Robert Plant’s Wanna-be Idol

I actually meant idle, but then you wouldn’t get pulled in by the American Idol reference. I’ll tell you upfront, I don’t watch American Idol.  I don’t really have anything against it, but I don’t really have anything good to say about it either.  I watched the first couple seasons because of all the hype, but it started to get old after awhile.  However, every day after American Idol is aired, there is some kind of stir about the show making its way around the news room.  So this week I heard that they did a Rock Week theme for the final few contestants.  Even though the history of American Idol never puts out a rock singer, exception Daughtry, I thought I might as well YouTube it to check it out.

I’ve heard of this Adam Lambert guy before, but never really heard his voice.  I guess the joke is on me, because the first song I heard from him was Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” I’m not one to freak out when hearing or seeing something shocking, and I’m not about to do that right now.  But, I can say that his performance was an interesting cover of Robert Plant’s voice.  Is that interesting good, interesting bad, what do you mean?  Well, for one, I’m going to compare his performance to Robert Plant’s version off of Zeppelin II, so just interesting.

His voice is pretty good, and the first lyrics of the song did sound a little like Robert Plant.  He did a good job on vibrato’ing notes like Robert Plant did profusely on the album.  However, I think he got too “showy” a ways into the song.  I know it’s American Idol and it’s all about stage presence, blah blah blah.  And this may be the reason why I don’t watch American Idol, but the fact that these signers don’t sing from the meaning of the song or how the artist portrayed it from the start, makes what I hear from them only lyrics over a rhythm section.  Listen closely to Plant’s version on Zeppelin II.  You know he’s signing as passionate as he can, which made all his songs legendary.  After all, it wasn’t just Plant’s high voice that made him popular, it was everything about his voice.  His small whispers to guitar solo mocks to screams, that was Robert Plant.

Now this guy Lambert comes in and sings his own version of the song.  That’s all fine and everything, but once he starts to push off of what Plant did in specific spots in the song, that’s when it starts to get messy.  For instance, the lyrics “All them good times, baby, baby, I’ve been yearnin’,” he start to go up the latter and screams “baby, baby, I’ve been yearnin’.” If you know the song, Robert Plant backs down on that point and really lays back the energy.  The point of laying back like that was to save the energy for the chorus, or in Lambert’s situation, the guitar solo.  However, Plant was part of a band, so vocals were only a fourth of the end product, but Lambert is apparently 100% of the product.  And when you’re 100%, you can do pretty much anything you want at the expense of quality music.  So by deriving that, I will say “Nice job Lambert, you are a good singer” and I’ll go back to not watching American Idol and listening for the stories the next day at work.