Platinum Weird - "Taking Chances"

That's DioGuardi on lead vocals.

Kelly Clarkson - "Walk Away"

This video perfectly captures my reaction to this track.

Hilary Duff - With Love

Ashlee Simpson - La La

Time has not been kind to this track. (Christ, her voice.)

Katharine McPhee - "Love Story"

A song that deserved better. At least McPhee's Idol appearance helped kickstart her acting career, right?

Lindsay Lohan - "Confessions Of A Broken Heart"

I wonder if this means this year will have "Inappropriate Overshare Week."

Celine Dion - "Taking Chances"

Does this mean we're going to have a Celine Dion mentor week? Dare to dream.

GRAMMY-NOMINATED SONGWRITER KARA DIOGUARDI JOINS PAULA ABDUL, SIMON COWELL AND RANDY JACKSON AS JUDGE ON "AMERICAN IDOL" [Press release via The Futon Critic]

I don't want to be the sort of person who puts down a wonderful organization like the March of Dimes. Hey, I'm for healthy babies too! I've fathered two of them, and I was certainly thankful for their health. However, look at this lineup for Stork Tunes, "a CD celebrating motherhood with calming, inspirational musical compositions focused on mothers and babies." Really, they couldn't do any better than this?

Celine Dion, "A Mother's Prayer"

Dixie Chicks, "Godspeed (Sweet Dreams)"
Jessica Andrews, "I Wish for You"
The Boys Choir of Harlem, "Children of the World"
Katrina Carlson, "Mother"
Norah Jones, "Sunrise"

Dean Backholm, "Mother & Child"
Kenny Loggins, "Rainbow Connection"
Billy Joel, "Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)"

Sinead O'Connor, "All Babies"
Wynonna Judd, "Always Will"
Raffi, "May There Always be Sunshine"

I get the idea of wanting to relax while giving birth, but do we really want to give babies this sort of first impression? I'm trying my best to keep my kids from having to deal with the knowledge that Celine Dion is out there—somewhere—for as long as possible. March of Dimes, I'll send you the $5 that's donated from each purchase of this disc in lieu of buying it, because I'd rather stick to this realistic and moving take on the bond between mother and child, which my children heard while entering this world.

Stork Tunes [March of Dimes]

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Obama '08 [Official Site; HT DHMBIB]
"You And I" No More? [Political Radar via the Daily Swarm]

^* Possibly wishful thinking on the part of your reporter.

As it turned out, the music section was completely devoid of copies of As I Am, while shoppers looking for Taking Chances could have their pick of the 10 copies remaining on the endcap. And while I figured that part of this was the result of the mall in question trying to "skew to the youth" (dear malls of America: this is a bad idea that you should never try to do, seriously), part of me also wondered if it was because people who may have seen Celine on Oprah and been interested in buying the CD didn't really know where to go to buy it; sure, big-boxes have music departments, but I'd guess that the association between seeing a new album advertised on TV and going to Target or wherever—except in cases like the Eagles', where the store and the album's availability are intertwined—isn't really automatic for people just yet. (And it likely never will be, given that big-boxes are going to start hiding their music departments somewhere inside the great big tents in the camping-equipment areas soon.) Obviously one Target in one weird-ass mall in one suburb is an isolated case, and perhaps the relative providence of Celine albums is just a result of behavior by the more casual, Oprah-watching listener: they'd just wait until they had to go on some sort of errand and pick it up then, instead of rushing out right on release day like the younger, more-devoted fan would. But given that we've devoted so much e-ink to the woes of the record industry, and the slowly-dawning-on-the-people-who-sold-out-to-big-boxes fact that people can't buy albums if there's nowhere for them to actually do just that—or even feel like they can do so!—I did raise my eyebrow at this stock discrepancy, what with Taking Chances allegedly being such a monster album that it scared Britney Spears away from its release date.

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Alicia Keys Tries To Lock Out Amy Winehouse, Spice Girls, Killers, Hives And More, In New Releases [MTV]

On the album's dramatic cover art, Dion wears her hair teased with extensions into a near-lioness mane, her facial expression curiously cryptic. The idea was all hers.

"Maybe there's a look that people expect, but this is show business. Come on, it's still the same me, but I decided that I don't have to paint on a smile to show what's inside," Dion says. "Don't look at my lips and my hair; look into my eyes and feel me, baby. I am smiling there and giving more than ever before. Come with me. Listen and imagine me however you want."

