The Idol winner’s song is infamous throughout the whole world of television and music for being possibly the worst song known to man. They’ve always been bad, even though some – Inside Your Heaven, My Destiny, This Is My Now – are exceptionally bad.

Now, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this year’s winner’s song. Kara DioGuardi was involved, which I didn’t know if it was a good or bad sign. As it turned out, whatever her faults as a judge, they were wildly eclipsed by the giant heap of failure that was No Boundaries. There are no boundaries to how bad it was. If one didn’t know any better, you’d think Kara DioGuardi was on the ABC payroll, paid to deliberately sabotage Idol.

The rest of the night went more smoothly. Historically, reprises don’t do well on the Idol stage, but both Kris and Adam did well on their reprises – Ain’t No Sunshine and Mad World, respectively. By far, they shared the strengths – and weaknesses – of the original performances earlier in the season. Adam swapped out the silly lighting for a trenchcoat and dry ice… perhaps, as he tends to do, distract from otherwise great vocals with the theatrics. Kris is absolutely brilliant at deeply felt, emotional songs, and he was just that last night. The piano was a perfect touch as well. Well done to both of them.

Simon Fuller is, fundamentally, a talent manager – not a musician. Sure, you can’t be a talent manager of singers without knowing something about music, but that doesn’t mean your infallible either. Both of his picks were… less than impressive. Of course, for some reason or another Fuller decided to pick more “socially relevant” songs. Now, whenever you decide that something other than music drives whether you think a song suits a person or not, it’s not always a good thing.

A Change Is Gonna Come was pleasant enough to listen, but… the vocals were uneven in spots. I’m not a fan of the wailing/shouting/whatever you want to call it. One might say the song called for it, and that may well be the case. However, at times, it was less of a song and more of an exercise in range, wailing, and glory-noting. Don’t think it was a bad performance, but was it the uber-performance the judges said it was? Nowhere close.

At least it left an impact, though. Kris’s What’s Goin’ On didn’t have anything going on. It wasn’t bad to listen to. There was just no impact; it was just there. Kris’s vocals were there, but… it was the sort of performance you forget right after hearing it.

Overall, Simon Fuller’s picks were something of a wash. One flawed performance versus a forgettable one… Adam won, largely because for all its flaws, his was memorable. Kris’s wasn’t.

The best song of the night belonged to Carrie Underwood, but really, that’s not a fair comparison. My only complaint about Home Sweet Home was the accompanying video montage: did we really need to see all those moments from auditions and Hollywood week, episodes that I’d prefer to commit to the memory hole. Wouldn’t some shots from, well, the finals been better?

Put money on it?: If anyone thought the finale would make someone out to be a clear winner, it wouldn’t. Overall, Adam might be a bit ahead – his advantage over Kris in the second song was smaller than his gap in the first. True, he was better with the winner’s song, but it was sufficiently bad that it won’t matter.

So, like previous seasons, the finale won’t matter as far as who actually wins. Broadly, there are two kinds of finales: a closely-matched duel, or a complete and utter mismatch. This was definitely the first case.

In that situation, then, you look at how broad the fanbase of each contestant is. For that, Kris has to have the edge: there are just too many questions about his style. No one’s denying he’s very good at what he does. However, does what Adam do really appeal to a wide audience – wider than Kris’s? It’s hard to say. There’s at least a third of people who’ll like it, a third who’ll hate it, and everyone else will be thing, “what’s that?”

Here’s another thing to consider. Last week, Kris was basically within shouting distance of Adam, if not leading him narrowly. That was with Danny’s voters still in the picture. Does anyone think that fanbase will break anywhere near 50/50? I don’t. Those who still vote will break at least 2:1 for Kris.

It’s been clear all season long that TPTB want Adam to win. They’re not dumb, so they avoided doing (mostly) the one thing that would have ensured a loss: throwing Kris under the bus. Given the favorable treatment that Adam has received all season long, more attempts to sabotage Kris was likely to provoke a viewer revolt, just like last year. True, A Change is Gonna Come was overpraised, but it wasn’t completely ridiculous and the comments were at least defensible. Will there be a backlash against the pimping on principle? Maybe, but it won’t be as bad as it could have been.

This duel was a lot closer than Conventional Wisdom ever said. Adam wasn’t quite the frontrunner, and neither was Kris this underdog fighting against the odds. This won’t be a 12-million-vote blowout. I wouldn’t be surprised if the winning margin is less than a million. Still, the fact is that the finale didn’t change anything. This was determined largely by factors that have been in place since last week, if not much longer.

