I Save American Idol From Itself Again!

Yo, check it out, man. I’ve got some more ideas for American Idol, still the most watched program in the history of television — watched by more people each week than have watched all the Super Bowls and the last episode of M*A*S*H combined! — but watched by slightly fewer now than in seasons when 80 percent of the contestants weren’t excruciatingly boring — and not watched very regularly by me since the American public sent Lily Scott home even though she was sublime in every way, and what a travesty 'twas, but I'm not bitter!

The themes for the various theme weeks — Motown, The Beatles, No. 1 Hits by Women With Bisexual Alcoholic Manager Husbands — are numbingly over-familiar by this time. But who could not tune in for a Velvet Underground week, a NIN week, a Music From America’s Shameful Racist Past week or Substance Abuse week? In the penultimate case, imagine, for instance, little Aaron Kelly, America's Virgin, singing Billie Holiday’s "Strange Fruit", about racist lynchings. Or how about little Katie Stevens, America’s Other Virgin, making the Velvets’ "Venus In Furs" or "Heroin" her own? Think the pleasant but insipid Big Mike needs to venture out of his easy-listening soul comfort zone? Let's hear him tackle "Fuck You Like an Animal"!

They’ve also got to rethink the whole mentoring schtick. As it stands, they get some non- or semi-entity like Miley fucking Cyrus or Usher to urge the various contestants to Give More of Themselves, and then, while the contestants shuffle back to their hotel rooms to ponder this imparted wisdom, mumble dutifully about how each of them has An Incredible Voice and surely has a glittering career ahead. How much more entertaining it would be if they encouraged the mentors to say what they really think. Can you imagine Aretha Franklin commenting candidly on Katie fucking Stevens’ version of "Chain of Fools"? “Are you pulling my leg, girl? Tell the truth now. Ain't you just being uppity? I’m the most celebrated female vocalist of the last 45 years, Lady damned Soul, and you’re an insipid little white girl from some leafy small town in Connecticut whose voice is suited to a high school talent show, and you’re going to sing one of my iconic hits? Are you tripping, girl?"

Saw on HBO the other night a documentary about a recent American Idol-like singing competition on TV in Afghanistan. If Idol's producers had real panache, they'd invite the guy who won (the women contestants received death threats for their lasciviousness, which consisted in one case of dancing and exposing hair) to be one week's guest mentor, or to fill one of the guest spots they'd otherwise allocate to the latest Lady Gaga knockoff. The public relations benefit would doubtless be incalculable; can you imagine how proud would be the average Afghan, whose heart I understood America to be intent on winning?

I continue to want to know what the tattoo on poor Andrew Garcia’s neck signifies. I’m guessing that it means he was initiated into one of those gangs whose prospective initiates drive around at night with their lights off until another motorist flashes his own lights, and then kill that other motorist and eat his pancreas and lymph glands with guacamole, but I may very well be mistaken.

Pictures of Lily (A Nation's Shame)

Well, it’s not nearly as bad as their having re-elected Bushandcheney in 2004, but I’m still beside myself. The people have just voted the sublime Lily Scott off American Idol. In the UK, which has always had infinitely better taste in pop music, she’d have made the Final Two. In the UK, they'd be carrying her around on their shoulders. A nation’s shame!

There wasn’t anything about Lily I didn’t love. I loved her weird, distinctive singing, and her musicality. I loved her ash-blonde hair, cut so as to evoke Jane Fonda’s in Klute. I loved that she looks like Claire, and I love her immoderate eye makeup; pictures of Lily made my life so wonderful!

She could have been the new Cyndi Lauper, that invigorating, that delightful. Instead, we've got Siobhan Magnus, who's occasionally wonderful, but nowhere near as original; the competent, implacably dour Bowersox (lips that touch the repertoire of Tracy Chapman shall never touch mine); and the firm of Wacky Hairstyle, Tearful, Boringly Precocious, and Just Plain Boring, But of Color.

I'd love to stay and keep chatting, but I have to send letters to all of Idol's sponsors advising that I will never buy their products again. I'd sooner starve, or take the bus.

A Money-Making Idea!