Which, of course, makes one wonder if she's seen this Halloween costume idea:

Dion takes "Chances" with harder sound as "Day" ends [Reuters]
Earlier: The Worst Album Cover Of The Year Race Blows Its Budget On Hair Extensions And Talc

The always critical and erudite Mr. Wilson actually approached Let's Talk About Love as a non-fan grappling with questions of "good" and "bad" taste—in fact, the book has since picked up the subtitle "A Journey To The End Of Taste"—and (the double irony, especially for the indie-centric readers of a site like Stereogum) the limits of populism. Having almost literally just finished the book, I'm still digesting, but it's almost certainly the only installment in the series to discuss French-Canadian race relations, rockism, and Milan Kundera's thoughts on kitsch. (The book isn't out until Dec. 15, but you can read the first two chapters now by e-mailing letstalkaboutcelineATyahooDOTcom.) Continuum Books and Mr. Wilson have also kindly allowed us to post an excerpt from the book; here, his complicated relationship with Dion takes root as he watches her on stage with his hero, Elliott Smith, at the 1998 Academy Awards and his bemusement turns to anger:

[Elliot] Smith also dealt frankly, I felt, with one of the ruling paradoxes for partisans of "alternative" culture: It might look like you were asserting superiority over the multitudes, but as a former bullied kid, I always figured it started from rejection. If respect or simple fairness were denied you, you'd build a great life (the best revenge) from what you could scrounge outside their orbit, freed from the thirst for majority approbation. This dynamic is frequently rehearsed in Smith's songs: In "2:45 a.m.," a night prowl that begins by "looking for the man who attacked me / while everybody was laughing at me" ends with "walking out on Center Circle / Been pushed away and I'll never come back." If laments and disavowals were your lot, you would shine those turds until they gleamed. And you'd spread the word to the rest of the alienated, walking wounded—which, in a late-capitalist consumer society, I thought, ought to include everyone but the rich—that they too could find sustenance and sympathy in a voluntary exile.

So how had Smith ended up in center circle at the Shrine Auditorium, smack up against the "Céline Dion clichés," a juxtaposition that seemed as improbable as Gummo winning Best Picture? An accident, really. Years before, he'd met independent filmmaker Gus Van Sant hanging out in the Portland bars where Smith's first band, Heatmiser, played. That friendship led to writing songs for Van Sant's first "major motion picture," Good Will Hunting, and so to Oscar night, featuring (as Rolling Stone put it) "one of the strangest billings since Jimi Hendrix opened for the Monkees," with Smith alongside the pap trio of Trisha Yearwood, Michael Bolton and Céline Dion.

He tried to refuse the invitation, "but then they said that if I didn't play it, they would get someone else to play the song," he told Under the Radar magazine. "They'd get someone like Richard Marx to do it. I think when they said that, they had done their homework on me a little bit. Or maybe Richard Marx is a universal scare tactic."

(Richard Marx, for those who've justifiably forgotten, was the balladeer who in 1989 sang, "Wherever you go, whatever you do, I will be right here waiting for you"—threatening enough? But if Dion wasn't booked, her name might have worked too.)

On Oscar night, Madonna introduced the performers. Smith ended up following Trisha Yearwood's rendition of Con Air's "How Do I Live?" (written by Dianne Warren who also penned "Because You Loved Me" and "Love Can Move Mountains" for Dion). He shuffled onstage in a bright white suit loaned by Prada—all he wore of his own was his underwear—and sang "Miss Misery," Good Will Hunting's closing love song to depression. The Oscar producers had refused to let Smith sit on a stool, leaving him stranded clutching his guitar on the wide bare stage. The song seemed as small and gorgeous as a sixteenth-century Persian miniature.

And what came next? Céline Dion swooshing out in clouds of fake fog, dressed in an hourglass black gown, on a set where a white-tailed orchestra was arrayed to look like they were on the deck of the Titanic itself. She'd played the Oscars several times, and brought on her full range of gesticulations and grimaces, at one point pounding her chest so robustly it nearly broke the chain on her multimillion-dollar replica of the movie's "Heart of the Ocean" diamond necklace. Then Dion, Smith and Yearwood joined hands and bowed in what Rolling Stone called a "bizarre Oscar sandwich."

"It got personal," Smith said later, "with people saying how fragile I looked on stage in a white suit. There was just all of this focus, and people were saying all this stuff simply because I didn't come out and command the stage like Céline Dion does."

And when Madonna opened the envelope to reveal that the Oscar went to "My Heart Would Go On," she snorted and said, "What a shocker."

