joshua has been the most over-hyped contestant of the season. He also has a decidedly throwback style that makes one wonder if he is current and able to build a fanbase. Some will think it’s a hard call, but with analysis: it’s not.

The pick: Joshua Ledet to go home.