As those largely lean one way, the verdict is:

Kris Allen to win American Idol Season Eight.

Over the years, Top 3 night has given us some great gems of music. Our friends at What Not to Sing describe it as must-see-TV. However, given how things have turned out, our expectations were muted.

For at least the first half of the show, those low expectations proved right on track. They ranged between the mediocre to the bad. Kris Allen showed the limits of a song that “suited” him: it was so similar to his style, even a good vocal sounded like it was straight out of a karaoke bar. Kris couldn’t do anything to make it more interesting, because to do so would have taken him beyond his vocal ability. This song was something of a booby prize.

Adam Lambert also had a so-so outing with U2’s One. The start was, in our opinion, pretty good. When it started up though… no. It exposed his chief vocal limitation: at times, Adam can sound like he’s shouting the song, not singing it. On the plus side, Adam proved he could actually convey the emotions of a song without resorting to excessively slow ballads or over-the-top acting.

For all the mediocrity in both Adam and Kris’s performances, though, they were miles ahead of Danny. The performance aspects of it – moving about the stage, connecting with the audience, the interplay with the saxophonist – were pretty good. However, it couldn’t cover up the mediocre singing. This is the top three. My standards for a top three performance are pretty high, and this was nowhere near. No range, no power… this was an utter failure as a song.

Things looked up considerably in the second half of the show. Heartless was a remarkably gutsy call by Kris – and not the sign of someone lacking in their artistic abilities. This was the textbook example of making a song your own. His vocals were powerful when they needed to be, controlled when they needed be. This was the song of someone who had nothing left to lose and laid it all out live on the Idol stage. Brilliant.

There was a good song somewhere in Adam Lambert’s Cryin’. However, somewhere along the line it turned into something.. somewhat ordinary. It just didn’t have the overall quality of his past performances. The vocals were again a little too much screamy, the arrangement felt all over the place… it was good, yes, but not much further than that. This did not deserve all the praise it get in our opinion. Adam may have the ability to hit a high note and hold it, but there’s a lot more to music than that, Kara.

As for Danny… You Are So Beautiful was an enormous improvement over Dance Little Sister, but that doesn’t mean it was all that good either. Like his first song, Danny checked off everything needed for a top-notch Idol performance… except singing well. The slower song helped matters there a little, but I’d class it as no more than “decent”. And “decent” isn’t where contestants should be this late into the season.

Like the rest of the season, the Top 3 left us underwhelmed. One of Kris’s songs was brilliant, but the other was well-done copycat karaoke. Adam had an off night – perhaps the shift to multiple solo songs isn’t doing him any favors. Danny was disappointing; his performances were just not up to the standards of a top 3 show.

That’s what we meant: Just over the weekend, I wrote up Part 1 of our Season Post-Mortem and pretty much called out the judges and producers for thinking a little too highly of themselves this year.

Somewhere, the Idol gods must have nodded in agreement and decided to underscore our point by making fools of the judges this week. In a year full of low points for Randy, Kara, Paula, and Simon last night stands out for all the wrong reasons.

Maybe it’s just us, but it seems that the judges used up more time talking about each other than actually critiquing the songs. If the judges have issues backstage that are spilling over to the cameras, please, we really don’t want to hear about it.

Merit versus the bus: If it were just up to merit, this would be a ridiculously easy pick. Danny Gokey has been the very definition of underwhelming, and Kris was the best of the night by far.

However, the top three has been known to produce wacky results. (See: Melinda Doolittle.) Anyone could go home.

In all likelihood, though, it’s down to a Kris-versus-Danny fight. Simon defused the possibility of a surprise Adam boot with his plea for Adam fans to vote. It’s probably enough to keep him safe, although it’s quite likely he’ll be put in the bottom two.

Danny has a fanbase that is a lot stronger than it really deserves to be, based on the quality (or lack of) of his performances. Kris, on the other hand, shone the most last night. It should be a pretty even fight that’d be tough to call… in normal circumstances.

However, there is a catch. As medicore as Danny was, the judges – for the second week in a row – overpraised him. Paula’s song choice was vocally “very, very good”? Really now? And You Are So Beautiful was a “masterpiece”? What are the judges on, because I’d sure as heck like to find some.

With that in mind, it’s clear that Kris’s edge in performance won’t be as big in at least some minds as it ought to be. Danny will be perceived to have two good performances, whereas Kris will have only one.

