There’s a voting scandal perpetrated upon America second only to the 2000 Selection Debacle in Florida.
I’m talking, of course, about last night’s American Idol results.
Yes, I’m one of those people who religiously follow the show. I missed the first season, dismissing it as “just another reality show.” I’ve avoided all of them; I’ve yet to see a minute of Survivor, The Apprentice, The Bachelor, or any of the others. My argument against them is always the same: they are anything but real. They are completely unreal, contrived competitions in front of TV cameras for big cash prizes. I prefer my television scripted, thank you very much.
But my cousin Kenny told me I should give Idol a chance. “It’s a talent show,” he explained. As a musician and singer, I thought I’d take a look. The minute I heard that incredible voice coming out of Clay Aiken, I was hooked. That and watching the completely untalented kids in the early auditions get hammered by Simon Cowell. That’s a vicarious thrill for me, considering all the lousy wannabe singers I’ve endured at open-mic nights and karaoke bars. “How do you people not hear that you’re completely untalented?” I’d always think to myself.
Anyway, I’m addicted to Idol. This season, there are four singers who are leagues above their competition. Fantasia Barrino has an exotic look and sounds like she’s channelling Aretha Franklin circa 1967. LaToya London is the tiniest little thing with the biggest pop diva voice. Jennifer Hudson brings a gospel Sissy Houston feel to the show. And George Huff has a wonderfully-soulful voice that belies his youth.
Is it coincidence that the four African-American kids are the best talents on the show? Hmmm. It is a fact that Idol is the only reality show that garners a higher percentage of black audience than white audience (something like 19% vs. 15%).
On Idol, the elimination show takes the three kids who got the least votes, then winnows them down to the one who gets kicked off. This week, the bottom three were Fantasia, LaToya, and Jennifer — arguably the three most talented singers in the competition. Poor Jennifer was voted off, much to the schock and dismay of the audience and the three judges.
The part that makes this such a scandal are the other kids who garnered more votes than the “three divas”. There’s George, but he’s good enough to have survived. There’s Jasmine, a cute Hawaiian girl who has a decent-enough voice, and Diana, who is not bad, but neither of those girls could hold a candle to the other girls.
No, the shocker is a 16-year-old Conan O’Brien look-alike named John Stevens. The kid is talented, sure enough, but only if we get in a time machine and put him in American Idol 1954. It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. He’s a shy, geeky, shut-in who listened to and performed Frank Sinatra songs for his grandparents. When he’s singing Frank, Dean Martin, Perry Como, or any of those types of songs, he’s very good.
But when you take him past the Fifties, he’s incredibly awful. If you asked this kid to perform hip-hop, he’d jump up in the air on one foot. As for some soul and he’d ask for some lemon to go with that fillet. Last night he performed Barry Manilow’s “Mandy” and it was excruciating.
And yet I’m supposed to believe that this kid came in no worse than 4th out of seven, and out-polled Fantasia, LaToya, and Jennifer? When the results were announced, the cameras hit his face and he looked positively ashen. Even he can’t believe it! Neither could the other kids. The “three divas” stood in one group and the other three stood in another. When Ryan Seacrest asked George to join the top group, he naturally went to stand with the three divas.
Now like I said, I follow this show religiously. I check on MSNBC where they have a poll that asks two questions: Who should be voted off next, and who will eventually win. John Stevens consistently gets the highest percentage on the first question and the lowest percentage on the second. Last week, the vote was 75% for John Stevens to get booted off. This week it is up to 84%
And therein lies the problem. On the MSNBC poll, you can only vote once. On American Idol, you can vote as many times as you like. The show is co-sponsored by AT&T Wireless, so they want lots of overvotes. Also they have no mechanisms in place to stop the use of computer power-dialers that can call, hang-up, and redial thousands of times an hour. The other problem is the demographic that is most likely to spend time on the phone fighting through busy signals: teenage girls.
So what we have is a small but dedicated legion of fans with power-dialers that like John Stevens. We also have three super-talented churchy-singing black girls who split the vote for that type of singer.
The judges admonished America, saying “this is not a popularity contest, it is a talent competition.” But everything is a popularity contest to a teenage girl. And if this keeps up, is it possible that John Stevens could win American Idol? What a disaster that would be. The producers run this show to get themselves a marketable talent, and aside from nursing homes, there’s not much market for the next John Stevens album.
But then again, that may be the blow that restructures the voting to something more fair. Many have complained that America should be voting for the person they want eliminated, not the Idol they want to see continue. AT&T doesn’t want that, because it would cut down on call volume, and FOX doesn’t want that because the call volume helps them sell advertising. However it would be a much fairer way to determine the outcome and much more likely to produce a talented winner. John Stevens must go!
(By the way, in last year’s final, Ruben Studdard beat out Clay Aiken, although many considered Clay to be the more talented singer. Record sales seem to have proved it. Clay’s album has sold much more than Ruben’s. But again, the voting is flawed. They allot a three hour block of time in which to count votes. But there’s a finite amount of votes you can count in three hours. They said that the results between Clay and Ruben were very very close, but with the time limit, that means nothing.
Suppose Clay would garner 25,000,000 votes and Ruben would garner 10,000,000. If you can only count 10,000,000 votes in a three-hour block of time, then both singers would have about 10,000,000, with the only difference being how soon in the three-hour block could a particular voter get through on the phone lines.)
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