X-Factor 2012: Week Two

It’s time! For my weekly dose of manufactured controversy, tabloid drama and RYLAN. I shouldn’t act like this show is incredibly tired and predictable though. I mean, they did replace the pre-recorded auto tuned group performance monstrosity with actual real live singing last week. So really, anything could happen in this series of the X-Factor. Nicole might strangle Gary Barlow with a noose while Louis chants, “Looks like you’ve reached the end of the rope!”, all while Tulisa flaps her arms up and down making seal noises. Rylan could win. Chris Maloney mightn’t make me want to throw heavy objects at the TV screen. ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN.

Dermot does something that isn’t quite a dance and isn’t quite Tulisa flapping her arms up and down making seal noises. Perhaps he realises that the levity of the situation we find ourselves in. In a time of such widely reported discord between Messrs Barlow and Walsh, national treasures and beloved heroes both, the nation does not want to see a Dermot dance. The nation is at the precipice of a sheer drop into madness and loss, waiting expectantly for a sign that a process of peace and reconciliation can bring these two titans of entertainment together again. After we recap last week’s events and the Barlow/Walsh falling out for the millionth time... both men shake on it. The nation breathes again.

Jahmene and his weird eyebrows are up first. Look at them. Look at how weird they are. I think they’re actually parasitic alien organisms that Jahmene discovered in a shadowy part of Asda while he was still working there. Somewhere near the women’s toiletries. He agreed to serve as their host and in return, they’ve promised to boost his confidence and get him loads of poon. I shall call them Zug and Zog. Last week, Jahmene, Zug and Zog were accused of oversinging a bit. This week, they’ve learned their lesson and perform a more restrained mash-up of Amy Winehouse’s Tears Dry on Their Own and Ain’t No Mountain High Enough. Which at least makes sense from a mash-up point of view, as the former samples the latter. Some of the later mash-ups we’ll see, and mash-ups are the unofficial theme this week (the official theme being love and heartbreak, which is only about 90% of all music ever), are just plain wrong.

JUDGES! Tulisa says she doesn’t like the way Jahmene’s eyebrows are looking at her. Gary compliments Jahmene for taking his advice about not over singing, because Gary likes to remind us about how insightful and correct he is about the technicalities of singing. Nicole flirts with Jahmene and he does his creepy giggle.

Next up is Me Nerves. Louis criticises Me Nerves in his intro video, saying he finds him a bit too cheesy. Normally I’d point out the hypocrisy in Louis Walsh calling someone cheesy, but this is Chris we’re talking about, so I don’t really care. Gary goes back and forth about changing Chris’s image. Please do, his radioactive orange visage makes me ill. Ultimately, Gary decides not to change anything about Chris, because if he did it might affect Chris’s nerves, causing him to have a violent panic attack and shit everywhere. WHICH COULD TOTALLY HAPPEN COS REMEMBER HIS NERVES! Chris is singing some 80s power ballad which isn’t one of the most illustrious 80s power ballads ever. It’s still one of those you-know-it-to-hear-it ones, but it’s no Total Eclipse of the Heart. Which he’ll be performing next week, probably. If he had to cover a Heart song, then he should’ve done Barracuda with an elaborate Sarah Palin-themed performance.  Dancers dressed as moose and salmon being hunted down by Chris, symbolising him conquering his nerves, perhaps. Gosh, that was an easy idea to generate. Brian Friedman’s job isn’t difficult at all!

JUDGES! Nicole tries talking to Chris but Gary reminds her “As soon as he stops signing, his nerves get him”. Yes, Gary actually says this. Dear X-Factor producers, the narrative you’re still trying to peddle about Chris and his nerves is not slightly undermined by the way he performs like some veteran, poised diva. Louis reminds us that Chris is cheesy and cabaret and cruise ship. Tulisa says Gary needs to do something to make Chris more current. Dubstep!

The first of the groups to perform tonight is Union J. I think they’re the ones with the 4 members, one of whom has been ordered back into the closet lest he disrupt the boyband paradigm. Poor Jaymi. I shall call him Gay Face from now on. 

In their VT, Union J admit that they were shit last week. Then they meet seasoned performers One Direction who share the depth of their experience with Union J and inspire them to hopefully attain new heights. This is the second appearance of One Direction on this show since the live performances began just last week. I think they’re going to come up with ever more elaborate and desperate ways to shoe-horn a One Direction appearance in every week. Later on: One Direction attend Lucy’s nan’s funeral. And join us next week when Niall Horan eats a sandwich in the background of Ella’s intro video. As One Direction have now officially endorsed Union J (fuck you, District 3), and because Union J have a clone of Harry Styles in their line-up, I’ve decided I shall refer to them as Another Direction. It’s easily as stupid a name as Union J is. Another Direction are performing Bleeding Strings: a mash-up of Bleeding Love and Broken Strings. It’s a song about what happens when there’s a violent accident at a violin recital. They do much better than last week, when they sounded like a bag of cats being slowly boiled to death. This week they only sound a pair of cats being steamrollered while someone plays Leona Lewis in the background.

