Columns

Just prior to patronising a certain Uni bar for an earth-shaking, euphonic performance from Dunedin’s immensely talented Mountaineater, I luxuriated on the couch and absorbed the exact opposite of musical freedom and creativity: American Idol. Why?

I’m not entirely sure myself – mostly I was watching with indifference because I was too lazy to find the remote (and complaining is greatly facilitated by the show, which can be quite enjoyable). I truly found it amazing, in the original sense of the term, that it could get away with dumbing down music to the most boring, bland, insipid aural disasters, and continue to pass itself off as a singing competition. It’s got absolutely nothing to do with singing, or entertaining, and five minutes of watching the show will convince you of that ... if you can take it. Trying to bear a contestant’s painfully pedestrian version of Elvis’ ‘Hound Dog’ takes true grit and gall, to the point where you’re almost measuring the amount of punishment you can take before giving in and breaking your TV set. Then the over-paid, under-qualified panel pipes up with excessively overblown (excuse the tautology) comments about the contestant’s talent, their bright musical future, and their singing ability.
Obviously people on these shows don’t have any talent. We know that. If they did, they would have created something interesting or actually entertained anyone beyond their sartorial appearance or their hermetically-sealed hairstyles. But they don’t, and in fact, are prohibited from doing so by the show’s managers. American Idol is determined to smooth all of the interesting edges off its contestants to make them overly palatable for drooling mass audiences (while attempting to re-spark some interest in certain music company’s back catalogues). This process churns out amorphous blobs of performing protoplasm that bounce around on stage with about as much enthusiasm as a pensioner making toast in the morning, to music you’d guess was arranged by Barney and Friends. Give me people with bizarre personalities and weird voices any day (Tom Waits, Lou Reed) over these vapid, lifeless, untalented hacks. Luckily local musicians don’t feel the need to be as pathetically ingratiating and excruciatingly dull as Idol suggests you need to be to make it in the ‘music business’. So, anyone that watches Idol without looking over their shoulders needs to line up for a droning musical kick to the head á la any local Dunedin band: a reminder that music should be interesting, challenging, and free from douchebags like Ryan Seacrest providing the narrative.