It remains my belief that people don’t watch American Idol for the music. If someone wanted to hear terrific singing, there are literally millions of tracks he or she could download from iTunes, my own among 'em. What attracts a huger viewership to Idol than any other program on TV, I'm convinced, is the opportunity to witness real humiliation and real courage.

Certainly sports fans get to see lots of humiliation. But whereas the quarterback who’s thrown a virtually game-ending interception, the batter who’s struck out with the bases loaded and his team behind in the bottom of the ninth, and the basketball player who misses free throws that might have tied and then won the game with half a second left on the clock are all allowed to cry or upend the water cooler in the locker room before they confront the press, the Idol contestant who’s just sung his or her little heart out is expected to stand there grinning bravely while the judges tell him how awful he was — and then be tearlessly thoughtful and philosophical when Ryan Seacrest asks immediately thereafter if his fresh wounds hurt!

For my money, the 17-year-old girl who manages not to burst into tears while being informed that her song choice was idiotic, her singing shrill and off-key, and her hairstyle unbecoming demonstrates far greater courage than the college football coach who, 30 minutes after his heavily favored team was beaten, finally emerges from his office to snarl at reporters about how they wouldn’t be asking such stupid questions if they understood the game a tenth as well as he.

If my analysis is correct, the idea I’ve just had will enable some enterprising TV producer to make a great deal of money: Let children compete, with the understanding that the judges will pull no punches because of a contestant's age. It’s really just a case of incorporating into the present Idol format juvenile beauty pageants of the sort that became notorious after the murder of JonBenet Ramsey.

Can’t you just picture hundreds of millions of American being riveted by the spectacle of Randy Jackson advising the recent winner of, say, Little Miss Chocolate Drop that her rendition of Aretha’s "Natural Woman" “just didn’t work for me, dawg; know’m sayin’? I just don’t think singing’s your thing, dude.” After the countless thousands of dollars’ worth of lessons! After the cruelly truncated childhood! Picture Ellen Degenerate telling a five-year-old who’s just emoted her way through Eric Carmen’s “All by Myself” that the song might have been a little old for her. How could you not watch? Picture a 7-year-old tarted up like a 22-year-old listening with meticulously glossed little lower lip all a-tremble while Simon Cowell complains that her version of Nilsson’s “Without You” sounded like a kitten being tortured.

Now, that would be entertainment!

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The Most Swollen and Purple of Sore Thumbs

Randy used the word pitchy a lot, and addressed you as dawg, man, dude, and baby. Though his mixture of ghetto and surferdude patois was nearly unintelligible, it's safe to say he found your performance sorely wanting.

Kara said, “Listening to you sing was like being hurled, with wrists and ankles bound, into a enormous vat of pus. It was by far the most unpleasant experience of my life, one I dread reliving in my nightmares for years to come. I curse you for having made me suffer in this way. I curse your progeny, and your ancestors.”

And Simon said, “It wasn’t really the right song for you, but of course there couldn’t be a right song for anyone so devoid of talent. Your performance made me wish that as a child I had plunged newly sharpened pencils point-first into my little ears, making myself deaf.

America has voted, and agrees with Kara and Simon, and wants you to catch the first plane home.

I'm paraphrasing, of course.

My guess is that what happens next sends countless tens of millions either reaching for their fast-forward buttons or dashing into their home offices to check their email, for what happens is that the disgraced, newly banished contestant is invited to reprise the very performance that made America want never to hear him or her again! In a show that’s generally shrewdly put together, one in which every milliliter of poignancy is wrung from every situation, this miscalculation is the most swollen and purple of sore thumbs. Far better that they should show the banished contestant's reunion with his heartbroken family. Look at me, boy! You know we don't have health insurance! Look at me, boy! We were counting on you, boy, to pay for your baby sister's bone marrow transplant! Is that really the best you could do? Look at me, boy!

