Justin Guarini - Stranger Things Have Happened

All Music Guide

It's hard to say that anyone who became a star, however briefly, when he was a teenage heartthrob on the number one television show in America, then received a chance to record his own album and then starred in a major motion picture bearing his own name in the title, got a raw deal, but it sure is easy to feel a little sorry for Justin Guarini. In 2002, he was all the rage, the runaway star of the first season of American Idol. Kelly Clarkson may have won the competition she was the better singer, after all but as the show was airing, Justin had all the adulation, not just from the teenyboppers in the audience but from the online community. When the show concluded, it seemed like both Justin and Kelly had it made...and then came the rushreleased movie From Justin to Kelly, a cheap, silly musical that dinged Kelly's reputation while completely derailing Justin's career. The film arrived in theaters a mere ten days after his eponymous debut album hit the stores, and the record was bur...ied in an avalanche of bad press for the film. Justin Guarini may have peaked at 20 on the Billboard charts, but no single charted and soon the singer turned the butt of jokes, even on American Idol itself.Justin surely deserved some of the ridicule: he was an incorrigible ham, often recalling a lounge singer, and his dreads were rightly mimicked as Sideshow Bob hair, giving him a clownish appearance (and, of course, his name sounds kind of funny). Be that as it may, Guarini had charisma and a good showbiz voice that he used to the hilt on his pop album which may have bombed, but it was a good, slick collection of dancepop. Perhaps if it had been delivered earlier, at the end of 2002, just a few months after the conclusion of the first season instead of at the end of the second a release pattern that the show would follow beginning in 2003, after Justin's flop it might have been a bigger hit, but there's no use speculating: what happened happened, sending Guarini far away from the spotlight. And as American Idol dragged on through the years, piling up outright failures from runnerups like Diana DeGarmo and Bo Bice, as winners like Fantasia Barrino and Ruben Studdard failed to become huge stars, Justin started to not seem so bad after all. Read more Less