Maddie Poppe sings Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide"...

... on the "American Idol" finale last night. The results are revealed tonight, in a show that will include, among other things, Maddie Poppe singing her audition song, "Rainbow Connection," with Kermit the Frog. I don't know what you like to watch on TV but Maddie Poppe singing "Rainbow Connection" with Kermit the Frog sounds like the best thing that's been on TV in years.

Here's the audition version of "Rainbow Connection" (one of my all-time favorite songs):



ADDED: "If not for american idol i may have never heard her artistry.she is so cute.when i hear her sing it makes me want to ride a merry go round at the county fair" — a comment on this video from last year, before the TV-show competition began:

"American Idol" top 3 revealed.

2 contestants were cut last night. I only liked 2 of the remaining 5 and predicted both would be cut. But one survived:



She also sang what I long ago identified as my all-time favorite song:



She also auditioned with one of my favorite songs:



You have to endure so much loud, show-offy belting to put up with the show. It's amazing that someone with restraint, taste, and quiet charm made it to the end.

"American Idol is shedding contestants like an Agatha Christie whodunit. There goes Effie Passero through a trap door."

"A suit of armor fell on Ron Bultongez. Amelia Hammer Harris took a hard fall off the Orient Express. And now we’re at the top 14 with the shivering, terrified survivors who just want Ryan Seacrest to lower his monocle and solve this whole thing for everyone. But we’ve got five episodes left to deduce which contestant deserves the crown, and I have a sneaking suspicion it could be anybody. Let’s roll through these 14 contenders, comment on the eliminations, and wonder if Lionel Richie knows his sparkly blazer would look smashing on Vicki Lawrence."

Louis Virtel is doing a fabulous job of recapping "American Idol" at Vulture, with snappy sentences and full, commercial-free, clips of every performance. That link goes to the recap of last night's results show, where my favorite, Maddie Poppe, sang "Walk Like an Egyptian":



And here's the link to the Sunday episode recap, with each performance ranked by Virtel, including #1, Maddie Poppe, doing "Homeward Bound":



ADDED: Here's what Virtel wrote about that "Walk Like an Egyptian" performance:

I’m all for Maddie Poppe’s calmed-down, twee’d-up renditions of songs... “Homeward Bound”? Sure. “Brand New Key”? Absolutely. But after Ryan Seacrest announced she was safely in the top ten, Maddie gave her first baffling performance of the season: an undanceable take on “Walk Like an Egyptian.” It’s as if she wanted us to pay attention to the Bangles’ lyrics, which are … well, they’re stupid. Let’s talk a look at “Foreign types with the hookah pipes say / Ay oh whey oh, ay oh whey oh / Walk like an Egyptian.” That’s offensive, senseless, and then back to offensive. And she didn’t even throw us the saucy Susanna Hoffs side-eye to soften the embarrassment! I’m worried now. Soon, Maddie with perform “Kokomo” as a piano ballad or add marimba to “Tears in Heaven”! Here’s hoping she’s back on track with an angora-warm version of “You’ve Got a Friend” or something next week.

Ha ha. Ask Meade if I didn't say out loud, "The lyrics to this song are actually pretty offensive."

AND: Here's the old Bangles video featuring the ancient mystery of Susanna Hoffs's inability to position her irises in the center of her eyeballs. As for the idea of "the Bangles' lyrics," I've got to object. They didn't write the song. It was written by music producer Liam Sternberg, who, Wikipedia tells us, "wrote the song after seeing people on a ferry walking awkwardly to keep their balance." The only connection to Egypt is that Sternberg thought the people looked like the figures in the ancient Egyptian paintings.

Is the song offensive? It's one of the songs Clear Channel banned after the September 11, 2001 attacks. [CORRECTION: That statement is wrong, as explained here.] It's got that casual, silly attitude toward ethnicity found in many old songs — "Ahab the Arab" ("There he saw Fatima layin' on a zebra skin rug with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes and a bone in her nose ho, ho"), "The Sheik of Araby" ("At night when you're asleep/Into your tent I'll creep"), "Midnight at the Oasis" ("You won't need no camel/When I take you for a ride"). I'm just naming ones about Arabs that spring immediately to mind. There's also Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs...



You wouldn't do that today. Domingo "Sam" Samudio was Mexican American, and he just enjoyed Yul Brenner as Pharaoh in "The Ten Commandments." As for Yul Brenner, he was a combination of Swiss-German, Russian, and Buryat, but it was accepted back then that he could play an ancient Egyptian. And he also got to play the King of Siam.

I'd branch out to other ethnicities, but I'll just say "Turning Japanese," and I'll leave it to you to come up with some other silly songs that would steam people up if they came out today (but maybe we can still love because they are old).

"Turning Japanese" was just a way of saying I feel like a foreigner in my own culture. The lyrics had nothing to do with Japanese people:

No sex, no drugs, no wine, no women
No fun, no sin, no you, no wonder it's dark
Everyone around me is a total stranger
Everyone avoids me like a cyclone ranger

But the video (and that musical riff)... just comically leaned into Japanese stereotypes (back in 1980, when not letting anything offend you was kind of the culture):

I don't know if any of you are watching "American Idol" these days, but...

... I bet a lot of you will, like me, enjoy Maddie Poppe singing the old Melanie song, "Brand New Key":



That song was very popular in 1971. What was it about? Was it sexual innuendo or just simple girlish enthusiasm about roller skating? Roller skates used to be metal contraptions that you tightened onto your shoes with a metal key. You don't have to read Wikipedia to see the potential for sexual metaphor — the woman is excited about her "brand new pair of roller skates" and some guy's "brand new key" and thinks they should get together and "try them on" — even though she's "okay alone," he's "got something [she] needs." Melanie denies any sexual depths:

"I was fasting with a 27-day fast on water. I broke the fast and went back to my life living in New Jersey and we were going to a flea market around six in the morning. On the way back… and I had just broken the fast, from the flea market, we passed a McDonald's and the aroma hit me, and I had been a vegetarian before the fast. So we pulled into the McDonald's and I got the whole works... the burger, the shake, and the fries… and no sooner after I finished that last bite of my burger… that song was in my head. The aroma brought back memories of roller skating and learning to ride a bike and the vision of my dad holding the back fender of the tire. And me saying to my dad... 'You’re holding, you’re holding, you’re holding, right?' Then I’d look back and he wasn’t holding and I’d fall. So that whole thing came back to me and came out in this song."

Her explanation makes it even more childlike (and therefore not sexual). Melanie says:

I thought it was cute; a kind of old thirties tune. I guess a key and a lock have always been Freudian symbols, and pretty obvious ones at that. There was no deep serious expression behind the song, but people read things into it. They made up incredible stories as to what the lyrics said and what the song meant. In some places, it was even banned from the radio. My idea about songs is that once you write them, you have very little say in their life afterward. It's a lot like having a baby. You conceive a song, deliver it, and then give it as good a start as you can. After that, it's on its own. People will take it any way they want to take it.

Some people mainly know this song from the movie "Boogie Nights" (which had a character, Rollergirl), and it was sung on "The Voice" in 2016 (but I never watch that show, so it was new to me as a present-day singing competition song).