I also found intensely cringe-inducing — until I learned to derive great pleasure from it — the big mega-cornball show-opening group performance, in which the contestants, in groups of three, do little dance steps while singing a line or two each from a song you won’t have heard, and will hope never to hear again. Brave Crystal Bowersox, managing to smirk bravely through her embarrassment! Brave Andrew Garcia, he of the cholo tattoo on his neck! Brave Casey James, the Jesus-haired blues singer! It occurred to me I might not have witnessed a comparable display of good-sportsmanship since The Byrds’ October 4, 1965 appearance on Hullaballoo; the real agony begins four minutes in!

I’m reminded of a wonderful caption in Melody Maker in late 1971, beneath a photograph of the outlandishly attired new glam group Chicory Tip: Right, lads. Just don’t ever let us hear the words “serious musicians” out of your mouths.

I’m only slightly astonished to discover that Chicory Tip, now looking like three supermarket managers, are still at it. But then I remind myself that in the UK, nothing is ever thrown away. If you had a No. 17 hit in the spring of 1969, you can still make a living playing pubs, and Tip’s (excellent!) "Son of My Father" was No. 1 for three weeks.

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Crystal Bowersox and the Goblet of Fire

The most heartbreaking moment of American Idol this week so far has been when brave Lacey Brown, sent home last year just before the Final 24 were chosen, sang dreadfully, and had to keep from bursting into tears while all four judges defecated on her performance. Is it not for such moments of rare courage that a lot of people watch the program, rather than for the mostly very boring singing?

How not to hope that someone named Crystal Bowersox, with dreadlocks, won’t win? Well, it’s actually much easier than I’d have imagined. She’s aloof and unsmiling, our Crystal, and exudes a sense of imagining herself too hip for the show, and it isn’t endearing. I’m reminded of the great discomfort Paul Simon used to affect at awards shows at which he knew he was going to be given armfuls of awards; sure, he’d accept the damn things, but only with the most palpable reluctance. If you’re going to play the game, play it with grace. When La Bowersox performed a song by the unspeakable Alanis Morisette, it contained a lame harmonica passage apparently intended to demonstrate that she may be in American Idol, but is not of it; no way!

Lily Scott, who looks like my wife, is quirkily jazzy, very distinct, altogether terrific, and surely doomed by having nothing to do with the WhitneyMariahLeona tradition of technique-based divastry. Haeley Vaughan, with the biggest mouth I’ve ever seen — she could swallow Ryan Seacrest’s head, whole — might make the Final 12 on the basis of being an oddity: a black girl country singer. But the record shows clearly that anatomically quirky contestants can go only so far, as witness neckless Melinda Doolittle from Season 17, or whenever it was.

Several years ago, while I was living in the UK, the BBC tried to challenge Pop Idol (later to metamorphose into The X Factor) with a show called Fame Academy. The second season was won by a little lesbian from the hinterlands called Alex Park, who seemed, whenever she opened her mouth, to be singing to save the life of someone she loved; she broke your heart with every song. American Idol contestant Siobhan Magnus has that same quality, and breathtaking range, and will of course get nowhere near the final because America, far more skittish than the UK, will find her frightening, just as it found Adam Lambert last year. We as a people would much sooner read John Grisham than Scott Turow, though the former isn’t fit to install updates of the latter’s text processing software.

This year’s male crop is pretty undistinguished, lacking a single jaw-dropper in the Adam Lambert class, and I’m speaking solely of singing ability, rather than panache. The human mountain Michael Lynche phrases engagingly. Casey James, who will spend the rest of his career trying to live down having eagerly exposed his pigeon-chestedness for Victoria Beckham and the leering Kara at his first audition, is a reasonable rock dude in the tradition of Bo Bice, over whom America ultimately chose Carrie Underwood back in Season 18, or whenever it was. I’d like to see the very ethnic Andrew Garcia make it into the last couple of weeks, but I suspect his gang-tattooed neck will ultimately terrify America, which, presented last year with a choice between the incandescent Lambert and the soporifically bland What’s-His-Name, chose the latter. The smart money’s on Jermaine Sellers, whose own neck tattoo is offset by his self-identification as a church singer.

You read it here first: this year’s winner will be the blandly gorgeous, unmemorably virtuosic Michelle Delamor, who is everything Lily Scott is not, and the rest of the world will snicker at us anew.

