That's dedication right there.

​As the baseball season nears, the announcements of the season's schedule of promotions steadily increases, and over the weekend the Mets announced that for their 50th anniversary they'd be throwing a three-show postgame concert series in 2012. The lineup: the hesher-pop outfit REO Speedwagon (June 15), powerpop titans Cheap Trick (July 20), and the religious post-grunge outfit MercyMe (August 10). The bands are from Champaign, Illinois; Rockford, Illinois; and Greenville, Texas, respectively. That's right—there are no New York bands on the bill, which seems quite silly given that this city is crawling with musically inclined fans of the team and even has a DIY venue named after the Mets' former home. To that end, here are six New York-based acts who might not mind having the 2012 version of the Metropolitans as their opening act. Perhaps those of us who feel passionate enough about this issue can organize a trip to this season's triumphant return of Banner Day (May 27!) in order to lobby for one or all or these choices?

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​Sound of the City's year-end roundtable, with contributions from Tom Ewing, Eric Harvey, Maura Johnston, Nick Murray, and Katherine St. Asaph, continues. Follow along here.

Hi again everyone,

Sure, there was lots of great music put out by women this year—my Pazz and Jop top tens will be stuffed with them. But does that make 2011 a Year of the Woman by any stretch? I'd argue no, and I suspect the guy who I overheard on the subway the other day, who was complaining that while he liked Lady Gaga going to a concert of hers would make him feel like less of a man, would agree with me; those people horrified by "Super Bass"'s showing on the Pitchfork singles list might as well. If anything what bothered me about the Year of the Bro (yes, I'm calling it this now) was the way that gender roles became more circumscribed, the way that people who called bullshit on misogyny and homophobia (OK, I'm mostly talking about Tyler here) were mocked in ways that Nick rightly pointed out were absolutely conservative, and the end result was little more than a lot of empty laughter and "objective" music-blog reports that implied an overtightened sphincter on one side.

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​Scotty McCreery—winner of the 10th edition of American Idol, and owner of the new No. 1 title on Billboard's album chart, Clear as Day—sets a handful of chart records this week that certainly sound impressive.

As Billboard reports, McCreery is the first country act to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with a debut studio album. At 18 years old, McCreery is also the youngest man to open at the top of the chart with a debut release; he beat former B2K singer Omarion, who, at age 20, made his solo debut atop the chart in 2005.

Of course, neither of these records would have been possible without the imprimatur of Idol, however talented McCreery might be. It's not like he's burning up the airwaves or iTunes—his highest-charting single to date, "I Love You This Big," hasn't gone any higher on the Billboard Hot 100 than No. 11, or No. 15 on Hot Country Songs. McCreery's No. 1 debut is all about the magical promotional juggernaut that is network television, particularly its top-rated show.

But even in the Idol context, McCreery's out-of-the-box chart performance looks mighty. Clear as Day is the first debut album by an Idol finalist to top the Billboard 200 since 2005, when that year's fourth-place finalist, Chris Daughtry, rose to the top of the chart with Daughtry.

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American Idols Live
Nassau Coliseum
Wednesday, August 24

Better than: A two-hour elimination episode.

To say that the 10th season of American Idol—the first without Simon Cowell, the fifth after the victory of gray-haired boogie man Taylor Hicks "broke" the show's ability to mint stars—was plagued by problems is to be somewhat charitable. Sure, it's still the most popular show in the country, despite surges by the likes of Dancing With The Stars; yes, it probably assisted Jennifer Lopez's return to the pop charts after she'd seemed all but exiled from them. But this season was plagued by a lackluster contestant pool and an outcome that seemed all but predetermined from sometime in mid-March. Yet despite the victor's assured dominance on the phone lines, the Idol powers that be were so unsure of the public's wisdom that they decided to throw the bulk of their promotional energies not behind country boy Scotty McCreery, the Josh Turner-imitating, sideleaning kid from Garner, N.C. who won the whole thing last May, but behind Pia Toscano, the ninth-place finisher from Howard Beach who amalgamates the most boring parts of Québecois belter Celine Dion and Pussycat Doll leader Nicole Scherzinger into a package that stands stock-still while competently belting out even the most meaningful phrases.

It's too bad, really, because last night's show at Nassau Coliseum proved that the most viable pop star to come out of this year's crop was actually the guy who finished... seventh?

