* Fighting and drama queening. It will attract all kinds of attention from the guys holding the cameras. And that footage will then be used against you when they kick you off. If they're following you around too much and it's because someone's crying about refusing to do the choreography, you're in the wrong group.
* The following sentence: "I don't have a captivating vibe about them."
* Imagination-bereft group names -- a small detail I know. But "Team Awesome," "Neopolitan," "The Mighty Rangers," "Destiny's Wild" and "Big Dreams" were all rejected monikers for the band in the Justine Bateman movie Satisfaction. Meanwhile Phoenix is sorta already taken by this other popular band that exists in real life right now. Why not just call yourselves U2 while you're at it?
* Words to songs being optional. Being a singer in 2010 means you don't have to know the lyrics to any song recorded before you were born, no matter how popular it was. The fact that I somehow managed, over years of supermarket visits where they floated down from the ceiling and into my ears, to absorb all the lyrics to "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" and Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" without ever having purchased them in any recorded format, must mean I'm some kind of Rain Man.
* Danny Gokey.
-- DAVE WHITE
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