Untalented
‘superstars’Performances so bad they're fun
make "Superstar" CD remarkable
William Hung may have used up his 15 minutes of fame, but his legacy has just been extended another quarter-hour. No doubt inspired by the skyrocketing popularity of the harmonically challenged "American Idol" reject-turned-pop star, the WB network launched "The WB's Superstar USA" in May in hopes of finding the worst singer in America.
Host Brian McFayden, left with Jamie Foss, winner of "The WB's Superstar USA."
It was a TV show with a suspiciously familiar premise. Following a multicity cattle call, aspiring singers were plucked from auditions to endure weekly nail-biting eliminations before a nationwide audience. Though these participants believed they were being chosen for their singing ability, they were, in fact, handpicked for their outrageous lack of talent. In the end, 20-year-old Jamie Foss, a chirpy blonde from Erskine, Minn., was declared the country's "superstar" and awarded a recording contract with Koch Records, the label that signed Hung earlier this year. Foss, like her fellow competitors, was only told of the farcical set-up after the contest had ended.
The joke doesn't end there. Koch recently released some of the show's most putrid performances on CD for public consumption. What's funnier is that the collection, which also includes a bonus DVD with unreleased footage from the series, is every bit as entertaining as any "American Idol" album, if for very different reasons.
There's Foss's three laughable performances on the 12-track CD, including a hilariously over-the-top duet with rival Mario (no actual surnames were used during the show), the soft-spoken nerd with two left feet. The gung-ho Jojo is completely toneless, both in his singing and physique, yet losing his breath halfway through "Crazy in Love" actually earns him bonus points for being unbelievably bad. Though polar opposites, performances by the lifeless Tamara ("Unbreak My Heart") and the impossibly exaggerated Nina Diva ("Roxanne") are equally fascinating to listen to.
Rosa, though, might have been the LaToya London of the show, that is, the overwhelming favorite who, by some inexplicable turn of fate, was dismissed from the competition sooner than she probably deserved to. Her otherworldly caterwauling on sultry dance numbers like "Bootylicious" and "Genie in a Bottle" was among the show's comical highlights and gives the album surprising replay value.
A ghastly vocalist, Rosa is completely void of any sense of timing, rarely hits a proper note and routinely forgets her lyrics. Her verses are a garbled mess, often embellished with fanciful words that flounder somewhere between English and Spanish. Her miserable rendition of the tender ballad "Wind Beneath My Wings" is at once astonishing and side-splitting.
Then there's Omar, the timid soul crooner from Philadelphia, who advanced through the tournament on the strength of his embarrassingly meager vocal skills. His butchery of the delicate "Endless Love" made viewers cringe, though a playback of his CD performance, as those of his fellow contestants, should make listeners delighted to know there are at least seven people they can out-karaoke in this world.
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