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Idol runner-up Lauren Alaina at Central Park this morning.

​Yesterday my wonderful colleague Jen Doll penned a list of 11 things to do in NYC before the summer ends, and I'd like to add one item to her list: Catch one of the outdoor concerts put on by the national morning shows. This morning I went to Good Morning America's showcase of the top 11 American Idol contestants from this year, and it was pretty fun and definitely worth waking up before dawn for, even if the warm-up guy ill-advisedly made a Simon Cowell joke at one point. (Psst, dude! You may want to brush up on your Steven Tylerisms for next year!)

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​
When I heard that Jennifer Lopez was leveraging her new position as an American Idol judge to launch her new single, premiering the video for "On The Floor" on one episode and performing the song on another, I rolled my eyes at what I thought was her hubris. It'd been less than two years since Lopez's long-flagging music career had seemed to finally come to a screeching halt; her single "Louboutins" flopped, and Sony opted to drop Lopez rather than release her seventh album. Using Idol as a platform to relaunch herself into pop stardom seemed doomed and desperate.

Or so I thought.

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Michael Becker/FOX

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Few low-level American Idol eliminations have been met with the hue and cry that accompanied the April booting of Pia Toscano, a comely, big-voiced belter who hails from Howard Beach and who was given this year's ninth-place trophy. The notion that Idol is a "singing competition" really stuck in the minds of Tom Hanks and Snooki, although whether those outraged fans actually picked up the phone and voted for Toscano after her manic, winded version of "River Deep, Mountain High" way back when was never verified by the many so-called journalists who joined in with the celebrities' complaining.

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Michael Becker/FOX

​A deeply frustrating season of American Idol is over now, having discovered exactly zero future stars, and last night we got the massive glitzathon finale, an annual event that reliably has little or nothing to do with the rest of the season. Scotty McCreery barely even looked surprised to win the thing, and he only wisely half-bothered to sing "I Love You This Big," his dog-ass first single. Still, this turned out to be a shockingly fun results show, especially given how boring the last few weeks have been. Scotty could have a career, or he could not; it doesn't even really matter. What matters is the show managed to pull its shit together for its final night of the season.

At the outset, we got a montage of the judges saying tortuously nice things about Scotty and Lauren Alaina, something they've been dutifully doing all season. When that was over, Ryan Seacrest told us that the season racked up damn near a billion votes, so someone at AT&T is swimming through a giant bank of texting fees, just like Scrooge McDuck. Seacrest wore a classic, well-tailored black tuxedo; Randy Jackson wore an ass-ugly clown tuxedo; Steven Tyler wore a bunch of chains around his neck and just looked real extra Geico Caveman. This was a big night!

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Michael Becker/FOX

​Oh boy, here we go. I can't possibly overemphasize how not excited I was to watch this Idol finale: Two perfectly decent singers who stick entirely within their genre--the exact same genre, even--and who both ran out of interesting tricks and wrinkles weeks ago. TMZ had a story yesterday evening that Lauren Alaina's voice was dead and that Idol producers were frantically scrambling to find Haley Reinhart, giving me about five seconds of hope that something unpredictable might happen, but no. At the very outset of the show, Ryan Seacrest introduced a dumpy and smug-looking doctor who said that Lauren had blown out a vocal chord but that she should be OK. I don't remember the last time I wished that hard for a child's ill health.

Just before we met that doctor, the camera found David Archuleta in the crowd, and I wonder if that kid wishes he could try out for Idol again. He does know something about endless, foregone-conclusion, death-march finales.

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​So we lost Haley Reinhart this week. Fuck you, America. That's all I really have to say about that. I don't know why twangy teenagers are bulldozing everyone else this year, but it's going to make for a truly boring one-note final show. Has American Idol ever had a less interesting final two than Scotty McCreery and Lauren Alaina? Even the Taylor Hicks season had Katharine McPhee, who was pretty good. Scotty's obviously going to win this thing; that's been pretty clear from about week four. But I could've really used a couple more Haley performances in my life. Haley looked pissed. I sympathize. Unfortunately, she departed with "Bennie and the Jets," probably my least favorite of her performances all season. She also neglected to scream her final note directly in Casey Abrams' face and reciprocate his gesture from a few weeks back.

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