JUDGES! Tulisa says that they have a really strong female following, so it’s important the gay one spread some rumours about dating Pick ‘n’ Mix or something. Gary calls it a total transformation, and makes the Transformers noise to illustrate his point.

Baby Pony Ella is up next. Her intro-video is all about how she is definitely not dating George (aka Harry Styles II) from Another Direction.  I think they may be trying to sabotage Ella with this. She’ll have a bunch of angry placard waving 14 year olds outside her hotel window tomorrow shouting “Get your hands off our non-threatening boyfriend-to-be”. Baby Pony is performing Lovin’ You. You know, the one with the lalalala and doodoodoodoo. She’s also styled exactly like Adele. Perhaps herself and George are planning on starting a celebrity impersonation company once they end up on the former-reality talent show contestant scrap heap and desperation strikes. This will be after they’ve done Celebrity Come Dine With Me and Celebrity Boxing, obviously. Ella is quite good, doesn’t fuck up as much as last week, and nails the all-important testicle-shattering high notes that characterise this song.

JUDGES! Never one to let an opportunity to show how much he understands the intricacies of vocals and music, Gary congratulates Ella for hitting the “F Sharp descending” or something. Fuck off, Gary. Louis says that Ella is like a timeless goddess. He fails to mention which goddess, so I’ve decided that Ella is the mortal avatar of Epona, the Celtic goddess of horses, mules and donkeys.

Dermot tells us that we’ll be meeting the “darker side of love” next, which is a very sensitive way of saying the next two performances are the mutt-ugly guy only a mother could love (and even she struggled) and the girl whose nan died this week. Ben Mitchell is first up. His intro-video is about how Nicole is making such an effort to get to know and understand him. Oh Ben, she’s not doing it to help you, she’s doing it to better understand the human race so that she can gather more intel on us for her techno-organic alien creators. Nicole accompanies Ben to a completely abandoned pub that has probably been closed off and specially sterilised for her visit. She has some pork scratchings and a pint of t’local brew. Her efforts to fit in fail when she pulls out her diamond-encrusted iPhone and rings her pal Mary J. Blige to give Ben a pep-talk. Ben says he feels like a fish out of water on the show. Yes, everyone else is a clownfish and you’re a blobfish, Ben. Mary J. Blige tells him to grow a pair and quit whining. In what may be a subtle hint to Louis and Gary to get over themselves, Ben sings Blige’s No More Drama. It’s a reasonable rendition.

JUDGES! Tulisa believes every word when Ben sings. He connects emotionally with the music and she can really feel the pain. Next week, Ben will start cutting himself in order to bring his ability to sing about pain to the next level. By the end of the series he’ll have developed emotional transference abilities so powerful that anyone listening will actually develop open sores just by listening to him.

Lucy the lesbian’s nan died this week, so her VT is a right barrel of laughs as you can imagine. She decides that she wants to do something upbeat so that she can make herself smile, hence the unexpected cover of Gold Digger. It’s a bit weird and doesn’t entirely work. I just don’t think Lucy’s a great singer. All of her performances are just talky-with-an-acoustic guitar. What made her audition a success wasn’t her singing, it was her songwriting, and that’s not something you can showcase very well on a circus like this. I can’t bring myself to be too mean about her, after all her nan just died, and she’s annoyingly likeable for some reason. I’ll be extra-horrible next week to make up for it.

JUDGES! Tulisa points out that Lucy didn’t do a sad song and go the sympathy vote route, which is a surprisingly valid and relevant point to make. I guess that Ms Contostavlos Khalkíoikos Papathopolous was overdue.

Next up is District 3. Their intro-video details how they wanted to do a Bieber or One Direction song, but Louis had no idea who those people are because they came to fame within the past 5 years, and insisted they do something from the 1990s instead. It’s Boyz II Men’s I Swear. As usual, the boys sing with inexplicable American accents. The staging is another piece of ridiculously OTT Friedman genius. The boys perform on a rotating platform while lasers point at its base. Then the lasers shoot up to imprison the boys on their futuristic platform of death. Then rose petals fall from the ceiling at the key change. Then there is more light show. More than enough to distract from the terrible vocals, you’d think. You would be wrong. Cleethorpes demands that you knock it off with the fucking American accents, lads!

JUDGES! Gary and Louis have another panto-spat. Nicole says she’d love to get the boys shirts off and rub baby oil all over them. Louis Walsh takes a moment from tearing Barlow’s hair out to ponder that mental image, and looks content.

We’ve now reached the flabby middle part of the show where everything gets a bit boring and the contestants are about as memorable as Nicki Evans, Ashley McKenzie, Chenai Zinkyuku, Laura White and Sophie Habibis. And soon to follow in those forgotten footsteps is Jade Ellis. This week she’ll be performing Amy Winehouse’s Love is a Losing Game.  No sign of her adorable daughter in her VT this week, so I’m instantly less emotionally attached to her. In a bid to make herself memorable, Jade performs the song suspended from the ceiling over a pit of fire. She sings more than adequately, but because she doesn’t destroy any windows with her voice like Ella, deafen anyone within a 2 mile radius of the studio like Melanie or generate a strange radioactive orange glow like Me Nerves, she’s still pretty forgettable. Basically, it’s restrained and nicely delivered, but restraint and “nice” won’t get you very far in this show. Jade needs a better gimmick than an adorable daughter and elevators breaking down when she’s nearby.

