American Idol 4: Why Janay Lost

The semi-finals have ended, and this is the last week I’ll have to write four articles about why people lost. Thank goodness! But enough about me, this article is about Janay. Honestly, this is the first of the four I’m working on because, well, it’s the easiest.

Janay should have been sent home in the first semi-final round. She has never looked comfortable on the stage – in fact, she has often looked positively scared to death. I’m not saying this to be mean. In fact, I’m glad she was voted off, because I always felt bad for her when she was up there! Bruce Barker said it best in his We’ll Be the Judge of That! contribution this week: “Sometimes a woman comes along with eyes so expressive it almost seems you can read her every emotion just by looking at her. Janay’s eyes are screaming for help.”

But we aren’t here to talk about how good it was to see Janay go. We’re here to figure out why Janay went. It might seem easy, but let’s still follow the usual pattern of looking back at What ‘American Idol 4’ Contestants Need to Know to figure out where she went wrong.

The first stop on that road to wrongness is with the very first rule – being able to sing and perform. As we’ve already mentioned, Janay pretty much always looked terrified when she was on the semi-finals stage. In her last performance, Randy told her she was out of tune almost the whole song, Paula agreed it was pitchy, and Simon told her a suitcase and plane travel were in her future.

As far as the non-onsite judges, Sting7 said in his recap that he winced after every sour note and, “there was a lot of wincing.” You’ve already seen one of Bruce’s comments from “We’ll Be the Judge of That!” but he was certainly note alone. Gil said she should have gone two weeks earlier, Brian agreed that she’s not good enough to have made it this far, Betsy felt the “performance was just terrible,” and I pointed out that she “broke a lot of notes.”

In other words, we had a very rare occasion here: It was unanimous. Not one person – not a judge on the set or a commentator writing for RNO or FOI – felt that Janay did anything close to a good job. It just doesn’t get any worse than that.

Randy has commented many times in the past few days (too many times, if you ask me) that song choice doesn’t matter. He’s wrong. However, in Janay’s case, it is indeed true. Song choice didn’t matter. No matter what she sang, she did it poorly because she was scared stiff.

I could point out that Janay followed the third rule – she was consistent. Unfortunately, she was consistently a big bucket of nerves, which is not really what this rule had in mind.

The fourth rule says to be unique. Janay was fine here. She was one of the youngest girls, and was nothing like the other teenager, Mikalah – in both good ways and bad. Once again, unfortunately she was unique as the “scared little girl.” I don’t think anybody has ever had that role in Idol history before.

For the same reason, Janay was memorable. I’m sure she had a lot of fans going into the semis due to her appearances earlier in the process. Indeed, that is pretty much the only way she made it this far.

The sixth rule says to avoid karaoke performances. Not an issue here, nor was the seventh about not arguing with the judges.

The eighth and ninth rules finish off the explanation as to why Janay made it as long as she did. The eighth say contestants should remember that they are a complete package and the ninth encourages them to create a fan base. Janay was the cute young nervous girl – that was her “package.” It also helped her to grab the fans. I think many viewers in the first couple weeks just wanted to give her one more chance to show that she could do it. There’s no doubt that Janay has potential. Unfortunately, all the chances in the world at this stage of her life were not doing her any good.

Janay had a single trait that everybody who watched American Idol will remember: nerves. She made it through the first two weeks of the semi-finals based on the strength of a fan base she had built and on those who just wanted to see her give it another try. By the third week, however, it became obvious to pretty much everybody that Janay simply did not yet belong at this level of competition. That is why Janay lost.

David Bloomberg is the Editor of Foxes On Idol, and can be reached at RNO@pobox.com.

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