Songoftheday 2/15/24 - I thank my lucky stars to be living here today, 'cause the flag still stands for freedom and they can't take that away...

 "God Bless The U.S.A." - American Idol Finalists

from the album American Idol Season 2: All-Time Classic American Love Songs (2003)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #4 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 2

 

Today's song comes from the then-massively popular TV singing competition American Idol, who in its first season had already spun off what would be a true superstar with Kelly Clarkson. The second season of the series began on the Fox network in the beginning of 2003, whittling down the tens of thousands that came for the auditions to a bit more than two hundred for the show. By February, semi-finals began which would eventually end up with twelve finalists for the voting part of the series. The first season had produced a companion album that made the top ten on the Billboard 200 sales tally at the close of 2002. Now that the producers knew what a popular brand they had, they decided to capitalize on that by releasing a second-season album. What was odd is that the set would have the top eleven contestants, with 12th-place finisher Vanessa Olivarez apparently left in the dust. Each of the remaining would have a cut on the record, subtitled All-Time Classic American Love Songs, but they wouldn't be the songs they performed on the show. Even more, there were two more cuts on the record performed collectively, but only by the top ten - Clay Aiken, Ruben Studdard, Joshua Gracin, Kimberley Locke, Trenyce, Carmen Rasmussen, Ricky Smith, Julia DeMato, and Corey Clark. And to complicate things, Clark was about to be disqualified from the competition for an unrevealed criminal history (as well as his soon-to-be-breaking allegations of an affair with "judge" Paula Abdul). One of the two songs was a remake of the 60's classic "What The World Needs Now", which was a choice considering people were led to believe this was a love song album. The other was even more baffling - a remake of the Reagan-era Lee Greenwood song "God Bless The U.S.A.", which itself had seen a revival that kicked it into the top-40 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. I've gone over that song (and its total hypocrisy) in a previous installment of this series, which you can read by clicking here so I don't have to relive the trauma. 

So at least on a positive note, with "some" of the proceeds of the single were to go to the American Red Cross. (How much is a question.) As for the piece of music itself, it's trying to polish a turd, if you will, and a studio version of this only makes it even more sterile than the overly-gushy less-than-two-minutes performance on the show itself. Nevertheless, the Idol train was in full gear already, and the single sold enough to place itself in the top ten on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 almost exclusively on sales, if only for a week...

The American Idol cover of "God Bless The U.S.A." became the highest-charting version of the song on the Hot 100 in May of 2003. But it definitely was a passing thing - it plummeted out of the top 40 after two weeks and off the whole chart after eight. The All-Time Classic American Love Song record, released in April of that year, went to #2 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, going on to sell over a half million copies.

Ruben Studdard would go on to win the season, and he along with runner up Clay Aiken will be back to the series, along with Josh Gracin, who would have a decent country music career for a while. Finalist Kimberly Locke, who came in third, would score a trio of #1 hits on Billboard's Dance Club Play chart, as well as the multi-format single "Eighth World Wonder", which will be a future "robbed hit". 

This won't be the last time a "finalists" single would reach the top 40, but the next time on the series will be with a totally new set of contestants.

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Here's the abbreviated "live" version on the show, which cut all the female solos in it (on brand for Idol)...

Up tomorrow: Kid Rock's sidekick takes on a soft soul classic and at least brings the original artist along for the ride.