What needs to happen next on “American Idol” Season 12: Someone needs to discover that Lazaro Arbos, currently a Top 7 finalist, is faking his stutter.
Gee, guess who Lazaro’s idol is? Ugh.
Please, I mean no disrespect to people with legitimate stammers. I love and have great empathy for you. Some of my best friends are stutterers. I have been known to be at a loss for words.
I’m just so bored with this kid that I hope someone finds some real dirt on him — maybe sneakily recorded uploaded iPhone footage showing no trace of a stammer.
He’s cute, reminds people a smidge of Ricky Martin, or “Ricky Ricardo,” as Nicki Minaj calls him (racist!). But I’m just sick of his vibe. There’s a point where any “gripping back story” starts feeling freakish. I celebrate that he has overcome obstacles in his life and made it this far, shedding light on what most of us take for granted: glibness. But he has had more than his 15 minutes. Time to pull the plug.
I can speak, sorta, as I am also Hispanic. Seguro, Lazaro’s story was moving at first. His mom’s tears; that part always gets me. But … GET THIS BOY SOME HELP.
I’m simply no longer “in awe” that he can sing fluidly in spite of his challenges speaking. So over that. Everyone knows the benefits of singing, and how people with heavily accented English or speech impediments can lose any trace of their accents or issues when singing. My problem with this contestant is he has lost all integrity, ever since the dust-up with mentor Jimmy Iovine.
Lazaro lied. He lied during Beatles week when he butchered “In My Life,” saying he had switched his song “last night,” and then cried about it. Jimmy later confirmed that Lazaro had had the same amount of time to learn his song as everyone else, and that he had been working on “In My Life” five days earlier. And if there’s one Lennon-McCartney song any self-respecting Latino knows it’s “In My Life,” because it sounds like every other Spanish ballad ever written.
The kid is making excuses, and he never apologized to Jimmy for lying.
This past week, he ruined the Motown trio with Devin Velez and Burnell Taylor by forgetting his part again. And these weren’t difficult words: “Sugar Pie Honey Bunch.” C’mon! Or, as Entertainment Weekly put it: ” ‘Sugar Pie Honey Bunch’ … you know that I don’t know you…” — Lazaro
During the results show on March 28, it bugged me the way he was fixing his outfit as Aretha Franklin’s audio message to Kree Harrison played. He always seems to be checking himself on the monitor. Even in his Telemundo interview, he constantly adjusted himself — is this part of an act to display ongoing stress? They talk about him as if he’s not even there, with his audition playing on a painful loop in the background. And he barely attempts to speak in his native language, which I find odd. Shouldn’t Spanish prove less stressful?
SPOILER ALERT: His voice is just not that good. Close your eyes and listen. Too much vibrato and no sense of pitch. Devin was far superior in terms of representing Latino singers — he gave us bilingual anthems, at least. And young Devin had a modern, suavecito attitude, not some old-school smarmy style. Oh, how it irked me when Devin was “singing for his life” Thursday, trying to earn the judges’ once-a-season save, and Lazaro first adjusted his suspenders, then looked at his watch and THEN started singing along on the Spanish part. The nerve! He just doesn’t seem that likeable. It’s not his stutter that keeps him from having friends — I’m thinking it’s his personality, and his stutter only prevents people from getting to know him well enough to realize that.
Truth is, if you eliminate the sympathy vote, Lazaro’s got nothing. His tears on March 20, in hindsight, seemed a ploy to get more votes — or at the very least showed he doesn’t have what it takes for this kind of work.
Sin verguenza. Stop voting for him, mi gente. Put him out of our misery and let him go get the therapy he needs before attempting to launch any sort of international career in singing — or acting, as the case may be.
— Not a fan
Related articles
- What’s it’s really like to audition for “American Idol”: Season 4 (mommytongue.com)
- ‘American Idol’ recap: Keep Me Hanging On – Entertainment Weekly (tvrecaps.ew.com)
- ‘American Idol’: Lazaro Arbos knows enough words for just one song on Motown Week (popwatch.ew.com)
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