"You are my wife!" exclaims Nicki Minaj in praise of a 19-year-old singer.

On "American Idol" last night. Nicki Minaj is a female. Whether we're talking same-sex marriage or not, however, proclaiming one of the contestants to be your partner in marriage is edgy for that family show.

Minaj is always coming up with new ways to say "I love you." (For example, last night, she also said "You are a little marshmallow that I want to eat.")

I appreciate the effort not to be boring, and it must be a great effort, when you listening to hundreds of song performances and then must say something. Imagine trying to think up something new to say that advances your image as a sexy, edgy pop star but isn't too dirty for a prime-time network show aimed at kids and the parents who watch TV with their kids. You can't say that you want to have sex with the contestant. You have to take it down a step.

ADDED: I just remembered that Minaj also said to one young female singer: "I love your boobs." To be fair, the singer was wearing a dress with a tight bodice that had high-contrast triangles marking the nipple location.

Steven Tyler appears in drag on "American Idol" and quotes Bob Dylan's "Talkin' World War III Blues."

He came out as if he were the last contestant and maybe it took half a second to recognize the big rock star (who was on the judge's panel last season). The news reports of the little stunt emphasize the drag and the (miniscule) surprise, but even where the lyric is quoted, the attribution to Bob Dylan is missing. Here's the NY Daily News:

"What the, what?" Randy Jackson said when he got a first glimpse of his former co-star on stage.

"My name is Pepper. I'm going to sing a song called 'Tell Your Ma, Tell Your Pa, Our Love Going to Grow, Wah Wah,'" he joked to judging panel. "But before I do I'm going to judge you all (bleeps) first."

I'm not finding any news reports that place the lyric — which I have engraved on my brain — in the old Bob Dylan song. "Talkin' World War III Blues" has 12 verses of Bob talking his way through a dream he had about walking through post-nuclear NYC, with all the people gone from the "lonesome town." Here's the 9th verse:

Well, I remember seein’ some ad
So I turned on my Conelrad
But I didn’t pay my Con Ed bill
So the radio didn’t work so well
Turned on my record player—
It was Rock-a-day Johnny singin’, “Tell Your Ma, Tell Your Pa
Our Love’s A-gonna Grow Ooh-wah, Ooh-wah”

Tyler said "Ooh-wah, Ooh-wah," by the way, just like Dylan, not "Wah Wah," as the Daily News would have it.

Now that you get the reference, is there anything to be made of it? Maybe Dylan was making an in joke at the time and Tyler was referring to that joke. Maybe Tyler wanted to alert us to the threat of nuclear war. Maybe Tyler wanted to wink at Dylan fans. But the best clue I found — as I did a Google search to see if anyone had recognized the Dylan quote — was an article from back in November about  friction between Tyler and current-season judge Nicki Manaj. Tyler had said in an interview:

“If it was Bob Dylan, Nicki Minaj would have had him sent to the cornfield! Whereas, if it was Bob Dylan with us, we would have brought the best of him out, as we did with Phillip Phillips....”

Manaj thereafter tweeted:

“Steven Tyler said I would have sent Bob Dylan to a cornfield??? Steven, you haven’t seen me judge one single solitary contestant yet!”

And:

“I understand you really wanted to keep your job but take that up with the producers. I haven’t done anything to you. That’s a racist comment.” 

Racist because it's against her... or because sending someone "to the cornfield" is a reference to slavery?

“You assume that I wouldn’t have liked Bob Dylan??? why? black? rapper? what? go f— yourself and worry about yourself babe.”

To quote Bob Dylan — especially while dressed in a garish blonde wig and big inflated breasts — is to tweak Nicki. Talking blues is related to rap, somewhere in the ancestry. The quoted line, which is talked, is about singing, singing like a rockabilly guy — "Rock-a-day Johnny" — and Tyler was acting as though he were going to sing the song Bob Dylan heard. Dylan is all alone in his dream, looking for company, and in his desperation, he turns on the radio, and then puts on a record, and it's this pop culture idiot, singing nonsense — ooh-wah, ooh-wah —but it's very poignant, because, after the war, Bob is longing for any kind of a voice. In the 10th verse, he calls the telephone number where a recorded voice says the time, and he listens to that voice, repeating the same time — 3 o'clock, the time the war started — for over an hour.

So Steven Tyler had a lot to say, if anybody wants to notice. He's saying we don't get artists like Bob Dylan anymore. The music industry — like NYC after the bomb — is devoid of real people. We're desperate for a human voice. And Nicki Manaj is the embodiment — for all her voluptuous physicality — of emptiness. He was spoofing her, critiquing everything, crying out for real human art, which — for him — Bob Dylan embodies.

But did anyone hear him? He pranced out as a clown. He was dressed as a woman. It resonated in the hollowness that has always been television. In drag, with that wide smile, he even looked like Milton Berle.



IN THE COMMENTS: In this post where I chide others for missing the Dylan reference, Mumpsimus dings me for missing a reference:

"To the cornfield" refers to the SF/Horror story "It's A Good Life" by Jerome Bixby. Or, more likely in this context, to the Twilight Zone episode based on that story.

Dust Bunny Queen links to this TZ clip.

Is this Mariah-Nicki thing going to work?

Is anyone watching?

We watched the first hour last night (with the rest saved on DVR), and, well, it seems the problem is that Nicki Manaj came to play. She's prepared. She's like the Tracy Flick of "American Idol." She's studied, and she's ready. If this reality show were "Survivor," she's be voted off immediately, because she wants it so bad. Meanwhile, Mariah Carey obviously believed she could simply swan in and be Mariah. That's enough in itself. How awful to have to be one of 2 women, when the other woman wants it so bad. It's like the wife and the mistress.

But there isn't even a husband. Unless America is the husband. But America, in "American Idol," is a whole lot of young girls. And what do they care about a wife and a mistress clawing it out? Poor Mariah! Don't tell me Keith Urban/Randy Jackson count as the husband who will step up — in this exaggerated TV sitcom — and choose the right woman, the true sweetheart, the wife, Mariah. These men are oblivious to the psychodrama. They're floating along aimlessly as if the only thing really happening is a talent show, where various young people try to sing as well as they can, and modestly knowledgeable judges give honest assessments.

Oh! My heart breaks for Mariah. But I must say, Nicki has won it all. She came to win and she crushed the competition in the first hour. Congratulations! But... is anyone watching?