The judges have nothing interesting to say.

Mortal Kombat 1 are up next, to try and win the battle of worst group of the evening. They’ll have to be pretty bad tonight, District 3 set the bar pretty low, but I have every confidence that after last week’s travesty, MK1 will fail to deliver. Their intro video is a bit meandering and pointless, which is odd given how X-Factor VTs are usually about aggressively pushing a very specific agenda like “Chris could shit himself at any point”, “Misha B is not a bully. Really”, or “All of Union J are entirely heterosexual and want to be your boyfriends, pubescent girls!” Maybe the point is to show how “fun” MK1 are, or something. They wear lots of bright colours! They put a baseball cap on Louis and call him “Uncle Louis”. Needless to say, “Uncle Louis” is the most terrifying thing I’ve seen on TV this week. And there has been a lot of footage of Jimmy Saville on TV this week. MK1 are singing the Jackson 5s I Want You Back, which has surely been performed on this show about ninety million times at this point. It’s lifeless and boring and doesn’t really work as a duet because it’s basically Sonya Blade singing a verse and Jax rapping a verse and isn’t about complementing one another’s voices or doing anything original at all.

JUDGES! Tulisa says she likes MK1 because they’re fun. Hooray, I was right about the intro-video agenda! Gary says the performance was “a bit Glee”. About 40% of the audience won’t realise that was a criticism.  In addition, I don’t think it was anything like Glee. Some of the biggest staples of Glee were missing, like gay martyrdom, misogyny, overuse of autotune and unrealistically open-minded teenagers.

It’s almost over. Only 3 more acts to go. I think I can make it. Kye Sones is up next. Or “the singing chimney sweep” as Borelow introduces him. Kye doesn’t want to go home to have to clean more chimneys, because that’s no way for a 63 year old to be earning a living. Borelow says that Kye isn’t just a singer, he’s “an artist” who’s constantly pushing himself and coming up with new ideas. Kye has been phoning Gary non-stop with his ideas and he reckons that makes him the envy of every female in the country. Not unless you’re ringing him for phone-sex, Kye. Kye is doing a mash-up of the Rihanna parts from Love the Way You Lie and Dido’s Thank You. So basically Kye is doing the non-rap parts of two rap songs. If he were truly interested in pushing himself, he would’ve done the rap parts too! You’re a liar, Kye, you don’t care about honing your craft at all!

JUDGES! Zingerbot says it didn’t grab her. She wants to be grabbed the way a magnet would grab on to iron filings. Her emotion sensor found the entire performance to be flat and emotionally vacuous. The panto dames bitch at one another: Louis says it was boring while Gary challenges him to say something more constructive Asking Louis for constructive criticism is like asking MK1 not to be street, man.  It just can’t be done.

RYLAN NATION! Let’s ignore Rylan’s VT (lots of wailing) and go straight to the performance: Rylan begins with Take That’s Back for Good, then transitions into Groove is in the Heart. There is no way that I can do justice to what I am seeing. There is a catwalk. There are people dressed as Anna Wintour and Karl Lagerfield at either side. Rylan parades down the catwalk followed by women dressed as pandas. Sexy pandas. Oh wait, there are man pandas too. And then... and then he starts singing Gangnam Style, where “Oppon gangnam style” becomes “Woppa Rylan Style” for some inexplicable reason. This is amazing. This is actually the end of television. When this episode finishes, all you’ll see on every channel worldwide will be static. This is the last thing to happen on television ever. It simply has to be. Rylan and the sex pandas parade around the JUDGE’S! table as he continues to smash the concept of singing into meaninglessness. Now he’s singing Pump up the Jam. I think he’s actually going to sing every song ever as part of this iconoclastic performance. Red balloons fall from the ceiling. Mercifully, it isn’t a precursor to Rylan launching into 99 Luftballons, it’s actually the signal that the performance has ended.  

The judges debate amongst themselves precisely how amazing Rylan was. Tulisa describes is as “epoch shattering”, while Louis suggests it has redefined the way we will think about music forever. Gary thinks that the notion of music as we currently understand it has been expanded so broadly by Rylan they we now need a new word. Nicole postulates that centuries from now, when our descendants look back through our digital historical archive, they will hold this performance aloft as the pinnacle of human endeavour. Her fellow judges nod in solemn agreement.

It’s possible that Melanie Masson may have performed after Rylan, but I can’t say for certain. I think I witnessed a woman come on stage and do something, but it seemed so dated and safe after the paradaigm-shifting performance that preceded it that I just couldn’t accept it as being “music”. We live in Rylan Nation now, where traditional ways of looking at concepts like statehood, music and individuality are meaningless. People like Melanie are going to have to up their game if they want to compete.

*Rylan Wink*