by Kim Remesch

Created on: April 25, 2009

For a show whose ratings rank as high for its "outtakes" (read auditions), American Idol is no stranger to horrible performances. As they say, you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince. If that's true, there should be many more princes in the world, courtesy of American Idol.

For the sake of this discussion, and for brevity's sake, we'll discuss only the horrendous performances that were part of the main season. It would be much too easy to dip into the audition vault.

Also, we have to break the concept of "worst performance" into a few cateogories: worst singing as well as worst stage presence.

SINGING

The worst singing on American Idol often came out of the mouths of some of the best singers. Then again, some of the worst singing came out of the mouths of the worst singers (performers, etc.). All in all, sometimes the singing performances leave the audience shaking its collective head time and time again wondering how the person they're watching made it through to the next level.

In this category there is one name that dominates, AS IT SHOULD. Sanjaya. His real name Sanjaya Malakar, was rarely used as Idol fans came to know him only as Sanjaya. Sort of like Madonna, only without any shred of the talent.

If you put together a top ten of horrible performances (of any ilk), Sanjaya would hold at least 5 of those spots. And here's the thing, he's a likeable guy. His hair was talented. Remember the mopped, faux hawk thing he had going during "Your Really Got Me"? Well, it really got that teenage girl in the audience.

The site Vote for the Worst claimed to be responsible for much of Sanjaya's popularity. The site encourages viewers to skew the voting, in essence voting for the person who least deserves to be there. It's some sort of demented, reverse solidarity thing. Simon Cowell publicly said that if Sanjaya ended up winning Idol, he'd leave the show.

Other bad singing moments came from other likeable characters. Kevin Covais, a/k/a Chicken Little comes to mind. The Season five contestant took what the judges threw at him and kept running.

During the week of Stevie Wonder songs, you might have expected Covais to come up with something from the "Little Stevie Wonder" days. That would have been fitting. Instead, he opted for Part-Time Lover. All other things being equal, he couldn't have made a worse choice.

Chicken Little, a mere 16 at the time of his Idol performance, chose Part-Time Lover, a racy song about having an affair. Besides the lyrics being so very wrong

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