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My Mariah Medley and Why It Failed

When I was an American Idol contestant a couple of seasons ago, the hard part wasn’t the singing — having extraordinary vocal ability is something you’re born with, and I was born with enough for triplets — but coming up with autobiographical information that would make America root for me. The production assistant I was assigned, Staci, made no secret of her frustration when, after inviting me to tell her something sad about my life, I recounted my parents not getting along well, and leaving adolescence having never known a whole day’s peace. She rolled her eyes, began sending a text message, and said, “What else you got?” I told her how excruciating arthritis in my right shoulder had compelled me to have it surgically replaced some years before. She rolled her eyes and said, “What else you got?” I told her I’d been estranged for years from the person I’d loved most and best in my life, my daughter. She looked up from her cell phone for the first time and said, “Tell me more.” When I was through recounting my terrible job of hiding how much it hurt when my daughter treated me as the booby prize and her mother, who’d insisted on divorce when our daughter wasn’t yet three, as the grand prize, she actually closed her cell phone entirely and said she thought we might have something to work with.

“You’ve entered the competition not only because you love singing,” Stacee thought aloud, looking at the ceiling, tapping her pen against her teeth, “but because you think that winning might make your estranged daughter love you again, right?” Her expression made unmistakable that I was supposed to answer yes. “Yes,” I said. “Exactly right!”

“Awesome,” she said, yawning as she scribbled a note to herself. She flipped to another page on her clipboard and called the next name on her list.

I wasn't surprised to be in one of the roomfuls of Hollywood Week contestants that got good news. I hadn’t imagined them able to say no to my Mariah medley, which had inspired Simon to muse, “You know, I think you’re even better than you know.” I replied, “Oh, I doubt it. No one’s that good.” But there was a twinkle in my eye when I said it, and I winked at him for good measure. “Cheeky,” he noted, approvingly. A very special look passed between us.

Now the 51 of us hoping to become the Final 24 who would sing for America’s votes — and be paid, if only nominally, to perform on the annual finalists’ tour — were herded into another big room to wait to be summoned for an announcement of the judges’ decision. Production assistants circulated among us, urging us to try to look like passengers on a newly hijacked jetliner — that distraught, that apprehensive. They turned the thermostat up very high to make us sweat, and then very low to make us shiver. We weren’t allowed to use the restroom. Two contestants who shared a joke and laughed nervously were told either to get with the program or go home.

It appeared, as the long day dragged on and on, as though I'd been forgotten. There were only nine of us left, and then six, and then only four — I, another guy, and two girls — with only two slots still open, one for each sex. We compared the various tragedies our various production assistants had helped us develop. The other guy, a rock dude with long hair and generic vocal gruffness, had a four-year-old son with a slight stammer. He’d been urged to say the boy had a serious neurological condition he wouldn’t be able to afford to have treated unless he won the competition. The mother of one of the girls, a generic soul mama with gigantic eyes and very glossy straightened hair, had been an unwed teenager who’d run away a couple of years after her birth; the young soul mama had grown up with her grandparents. The producers had told her to say her parents had been killed by a drunk driver while walking home from church.

Finally, there was a blandly pretty young blonde who shared my enthusiasm for Mariah, but of course didn’t have anything like my chops. She’d led a charmed blandly pretty blonde life, and could think of nothing sadder than that her younger brother had asthma. The producers suggested he be dying of lung cancer — oh, the cruel irony in view of his never having taken even a puff of a cigarette! She had learned that she intended, if she won, to give all the money she would make over the course of her career to medical research in hope of sparing anyone else the premature loss of a younger sibling.

I was pretty sure I was doomed, and blamed Stacee, whom I saw again just before I went in to hear the judges' verdict. She told me to be sure to point out, quaveringly, that this was my last hope of realizing my most cherished dream. Randy affirmed that I was by far the best singer they’d heard that season, and that he’d bet his children’s college money that superstardom awaited me, but that they'd had to pick Mr. Gruffvoice because of his sadder back-story.

Naturally, they showed none of that when the show was actually broadcast.

