‘American Idol 15’ top 8 rankings: Can Sonika Vaid, Avalon Young take on La’Porsha Renae?
There are several things that we are enjoying about “American Idol” season 15 to date, but one of the biggest ones is how it continues to change and morph itself in ways we don’t see coming. Going into the live rounds, we were feeling rather confident that this was going to be all about the guys; now, the ladies are starting to come battling back as threats to make it to the finale and win.
As always with these contestant rankings, we’re basing these on performance quality, screen time, and past voting history of similar contestants on the show.
8. Tristan McIntosh (last week: 9) – We do think that Tristan is talented, and there are clearly some country fans out there who support her. We just don’t think that the consistency is there in order to make it long-term in this competition.
7. Lee Jean (8) – Lee is at the moment the textbook example of a floater in this competition. He never does a terrible job, but at the same time never does anything that completely wows us. He’s done a good job making it this far, but we do think that the end could be near here.
6. Dalton Rapattoni (4) – Why the drop? We think that it is simply a function of the fact that he hasn’t had a huge performance in a few weeks, and we’re not sure how far his fan base goes outside of the young women who are clearly all voting for him.
5. Avalon Young (7) – We really wish we could rank her higher up following her excellent performance during the save-me-song portion of this past episode. However, the reality is that she was in the bottom three, and there is no guarantee that the trajectory is going to change.
4. MacKenzie Bourg (3) – Our concern for MacKenzie remains such: Is it possible that he can only really shine when he is singing his own songs? “Roses” was one of our favorite moments so far this season, but sooner or later he has to match that with a cover.
3. Sonika Vaid (5) – Sonika had a miss on a performance a couple of weeks ago, but since that time she’s been better. We’re still holding to our feeling that she would probably be the biggest star to come out of this season if she lives up to her potential, and right now she’s building towards it.
2. Trent Harmon (2) – We are still putting Trent fairly high, despite a couple good-but-not-great performances, on the basis of voting history for similar types on this show. There’s always one guy with a guitar who makes it super-far.
1. La’Porsha Renae (1) – Given all of the winner proclamations she’s received so far, it’s going to take some sort of meteoric rise from another singer this season to make us change our #1 ranking. Anything is possible, but we’ll see.
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