America voted and the new American idol is the dewy-eyed Jordin Sparks. A 17-year-old girl with a big voice and a melting smile, she sings more from the adolescent heart than from the grown-up head.
Jordin Sparks, winner of the sixth “American Idol” contest.
My grown-up heart was broken. I was rooting for Melinda Doolittle, the phenomenally gifted, stylistically adroit 29-year-old former backup singer from Tennessee who was voted off last week. A Gladys Knight-Tina Turner hybrid, she brings a compelling honesty to every phrase she sings.
But I wasn’t fooling myself. What chance did a humble, not as pretty 29-year-old woman have against a radiant but artistically undeveloped teenager?
My only consolation is that Ms. Doolittle will not be forgotten. As Chris Daughtry and Jennifer Hudson have shown, there are multiplatinum records and even Oscars in the future of a worthy also-ran.
As for this year’s runner-up, Blake Lewis, he deserves credit for bringing a rare taste of hip-hop into the show.
As he exchanged beat-box clicks with Doug E. Fresh on Wednesday’s two-hour season finale, I detected the beginnings a dialogue between “American Idol” and rap: beginnings that, I fear, given the show’s conservative, middle-of-the-road aesthetics, may lead nowhere.
Like many “American Idol” devotees, I have a love-hate relationship with the show, which is often inspiring and infuriating at the same time. In Wednesday’s blowout it was apparent how tight its co-dependent grip has become on an increasingly desperate record industry. What other phenomenon has minted so many instant pop superstars? Its commercial impact recalls Elvis’s teenage-idol phase, Beatlemania and the heyday of Motown.
The appearance this year of performers like Bono, Madonna, Annie Lennox, Green Day and Gwen Stefani, who in earlier seasons would probably have given “American Idol” a wide berth, lent the show a hip imprimatur. No one dares shun “American Idol”; the mass exposure it affords is irresistible. As a pop marketing tool, it’s bigger than “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”
To cheer or to boo: that is the question. The show’s charity fund-raiser, “Idol Gives Back,” was a noble idea carried out with the heavy-handed touch of a bad Disney movie. As the judges were photographed cuddling poor African children, some of whom were shown weeping a single tear positioned like a glycerine prop, the shameless sentimentality was nauseating. Yet $30 million dollars was raised.
At the end Ms. Sparks and Mr. Lewis were both obliged to sing “This Is My Now,” a piece of boilerplate kitsch that won the show’s songwriting contest. This faded carbon copy of “A Moment Like This,” Kelly Clarkson’s hit from Season 1, suggested that the show’s heart was still made of polyester.
But whether by accident or design, “American Idol” answers a mass hunger for consensus in a time of political strife and niche marketing; it presents a wishful teenage vision of the world as one big happy family. To be sure, there are squabbles, but they are resolved with group hugs. Strict but loving Papa Bear, Simon Cowell, enforces discipline; weepy, all-forgiving Mama Bear Paula Abdul, who can’t bring herself to say an unkind word to her brood, offers comfort and encouragement. Kindly Uncle Randy Jackson, with his pseudo-hip argot of “check it out” and “dog,” offers a calmer perspective when Papa Bear gets mad.
Most important, the kids rule the family. The parents may advise, but the children get the final say. Giving viewers voting power is also ratings insurance. Sanjaya Malakar, this year’s novelty sensation, is the boy you wouldn’t want your daughter to date because his head is in the clouds and his report card is all C’s and D’s. The kids kept him in the running. And in the end the family is indivisible. Older brothers and sisters return to visit after graduation, aglow with triumph.
There is enough reality in all this stage-managed hokum to make me a partial believer. More than half a century ago, however, Arthur Godfrey’s shows exerted the same mystique. Only later was it revealed that he was a tyrant. Undoubtedly “American Idol” has its own dark side.
In its six-year existence on Fox, the show has done much to codify the second chapter of the Great American Songbook: the one that begins in the late 1950s and extends to the present. The songs aren’t as literate as the standards of yesteryear, but the American public isn’t as literate either. Popular music has moved out of the head and into the body and become a competitive sport. The public may not know much about American history, but millions can recite pop and rock ’n’ roll history like catechism; it may be the only history most Americans really know.
And the appearances of guest coaches like Diana Ross, Barry Gibb, Rod Stewart and Tony Bennett reinforce that notion of a continuity between now and then. In the world of “American Idol” there is no generation gap, only the loving perpetuation of tradition. Never mind that the oldsters’ voices have deteriorated to the point that the contestants usually out-sing them. And never mind that the contestants’ versions of beloved hits are usually half-baked imitations of the original recordings.
Late in the finale, fragments of songs from the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” a sacred rock relic if ever there was one, were slaughtered by several contestants. Did anyone notice or care? In a commercial climate ruled by buzzwords and hype, dropping the name is what counts.
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