"American Song Contest," episode 1: Hueston Stands Out in Good but Mostly Predictable Show

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched the premiere episode of American Song Contest on NBC. I hadn’t expected that Charles would be watching it with me, but he did and he was less impressed than I was, especially with the quality of the songs. He argued that the songs were pretty derivative and fit neatly into established genres. There were a few exceptions – notably “New Boot Goofin’” by Ryan Charles of Wyoming, which was not country but rap (and not a country-rap fusion like last year’s “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus, either: “New Boot Goofin’” was straight-up rap on a country subject, though at least you could understand the words: a lot of my frustration with rap comes from its virtual incomprehensibility, and I figure if you’re going to reduce music to just lyrics and rhythm, at least you ought to make it possible for us to decipher what you’re saying) – but for the most part last night’s songs fit neatly into established genres. The opener, “Ready to Go” by the Minnesota band YAM Haus, was a nice bit of 1970’s pop-rock with a baby-faced lead singer that if he’d been around 50 years ago would have been a teen idol gracing the cover of Tiger Beat.

The next song was “Wonderland” by AleXa (that’s how she officially spells her name), and the promos for the show picked up on the unlikelihood of a K-Pop artist from Oklahoma. Actually her story wasn’t quite so weird: her mother is Korean, her dad is from New York City, and they met, paired up and decided to raise their family in Tulsa. “Wonderland” turned out to be a fun song, a nice piece of ear candy with some spectacular dancing going on behind it, and I liked the fact that it was all in English instead of doing the annoying linguistic shifts of the mega-K-Pop band BTS, whose songs shift maddeningly from English to Korean to gibberish. Tne next song was “Never Like This” from Arkansas-based country singer Kelsey Lamb, a beautiful love ballad whom Lamb made a bit too “particular” for my taste by saying she had written it about the husband she married less than a year ago. Given that one of the greatest country singers of all time, Johnny Cash, came from Arkansas, Lamb had some pretty big boots to fill – and she filled them beautifully. After that came a Black rapper from Indiana named UG Skywalkin’ – the “UG” in his name, he said, is short for Uganda, where his parents were born – whose song was called “Love in My City,” but he had the usual lousy intonation of many rappers and the second rapper he featured, Maxie, actually rapped with more power and authority (and you could at least understand what he was saying!).

Then the show shifted to Puerto Rico – the gimmick was it’s supposed to represent not only all 50 states but the five U.S. territories as well as Washington, D.C. – for an exciting performance by Christian Dijon of a song called “Loko.” I’m not sure why he spelled it that way because what he was singing was the Spanish word “loco,” meaning “crazy,” but I liked the song a lot better than Charles. I really got into the song and didn’t really notice – as he did – that it was just cobbled together from bits of Ricky Martín and Menudo. (Ya remember Menudo? The boy band, not the food.) I also thought he had the hottest bod of any of the guys on the program, and I liked his two-tone hair, half in basic black and half dyed dead-white. I had a little pang of disappointment when he mentioned that he has a girlfriend with whom he rode out Hurricane Maria (ya remember Hurricane Maria? The event for which President Donald Trump responded by going to San Juan and throwing paper towels at the crowd, then defending it as a joke?)

The next act was a real blast from the past: Michael Bolton, representing his home state of Connecticut (where he built a fully professional home recording studio so he never has to leave his wife and family to work). A real surprise of this program was that in addition to featuring artists on their way up (and artists who have already recorded and played to crowds of tens of thousands at home-state venues we haven’t heard of), they’re also featuring artists on their way down like Michael Bolton and Jewel. Bolton did a song called “Beautiful World” that seemed a bit ill-timed after the current horrors in Ukraine, but it was a nice pop ballad and for once Bolton didn’t overact (as he did in one Los Angeles concert reviewed hilariously by the now-retired Robert Hilburn in the Los Angeles Times, who wrote, “If I were to write my review of Michael Bolton’s concert the way he sang it, EVERY other WORD would BE in ALL-CAPS and EVERY sentence WOULD end WITH an EXCLAMATION POINT!”). After that a woman from Iowa named Alisabeth von Presley (did her parents stick her with that mouthful of a moniker or was that her own idea?), wearing a pink outfit and dyeing her long hair pink to match, did a song called “Wonder” that was considerably less spectacular than her stage presentation. She’s one of these people who plays a portable keyboard instrument that you hold in your hands front and center so you don’t have to hide behind a console: you can stand in front of your band on stage as if you were playing guitar. (I believe this contraption was invented for Herbie Hancock, though you could make the case that an accordion is a similar instrument: a keyboard-operated contraption but one which leaves you free to stand front and center instead of hidden behind the instrument’s bulk.)

The next song was “Feel Your Love” by Jake’O from Wisconsin, who describes his style as “Nuvo Retro” – which means he stands in front of his band wearing a white suit jacket and carrying a 1950’s-style electric guitar, while his backup singers are three women dressed in cheerleader outfits. Alas, the song he played, “Feel Your Love,” was contemporary pop instead of rockabilly (either traditional or “nuvo”), though he had a good stage presence. The next performer was from Mississippi, and was introduced by a title card mentioning previous singers who were born there, including Leontyne Price (I had forgotten about her!), Muddy Waters and Elvis Presley – though in Elvis’s case they are perhaps stretching a point because, though he was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, he grew up and came of age musically in Memphis, Tennessee, and his Tennessee heritage was far more important to the music he actually made. (Ironically, I’ve been listening a lot to another Mississippi native who was not on her list but could have been: the jazz/blues singer-songwriter Mose Allison.) The performer from Mississippi was a Black singer named Keyone Starr and she described herself as what would have happened if Aretha Franklin and Lenny Kravitz had had a daughter. I was disappointed with her song, “Fire,” because though she had paid tribute to the Delta blues tradition in her interviews, her song was a pretty plain piece of contemporary pop and didn’t match the searing intensity of Aretha (who was born, after all, in Detroit, Michigan and came straight from the Black church tradition; did I need to mention that Aretha’s father, the Rev. C. L. Franklin, was pastor of the largest and most influential Black church in Detroit, or that his albums were the biggest sellers Chess Records ever had – bigger than Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf – even though they were simply recordings of his sermons?).

After the country-rap guy from Wyoming came the last and, to my mind at least, most interesting artist of the night: Hueston from Rhode Island, who went on and on and on in his interviews about his blue-collar roots, which made me think, “Ah, he wants to be the next Bruce Springsteen.” His song, “Hold On Too Long,” didn’t sound particularly Springsteen-esque but I quite liked it anyway – and so did the show’s secret panel of 56 music-industry insiders and critics, whol voted to advance Hueston to the semi-finals of the American song contest. Alas, Charles didn’t get past Hueston’s facial tattoos to judge his music fairly. The first episode of American Song Contest lumbered on and on, complete with a so-called “Halftime Show,” and the hosts were Snoop Dogg (whom I find totally repulsive as a personality and an artist) from California and Kelly Clarkson (whom I like, though she was wearing one of those deliberately ill-fitting tops that looks like it’s about to fall off at any moment and reveal her breasts – doubtless the straight guys in the audience get more of a thrill out of this sort of thing than I do) from Texas – and whenever Snoop Dogg proclaimed he was representing California, I kept wanting to puke and thinking, “No, you’re not. Not my California, You may be representing the land of gangstas and thugs, but you don’t represent me. I’d much rather be represented by Kelly Clarkson!”