American Idol: The Song Remains the Same

Pop Music. Talk about it. Everybody does. We can’t help it. It’s as old as music itself. By definition, it’s popular music. And as long as you have two songs, one will be more popular than the other. The people delivering that music are pop stars.

The face of the pop star as has changed dramatically in the past thousands of years. From the local chanteuse to the juke joint piano player, absolutely anyone, at any given time, could be a pop star. Then came the recording – the LP. Then came the inevitable marriage of the LP and the radio, and the regional pop star was forever doomed to take a back seat.

Then things began to get hazy. When the need to put a face to the voice became crucial, the modern day pop star was born. Granted, the early pop stars of the first half of the 20th century weren’t always easy on the eyes, but it was about the music. Then came the ‘50s and girls started screaming. While the music was important, the person delivering the music and the inherent visuals came very close second. Still, anyone, at any time could be a pop star. This, my friends, is the point of conception of American Idol.

Talent shows looking for the next great superstar is not a new thing at all. There has always been a thirst to quench for fresh new faces. Motown made its name with its never-ending stable of new and excited faces who were all too eager to show you what they could do. In the ‘80s it was Star Search, the Ed McMahon version, that enjoyed a very long run, bringing us new talent to watch, judge, and ultimately, decide if they were truly stars. Sometimes, they were.

The end of Star Search came when it started messing with its own rules, exceeding its reach, and in the end, bearing little resemblance to the show that first aired. Be that as it may, it does have a impressive list of alumni. Of course, it took some time for some names on that list to fully find themselves, which is one of things that makes American Idol special. American Idol has been successful from the start – almost in spite of itself.

What started as an ambitious, but innocuous, campaign to find “the next superstar” has become a national phenomenon. Season one featured some audaciously awful auditions, and some startlingly good ones. It was undeniably fascinating. Pair that with some compelling judges – savvy music industry veteran Randy Jackson with his youth-friendly lingo; platinum recording artist and choreographer Paula Abdul; and the possibly evil, undeniably blunt, ultimately entertaining record label executive Simon Cowell -- and it was appointment television at its most basic.

In reality, precious little has changed from the first season to the current one. The same judges and tenants remain. What is different is the level of talent, and the level of awareness. In season one, those poor kids were thrust into a national spotlight that far exceeded any of their expectations. Some of them cracked under that pressure. The knock on season one was that it was a season of beautiful people with marginal talent. Kelly Clarkson smoked the competition by the second week of the Top Ten, never appearing in the dreaded bottom three even once.

American Idol owes a tremendous amount of gratitude to Clarkson, as her performances quickly became the ones to watch. Her deft ability to easily glide through genre after genre set the bar for future Idols to match. Fox did its best to sell the drama to the end, all while knowing Nikki McKibbin’s continued presence threatened the viability of the show as a whole. If anyone doubted the voting, even though Idol never gives the full results, they can drop those doubts at the feet of McKibbin. She was outclassed, and she knew it. The producers could have announced she was the lowest vote-getter, she would have been gone, and no one would have been the wiser. Quite the opposite -- there have been some unproven suspicions that autodialer programs were used to vote for McKibbin to keep her on the show as something of a prank. Since Idol could not prove this (or didn’t know they could), McKibbin remained, unchallenged. Of course, not everything was quite so peaches and cream. A lot of criticism was leveled at American Idol, and Simon Cowell specifically, for refusal to advance overweight contestants. Cowell staunchly defended his position, but quietly rested it by season two.