Last Night on American Idol

Last night on American Idol, Chris (no relation to Holly) Golightly, the last person to sing for the judges at the Los Angeles auditions, was first shown trudging disconsolately beside a train track, to the accompaniment of a poignant piano theme. He recounted to host Ryan Seacrest that he’d lived in a great many foster homes over the course of his short life, and had become accustomed to there being nobody to exclaim, “Attaboy!” if he did something noteworthy at school. But after the judges begrudgingly voted him through to the forthcoming Hollywood round, he left the audition room, and was greeted outside it by two friends — a rare misstep on the part of the show’s shamelessly manipulative director, whom I have now decided to replace.

Had I directed last night’s show, I’d have asked poor Chris’s friends to make themselves scarce, so that he would have no one with whom to share his moment of elation. He would emerge whooping and hooting triumphantly, as nearly all the golden ticket winners do, only to remember that he’s all alone in the universe — alone and unloved. The despairing piano theme would be heard anew, louder, as he tried in vain to blink back his tears. He would turn away from the camera in shame, and then fall to his knees, his body wracked by sobs.

The audition room will be rigged under my direction so that any singer indulging in melisma, the Mariah Carey-popularized trick of stretching a single syllable of a word over multiple notes for the purpose of inspiring listeners to exclaim, “Dude!” will receive a painful electric shock. For me, melisma is miasma.

The show is much more enjoyable in the pre-Hollywood audition stage, if you ask me, than when they all start mewling “All By Myself “and “Without You” and “Ain’t No Sunshine” and “A Natural Woman” and so on. But it would be even more enjoyable if not so predictable. You can bet the farm that every contestant revealed before auditioning to be A Devoted Parent or Son/Daughter is going to be good, and that if there’s something wrong with their kid or kids (autism seems to be big this season), terrific — maybe even terrific enough to inspire that pompous ditz Kara, perhaps America’s worst popular songwriter, to soar to new heights of inanity in her endorsement. “One million bazillon percent yes!”

Should any judge try to award an auditionee a yes vote exceeding 100 percent after I take charge, he or she will receive a painful electric shock, as they will too for using the adjective authentic for a singer with a drawl or cowboy hat. Should Clive Davis make an appearance, he will, if he offers a contestant such sage advice, gleaned from his 143 years in The Business, as, “Really feel the lyric,” be pelted with rotten vegetables and used condoms. An auditionee who humbly confirms that she is indeed a pastor, and who then, in response to the question What are you going to sing for us?, replies, "Nine Inch Nails’ 'Fuck You Like An Animal', will immediately be declared the Season 9 winner.

Should that corpulent windbag Randy Jackson, whom we think of in For All In Tents Towers as Dawgman Babydude, address a female contestant as man, he will receive a painful electric shock. Should he arrange his chubby fingers in a gesture presumably recognizable only to persons who think of themselves as one another’s... homies, he will be plunged into a vat of boiling miasma, or forced to have lunch with Clive Davis.

It’s high time, I think, that Simon Cowell stop being thought of as the show’s villain, especially in the audition stages; it isn’t he, but Jackson, who loudly mocks the comically hapless while they’re singing. It is Si, not Jackson, who commonly says something pleasurably wry. It is Jackson who’s proud of having played briefly in Journey, the mere thought of whom makes any reasonable person wince. And will someone please tell the guy that it's nonsensical, while sitting in Dallas, say, to shout, "Welcome to Hollywood"? One cannot actually welcome someone to a place neither is at the moment of welcoming!

Under my stewardship, there will be no more weeks during which all the contestants sing a Motown, disco, or Beatles song. Instead we will have death metal, shoegaze, and Sigur Ros weeks. The mark of a genuinely terrific singer is being able to sound terrific in Icelandic.

From this point forward, only males will be allowed to sing "Son of a Preacher Man" at their auditions, and any over-25 contestant who, in response to one of the judges asking, “So this is your last shot, isn’t it?” replies, “Fuck no, Jack; I’m going to give it to 40,” will immediately be whisked into the Final 24.

The asking judge will, of course, receive a painful electric shock.

[Sorry We're Open isn't my last shot; Anthems of Self-Loathing is forthcoming later in 2010! Facebookers: Read more like this and subscribe here.