Singapore Idol 2: The Battle of the Bengs Begins

I called it before Florence Lian did. To be fair, I think that the forums might have called it before I did; but I did not check until days after I thought of it, so I will still lay claim to the TM, thank you very much.

Immediately after the SI2 "theatre auditions" show on Sunday, I said to myself, "Jonathan Leong is like Sylvester Sim with a system upgrade. Taller, nicer looking, smarter-seeming, better-sounding."

Then Florence says it on national TV, although she left out the bit about Jonathan being taller, nicer-looking and smarter-seeming. She did not actually said he was better-sounding, but I think that was what she meant.

And so, with one innocuous judge's remark, the battle lines have been drawn. This will turn out to be the Clay-Ruben match-up of Singapore Idol. This will be bigger and tighter-fought than Taufik-Sly; anyway, that turned out to be a landslide for Taufik (hello, double the votes AND double the album sales) so it was never that much of a battle in the first place.

This one will be a BIGGIE. Never mind that the two duking it out are not even in competition with each other for the SI title. The fan-girls are armed with their poster-making supplies and scream-ready vocal chords. Jon vs Sly! It's ON! Who has the "magic"? Who has the craziest fans? Will Jon get Ken to bust out the "X factor" comment earlier than he did with Sly last year? Will Jon have a crazier fan than the unemployed Sly fan-girl who proudly showed off her astronomical phone bills to the entire nation? Will Sly have to fashion a new trademark "scrunch and point" gesture to revitalise his fan-base?

I am not on the Jonathon band-wagon, but he has Sly beaten to smithereens in my books. He's not a fantastic singer by any means but his voice has a very pleasing bass tone which I think will record quite well and is better suited to rock pretensions than Sly's voice. The boy should get himself some proper vocal training, though. He may actually be thicker than the bricks at the American Embassy (and I would not assume that he isn't just because he is a NUS poli. sci. undergraduate), but the important thing is that he looks smart. In case anyone hasn't noticed, this is a marked departure from Sly's "blur sotong" countenance. And just from the way he told his fans last night, "Your votes will not be wasted", he sounded like Martin Tyler next to Sly's Andy Gray. I even think the whole "laid-back attitude" thing he has going is probably genuine.

Of course, early season favourites don't usually go on the win the whole she-bang. I think the judge's open championing of his chances might harm him in the longer run. Last season, the judges were all over Jeassea and Beverly and look where that got them. But then again, Ken's love affair with Sly also started rather early during the Wild Card show, and Sly was a judges' favourite in the initial rounds before he lost his sense of pitch and they lost patience. He still managed to end up as runner-up and gave his fans plenty of fodder to liken him to Clay Aiken and imagine him blazing a path of Idol-whooping glory in his album sales (as a Clay fan, this was just unspeakably galling to me). Who knows, Jonathan might get that far, or even further. Judging by the high-pitched screaming last night, I would not bet against it.

Oh, there were other contestants in the first group of 7 boys. Jeez, talk about making life easy for the voters. Was there any doubt at all that the two most impressive performers were Jonathan and Paul? Not that they blew the joint away or anything, but the rest were just so mediocre. I think I saw better performances in my secondary school year-end concerts. I hope the other groups are more competitive than this, or we could have contestants in the top 12 that are actually worse than good old Jerry from S1. Whoa, scary thought!