Kristy Lee Cook's Destruction of Eight Days a Week on American Idol

In 1966, the Beatles created huge controversy when they released their album Yesterday and Today with its infamous butcher cover. 42 years later, American Idol contestant Kristy Lee Cook returned the favor with her own butchered cover of "Eight Days A Week."

In a typical bit of Idol lunacy, they decided to recast the song as a hoedown country song for Kristy Lee Cook. Randy Jackson heard the song and said that he half liked it and half hated it. Paula said that it just didn't work for her. Simon though it was horrible, and that in taking a risk, she did a huge injustice to the song. Paula and Simon are both right.

In the great tradition of clueless American Idol singers, she takes all emotion and joy out of the song and instead decides just to plow through it. With her fluttering hand and her completely unnecessary vocal quirks, she's no different than the dozens of vocally talented but emotionally and stylistically bankrupt singers that clutter radio.

Watching the performance again on You Tube, I'm struck by how phony it all sounds. This girl with the pleasant sounding neutral Northwestern accent in the introductory segment suddenly becomes forty times more Southern when she sings the song. Instead of trying to bring a bit of Kristy Lee Cook flavor to the song, she instead chooses to do her own third rate imitation of what she thinks a country singer singing the Beatles should sound like.

What irritates me most about American Idol is that it doesn't develop talent as much as imitators. For every heartfelt song from a true vocal talent, we get dozens of performances by people who want to be someone else.

To be fair, American Idol stacked the deck against the contestants with the Lennon and McCartney week. The songs in the Beatles catalog are timeless classics, and their own recordings are so definitive that it is impossible to do the songs without slavishly copying the Beatles arrangements or risking disaster by radically altering, such as Kristy Lee Cook decided to do.

Perhaps if Kristy Lee Cook toned down her country ham act and just sang, she might seem like more than just a poor imitation of real country music. Hopefully someone will mentor her in future rounds to tone down the shtick and simply sing.