American Idol contestant, Chris Sligh, tried to pull a fast one on America last night. About thirty seconds into his performace of what was intended to be Endless Love (made famous as a duet by Diana Ross and Lionel Richie), I looked at my wife and said, “This is a Coldplay song with the words from Endless Love and a weird melody layed on top of it.” Now it should be noted that in his pre-performance video, Chris went out of his way to let everyone know that HE had written “some new chords” for the song… we needed to know that this was HIS arrangement. The problem with doing that is that when a person plagiarizes a song… they probably should not do it on national television.It happens an awful lot… it really does… even Shaun Groves’ biggest hit during his Christian career is nearly identical to a song by Silverchair, but how many people that would ever listen to Shaun Groves would know that? Here’s the thing though… sometimes it happens by accident (I doubt that Shaun Groves was purposely copying Silverchair… perhaps the subconscious came into play), but I REALLY question Chris Sligh. So, I was extremely glad to hear when Randy “Dawg” Jackson said that the arrangement was basically Coldplay’s Speed of Sound. I am glad that there is a judge there that is knowledgeable enough about current music to know when someone has “borrowed” a little too much. I also was not impressed in the least with Sligh’s arrangement and I thought that Simon was much kinder than I would have been.

Ok… and um… I think that Sanjaya’s hair last night looked like the Cowardly Lion’s… I just can’t speak to whether or not he was copying the Lion’s “do” or not.