Kelly Clarkson – My Life would Suck – SNL
I happened to catch a portion of the SNL repeat that featured Kelly Clarkson as the musical guest. One of my pet peeves is seeing bands on shows miming to backing tapes. I mean, if you’re going to be on broadcast TV, you should be able to prove to America that you’ve got talent and play/sing live. “Dancing with the Stars” is an example of a show that frequently features musical guests lip syncing to pre-recorded tracks. SNL, on the other hand, does a pretty good job in making most of their musical guests perform live except for that train-wreck of an incident years ago with Ashley Simpson of course.
Now, Kelly Clarkson was solid as usual and the band indeed played live but I noticed something odd going on with one of Kelly’s backup singers. One of the girls had a guitar on but it appeared to me that she didn’t know the first thing about the guitar and it probably wasn’t plugged in anyway. I don’t know who’s idea it was but it was pretty distracting and took the focus off of Clarkson. The poor girl looked awkward with it on and her hand positions were a dead-giveaway. She had no business “playing” the guitar on stage. Come on, stuff like this is simply offensive to legit guitar players everywhere. If you’re going to be on stage with a guitar in hand, YOU BETTER know how to play. WTF?
The only plausible theory that I could come up with is that the SNL director demanded that a guitar be strapped on the chubby backup singer to hide her bulge. Why else would she have a guitar in her hands when she obviously doesn’t know how to play? It’s a cruel, cruel world in TV-Land for the *NOT-so-thin and beautiful*. …But then again if my theory were true, why didn’t Kelly have a guitar on her? hhhhmmmmm….
by The Lonely Island. Like a lot of folks, I’m a huge fan of those SNL digital shorts created by the Lonely Island trio – Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer but since a good portion of the CD is comprised of their past video hits (including “Lazy Sunday”, “Jizz in my Pants” and “Dick in the Box”) the album understandably suffers and feels a bit dated because of this. I suppose the problem stems from the fact that this type of comedy tends to be disposable and due to the short shelf life, there isn’t a lot of “replay value” here. Just think of it as “fast food” comedy where it’s good in short bursts but not so good for the long haul. and although I recognize the creativity that went into the recordings, the “Beastie Boys” retro style rapping overstays its welcome after a couple of spins. Plus it doesn’t help matters when each song contains only one or two punchlines. Some tracks like “I’m on a Boat” or “The Old Saloon” don’t even really have a punchline to speak of. I guess it’s nice for the comedy trio to have “official products” out on the market to sell but their type of humor really works best as online videos or as SNL shorts. and I don’t know about you but I feel like a pimple faced fourteen year old listening to all the toilet-humor on this album. heh.
