American Idolatry

Is there anyone in the room who doesn’t want to be famous?

I was driving to work this morning listening to the CBC as I always do.  But when the conversation turned to what exactly pigs are being fed these days (it turns out that the animated version of “Charolette’s Web” is perpetuating the ugly rumor that pigs eat “slop”) I set out to discover what else was on the dial.  First stop: the local EZ rock station.

[Most of you just read that as "easy rock".  I will digress for a moment here to mention that any Canadian station that sells itself as one that plays the brand of easy listening that this station does should really just break the bank on the marketing budget and use the full version of the word "easy" – or even "eazy" if you must – because anyone who has seen the Canadian version of Sesame Street knows that an E followed by a Z is pronounced "E-Zed".]

I was immediately confronted with a live-sounding, breathy, and over-emotive version of Cash’s “I Walk The Line”.  It was bad – really bad.  Off tune, too slow.  So I’m expecting that this is the station’s gag for the morning – making fun of someone’s bad version of a good song.  Imagine my horror when the DJs cut in with “Wasn’t that awesome?!”

It turns out it was a clip from this week’s American Idol.  Is there no low to which these people will not sink?

People who know that I am a singer and a songwriter ask me why I don’t try out for American/Canadian Idol.  Well, quite simply, it is the antithesis of true artistry.  The people who run these shows are looking for the next beautiful and pliable person that is going to make them a lot of money.  Essentially, when you go onto a show like this you are competing to become the mascot of a corporation.  That’s fine if you’re into that sort of thing but I don’t imagine they’re ever going to find the next Cash, Dylan, or Joni Mitchell by way of one of the contests.

You might say “who cares?” and you would be implying that nobody does.  And I might agree with you if I didn’t know a group of guys who run a magazine called Paste that covers artists who would never and could never have been found by a reality TV show.  And they are selling a lot of magazines.

But those reasons above might just be my faux artistic reasons that hide a few more practical reasons such as:
1. My hairline is receding
2. I write and sing my own songs
3. I don’t wear tight pants

“We all wanna be big, big stars but we’ve got different reasons for that” (Duritz).

I want to be famous as much as any performer, author or athlete does – but there are a lot of things I’m not willing to do to get there.

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