The Good Musician

Notes & Facts About American Idol

by Arjun Muralidharan on February 16th, 2008

Casting shows are often quite entertaining, to say the least.

Picture this: You’re wacthing American Idol and see a 16-year old participant singing and showing off her Mariah Carey song and you think “ugh”. This girl can’t sing.

Yet, the jury decides to give her a recall and she jumps with joy while half the viewership wants to punch her in the face (and the other half wants to bed her).

American Idol is never fair. Seldom musically correct. But aways dramatic for show. Here some hard facts you should’t forget:

1. Most AI contestants can’t really sing, even if they seem super-confident and impressive at the first casting. Fact is, they’re not using they’re voice correctly, and the trained ear will hear it. They can use their hand to show the pitch and close their eyes to show emotion and shake around their voice as much as they want, but that doesn’t make them musicians.
2. But they could learn. A recall by the jury often promises talent, but not always. Contestants hardly get the necessary musical education and development in my opinion, and AI is just not helping them. Period.
3. Women have to be super hot and super-slim. In our society, the social construction of women requires female artists who appeal to the mass market to be extremely thin and have what has been socially estblished as the ideal figure. On German Idol, a contestant was recently rejected for just being too fat.
   I’m not sure that would pass in the U.S. without legal consequences.

4. Idol winners seldom stay around for a long period of time because of a basic flaw: People can’t choose what they like and what they don’t. They can’t predict this in advance. Rating systems are psychologically flawed and can’t serve as a basis for business. The TV channels buy the show, and are interested in the revenue from the show’s run alone. What happens to the artist afterward is basically just icing on the cake.

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