American Idol can best be described as televised crack. No one really wants to watch it but it’s addictive. I’m sure that no one who is a crack fiend woke up one morning & said, Dayum, I need to start smoking toxic rocks through a glass straw till my heart explodes . Same with Idol……Since the American Sheeple love to have their prepackaged pop music pabulum spoon-fed to them by corporate radio whores, American Idol appeals to the American Idle in that now the music buying public is actually fooled into thinking they’re part of the process of choosing what sugar-coated tripe they’ll hear non-stop on the radio until that fresh-scrubbed pop star suffers a nuclear meltdown and implodes. And we all know how I love a good implosion.
Also, since America by & large loves a good train wreck, we tune in by the droves to watch the dreaded Auditions Week round of shows. In this round of 2-hour specials we get to see the absolute worst shit imaginable that these 100,000+ crowds have to offer up, and revel in the tears and suffering that follows the delusional idiots who actually think they can sing., whining about how America will be sorry they missed out when they get told how bad they suck. I do, however, have 2 problems with this:
1. This show is in like, it’s sixth season now. For nigh on 5 years now we have watched this shit happen so by now if you haven’t figured out the formula of one judge being hot & cold, one judge being a sugar sweet dimwit, and one judge is an asshole who calls a spade a spade to see you suffer, then you really get what you deserve.
2. In order to face the Big Three, you have to audition in small groups in front of handlers from the show who wade through the really shitty ones since with 5 minutes per audition you’d never get through 100,000 wannabes in a week, let alone a day. So, this means that in addition to feeding the decent singers into the hopper, these lackeys also hand-pick the poor bastards who get sacrificed on national television like Christians in the lion’s den. That’s the wickedly funny part of all of this.
So now we get to watch these kids sing the same tired-ass shit they sing every year….overdone show tunes, Stevie Wonder, Mariah Carey, and 70’s light rock. And we’ll also get “celebrity” judges to sit in, too, like Kenny Loggins or Barry Manilow, and Olivia Newton John and Paul Anka. You know, these celebrity judges for the most part are IRRELEVANT to today’s pop music. They may have been relevant to my parents when I was 9 years old, but to a 16 year old kid downloading to their Ipod, Carole Bayer Sager may as well be a goddamned ancient history footnote. Hell, even so-called judge Paula Abdullard hasn’t been relevant to pop music since about 1995. I find it galling that she gets to judge what a pop star is when she hasn’t had a top 40 hit since before most of the contestants hit puberty.
More people voted in last years’ Idol finals than have ever voted in any Presidential election in history, and that’s fucking sad. Our collective attention span is down to phone votes day by day. Maybe we should have all 186 current Presidential candidates go on a show and we can vote off each idiot one by one with weekly phone votes after debates. Then we’ll be down to two, and then we can vote for them in a giant 2-hour special with 800-numbers. This is what America has become…way to go, Sheeple.
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