In the end, when the producers really want a finale, they’ll probably get it. With that in mind…

The Idol Guy pick: Kris Allen to go home.

I’ll be blunt: so far, this season has been something of a hot, wet, mess. Still, though, this was a potentially intruiging final four. There was an interesting mix of genres, they were all pretty good vocally… this could have been a good night.

However, this being American Idol, what could have been rarely is. Such was rock night. It was a very mixed bag, to say the least: it had high points, to be fair – but when it hit the low points, boy were they low.

Unlike previous theme nights where the Idols wandered far and wide from the theme, this week they largely stayed within the confines of rock – which was friendly to Adam and Allison, but dangerous for Kris and Danny.

Adam Lambert had a good night, and that shouldn’t really be much of a surprise. Whole Lotta Love was the typical wild, frenetic, high-energy performance Adam Lambert delivers. With the usual Your Mileage May Vary warnings, Adam did exactly what he set out to do.

However, the Led Zeppelin song wasn’t groundbreaking in any way for Adam. We’ve all seen him with a similar over-the-top performance. However, Slow Ride was an even better performance in our book. Adam has something of a tendency to let the over-the-top theatrics overshadow the music – but that wasn’t the case at all for his duet with Allison.

The same was true with the vocals – without the need to be over the top, I thought it lacked the screechy tendencies Adam can have sometimes. Allison, too, held up her end of the bargain supremely well – if anything, she might have been even better than Adam. Whatever the division of credit, their duet was, by far, the best performance of the night.

As for Allison’s solo performance… I don’t know if it was a good song choice by itself, but considered in context of the duet… it was brilliant. It was a telling contrast from everyone else: she got to show two quite different, but not clashing, faces of herself artistically. It’s a useful – and difficult – trick to pull off on two-song nights, and particularly with a restricted theme as this week seemed to be in practice. The performance itself was pretty good as well – it wasn’t quite the refined perfection Adam delivered earlier, but Allison wanted to show off her more… sensitive, emotional side. And in that, she did admirably well.

From those three good-to-great performances, though, it went sour. Fast. Kris Allen picked a hard song to sing – especially one that called for vocals more powerful than he could actually deliver. It was a good effort, but… no. It didn’t exactly help, either, that Carly Smithson had done this song just last year – and much better.

However, it was better than his duet with Danny. Not only was the song choice bad – it just didn’t fit for either man – they also absolutely zero chemistry with each other on stage. Vocally, Simon was nuts – Danny was his usual shrieky self, and at least Kris kept some control. However, it wasn’t exactly something to be particularly proud of.

Worst of all – by a large margin – was the hot, wet, pile of cow manure that was Dream On. It was more of a nightmare than a dream. Congratulations, Danny Gokey: you’re giving Jasmine Trias a run for her money in the category of Worst Final Four performances ever. That was an outright disaster, one of the worst ones I’ve seen in many years of Idol-watching.

We want to get off this bus: Our friends over What Not to Sing put out their editorial this weekend that talked about how certain contestants at this stage of the show get run over by the 19E bus. They hoped that the bus would stay in the garage this week, but… it was not to be.

The bus came out in full force for Kris. TPTB kicked up the difficulty level so high, Kris stood no chance. I personally find it more than a little suspcious how everyone suddenly decided to hew so closely to rock – a genre Kris normally has no business being in. Putting in duets and saddling Kris with Danny? Saying that Danny was actually better in the duet? Maybe it’s just us, but Kris seemed well aware last night that the bus was going to get him – at most of it was preordained beforehand.

Of course, the bus wasn’t out to get just Kris, but being the biggest roadblock to the producers’ dream of a Gokey-Lambert finale he had to go right away. Kris definitely left the night with tire treads on his jacket.

However, Allison got side-swiped a fair bit as well. She was every bit as good as Adam was – but you wouldn’t know that from the judges. The purpose was clear: pimp Adam, and downplay Allison’s success – preparatory to the bus backing over her next week. They couldn’t slam her too hard, because they want her to get through this week, but not strong enough to interfere with the Lambert-Gokey faceoff.

While the 19E bus was ramming Kris down and side-swiping Allison, it was carrying both Adam and Danny in luxurious comfort. Adam’s praise was mostly well-deserved, but rarely have I seen such kind comments for some of the worst performances of the season to date. Audition rejects would have sung better than Danny Gokey did last night. Danny said something along the lines of his solo being “Not as bad as they thought”. It’s hard to say now who was more divorced from reality – Danny, or the judges.