I liked Madonna, who danced on the art/commerce borderline as nimbly as anyone. But right then, I squeezed my fists wishing she'd preserved a more dignified neutrality ("dignified neutrality" being the phrase that springs right to mind when you say "Madonna"). In retrospect, I realize she was making fun of the predictability, not of Elliott Smith; my umbrage only showed how overinvested I was. I wasn't surprised the Oscars had behaved like the Oscars, that the impossibly good-looking people had spotted each other across the room and as usual run sighing into one another's arms. But the carnivalesque reversal that wedged Elliott in there with Céline and Trisha was one of those rips in the cultural-space continuum that make you feel anything may happen. I was enough of a populist even then to dream that love might move mountains and heal the great divide.

But when Madonna seemed to chuckle at Elliott Smith, the grudge was back on. And not with Madonna. With Céline Dion.

33 1/3 [Official site]
Zoilus [Carl Wilson's blog]

ONE-LISTEN VERDICT: Yes, it's the Heart song, and Dion's vocal performance is uncharacteristically restrained, with her first fist-to-the-chest moment not coming until right before the second chorus. This track—which will apparently be on Dion's unofficial Halloween album, Taking Chances—was produced by ex-Evanescence guitarist Ben Moody, who adds music-box piano, big, dramatic strings, and a slightly militaristic drumbeat to the proceedings, thus giving it a slightly more ominous feel than the versions of the song that you hear from the "rock" chicks on American Idol. (Celine will get you alone, you better believe it.)
WHERE TO FIND IT: The always entertaining—and sometimes useful—whatz-new. If you dare.

maura@idolator: celine dion, real doll.
jessdolator: hottt.
maura@idolator: ...

Taking Chances [Amazon]

We're already anticipating the attack ads that will surely result from Hillary Clinton using Celine Dion's "You And I"—which you may also know as an Air Canada ad campaign's sloppy second—as her theme song for her '08 run. (Seriously, this result has to be some sort of glitch from the write-in portion of her Web site's ballot, right?)

Our Campaign Song [HillaryClinton.com]
Air Canada - "You and I" Commercial [YouTube]
Earlier: Hillary Clinton's Supporters Are Serious About Their Smash Mouth Fandom

"American Idol" will raise the dead on Wednesday and feature a performance with Celine Dion and ...

Elvis Presley?!

While "A.I." teased their "Idol Gives Back" charity benefit by revealing that "two of the biggest stars in musical history come together," sources at last week's taping tell TMZ that Celine sang Elvis Presley's hit, "If I Can Dream" — with an Elvis impersonator! Ugh! But we're told the impersonator was just used as a stand-in, and what you will actually see when the show airs is Celine singing with a virtual Elvis — in the vein of Natalie Cole and Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable." Unbelievable!

Unbelievable, indeed. After all, shouldn't it at least have a 3-D component to really be historic?

Celine & Elvis' "Idol" Duet from the Grave [TMZ]

Oh, Stereogum. How much fun it must be to live your lives as if you were still riding in the middle-section of the eighth-grade school-bus, talking down to the other kids because they're still digging Green Jellö while you've moved on to Superchunk. You're right: It is kind of interesting that the vaunted 33 1/3 series is doing a book on Celine Dion! And it's even more interesting that you guys aren't the slightest bit open-minded toward an opinion that strays from your hard-line "cool vs. uncool" canonical beliefs. Whatever the case, we await the inevitable "It's Okay To Like...Celine Dion" feature in a year, right after you guys make the ever-timely discovery that Hall & Oates weren't that bad.

Sources tell me that Dion has been booked to perform at this year's Academy Awards. The Canadian crooner will sing during a tribute to legendary composer Ennio Morricone, who will be receiving an honorary Oscar at the Feb. 25 ceremony.

I'm told lyrics have been written for Morricone's score for Once Upon a Time in America just for Dion. "The lyrics have never been heard before," one source says.

We realize Dion hasn't performed at the Oscars in a few years, and that the bigwigs at the Academy probably feel that they need to fill their Celine-quota, but really—couldn't she have filled in for James Taylor instead?

Celine Nabs Another Date with Oscar [E!]
[Photo: Getty Images]

Give us an artist/group from another genre that you'd like to collabo. Someone outside of the box that people wouldn't expect.

Celine Dion. She has an amazing voice. I really like the sound and beautiful quality of her voice. She's an extremely talented singer.

We're hoping Celine somehow gets wind of this and invites Artest to drop by for a Vegas set—in our dream world, the Francophone singer would persuade him to take some French lessons and throw down a cover of "Bonnie and Clyde."

Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot - Bonnie And Clyde [MP3, link expired]
15 Minutes With Ron Artest [The Smoking Section]