Sadly, though, despite all the savviness of the Idolsphere, the bus is sadly effective. Kris’s fanbase has been spotty of late, and he didn’t have the performances last night to really save him. He needed a good, standout performance to be safe – and he didn’t get that. Which means, sadly, that…

The Idol Guy pick: Kris Allen to go home.

Normally, there’s at least some consensus about which performanes were good and which were bad. This week, though… that’s not quite possible. There’s a strong degree of Your Mileage May Vary this week. Stronger, perhaps, than any other week in Idol history.

The vocals of the top four were, to be honest, pretty close. The big difference was in how they made use of it – the overall artistry, the personality – etcetera. This was, really, a good test of the overall musical IQ of the contestants. In that category, there was one who clearly stood out.

Of the top four, the best was Allison Iraheta. This was a poised, confident, powerful performance. Her vocals were excellent, the arrangement allowed her to bring her power to bear… as well as a degree of finesse that we haven’t seen from her before. It’s not the usual rock performance that’s expected of Allison, but a little flexibility can sometimes work on Idol. It certainly did for her.

It’s usually Kris Allen who takes a song, slows and strips it down, and makes it work for his vocals – but Danny actually outdid him in that category. I personally liked the slower portion of the song much better than the end – Danny just cannot bring in the power without sounding like he’s shouting. As for Kris, it wasn’t a bad effort, but it didn’t have the special flavor that his best performances have had. Still, it was a respectable showing, and vocally it was pretty good. Very restrained, excellent control – it was a technical masterpiece, but there’s more to good performances than that.

As for Adam, well… I didn’t care too much for the white suit, but then again I tend to associate white suites either with fried chicken or Fantasy Island. That said… it was a typically Adam performance. Over the top, very theatrical, good vocals. However, while the glory note at the end was clearly meant to show off his vocals, but it was more than a bit painful to listen to. Not because it was bad, but because some human ears – ours included – can be a little sensitive.

Worst of the night was, clearly, Matt Giraud. One little bit of advice: it’s probably not a good idea to do a song that was one of Melinda Doolittle’s best performances. It was emotional… but that was about it. The vocals were not up to the task of the rest of the field. Simon thought this was his brilliant? What was he on?

Overall, though, it was a pretty good night. The excessive amount of filler – only five performances in an hour – notwithstanding, it was a worthwhile show. I didn’t care much for the material, to be honest, but there’s no arguing with the quality – Allison was outstanding, Matt wasn’t a complete disaster (about the best you can expect from him right now), and the rest were good, but not really outstanding. We’ll take it, though.

Mr. Cowell, the strings are showing: Favoritism from the judges is a long-standing Idol problem. Rarely, however, was that more on display than this week.

It’s possible to say that Kris and Allison weren’t as good as Adam and Danny.  However, the spin that Simon Cowell put on it was manipulation of the worst kind.

Neither Kris and Allison were favored at the start, and both – particularly Kris – can interfere with the cherished Adam-Danny finale. The judging was a pretty blatant attempt at trying to derail either one early. So, too, was the overpraise for Matt Giraud.

The Idolsphere is on to your shenanigans, Simon. We still haven’t forgotten, say… Syesha Mercado. If you think you can get away with this without any repercussions… you may think so, but there will be consequences.

The obvious pick… maybe?: The main question this week, as far as the picks go, is Matt Giraud. Did he do enough to save himself – or, alternately, will external factors save him?

Normally, this should be an open and shut case. He was definitely not as good as the rest of the field, his fanbase is suspect… there’s no reason he should go.

However… this is Idol-land, where the abnormal is normal. Can you really rule out an exit by Allison or Kris?

This time… probably. All the praise in the world won’t change the fact that Matt was the worst last night. Sure, he wasn’t bad, but he wasn’t as good as the rest.

Also, comments like the one Simon made can backfire. I have more confidence in the strength of Allison’s fanbase than I had a few weeks ago. Yes, she was bottom three last week, but Matt received a huge bounce from his save then. Simon’s comments are just the type that can rally, not depress, a fanbase. In addition, the unfairness of the comments will also help Allison’s vote totals.

These picks are getting trickier as the season goes on, and I would like to keep my excellent prediction record. I’ve only been wrong about the save, but I’ve put the right person in the bottom all season long. For now, though, the pick is…

Matt Giraud to go home.