American Idol

Tuesday, May 2, 2006 12:24 PM UTC

Hipster rebel punk outsiders — 99 cents a dozen

A disillusioned ex-boho argues that consumer culture has turned "rebellion" and "individuality" into meaningless poses, about as transgressive as a turtleneck.

By Andrew O'Hehir

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Hipster rebel punk outsiders -- 99 cents a dozen

Every weekday, everyone in New York who is tangentially involved in the entertainment business receives a depressing piece of e-mail spam that demands, “Are You VIP?” If you decide you are, it invites you to click through to some nightclub promoter’s Web site, where you can get on the guest list for a party that features “Guaranteed Celebrities in the Building!!!”

Meanwhile, laddish authors like Tucker Max and Frank Kelly Rich (founder of Modern Drunkard) achieve short-lived fame for being young men who celebrate drunkenness and boorish behavior. (Imagine that.) Then there’s that just-above-the-coccyx tattoo on young women, which seemed, 15 years ago, like some vaguely racy advertisement for hedonism and is now just today’s answer to raspberry lip gloss. And let’s add the snowboarders who showcase their uncontainable, slope-shredding radicalness in Mountain Dew commercials.

These may seem to you like disconnected little pieces of pop monoculture, with nothing threading them together except the vacuum-cleaner whine of boredom that fills your head when you try to think about them. But Hal Niedzviecki, the author of “Hello, I’m Special,” sees a pattern. A Canadian essayist and fiction writer who founded the alt-culture magazine Broken Pencil, Niedzviecki identifies phenomena like these, and many more besides, as characteristic of a paradoxical culture in which “individuality is the new conformity” or, to say the same thing backward, “nonconformity is now the accepted norm of society.”

On one level, this idea is so obviously true it hardly bears mentioning, let alone repeating and reformulating over and over again (as Niedzviecki tends to do). This is after all the age of “American Idol” and “Survivor,” perhaps the greatest celebrations of pseudo-individuality on a mass scale ever witnessed. The flannel-suited organization man, with his ideal of outward social conformity and private, inward individuality, has all but disappeared as a cultural icon, except as the butt of sitcom humor or an object of reactionary nostalgia. As Niedzviecki frames it, these days one must present the outward appearance of being distinctive and special, even eccentric, while pursuing the most hackneyed and conventional dreams of money, power and celebrity.

Today’s avatar of success has abandoned the bowling leagues, country-club parties and Presbyterian church socials that supposedly occupied the organization man’s leisure time. His signifiers are different: He plays Texas Hold ‘Em in Vegas, BlackBerrys his broker from his whitewater kayak, hits all the best spots for mojitos in South Beach, chaperones models to the Croatian Riviera and leaps from job to job in a lonely, lustful quest for accumulation and domination. At least, he aspires to do all those things. He (or, increasingly, she) has upgraded from an old version of conformity to a new one, whose central oxymoronic commandment is: Be yourself. If “yourself” turns out to be nothing more than an amalgam of brand names and images plucked from TV shows, movies and magazine layouts, so much the better.

On the other hand, there’s something wobbly about Niedzviecki’s contention that the “individual conformist” lies at the heart of our culture; he doesn’t always seem to believe it himself. A blend of cultural analysis, reporting and memoir, “Hello, I’m Special” is full of sharp and funny observations (most of them somewhere on the spectrum from bemusement to rage) and is generally a bracing read. But as Niedzviecki wanders from New Age Judaism to self-esteem training for teens, the “low-power” TV movement, karaoke clubs, the real estate boom in the remote coastal islands of British Columbia and boy-band entrepreneur Lou Pearlman’s latest product (a group called Natural whose members actually play instruments), it becomes increasingly less clear what his target is.

Sometimes he’s writing about the rise of conformist individuality. Sometimes he’s writing about the paralytic disorder of celebrity worship (with its concomitant belief that each of us is a potential celebrity). And sometimes he’s writing about the pop-culture economy that makes these things possible, a bloblike entity whose only products are image and spectacle and that has grown so big that nothing, including our purportedly private inward selves, can be said to remain outside it.

There are times when Niedzviecki seems like a paleontologist trying to reconstruct an entire extinct critter from a single metatarsal, or like a physics undergrad who has noticed a peculiar relationship in the lab between mass and energy, but doesn’t know about that famous equation. His reading is eclectic, ambitious and scattershot: He draws from classic works of sociology by Ulrich Beck, Serge Moscovici and George Simmel; contemporary cultural analysis by Benjamin Barber and Stuart Ewen; and the great postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault. But he doesn’t seem fully aware that for 50 or 60 years cultural critics of various stripes have been wrassling pretty much the same problem he is: that is, the tendency of late-capitalist culture to absorb all forms of opposition and resistance, whether real or symbolic, and then crap them out on our heads as interchangeable commodities.

This isn’t entirely a liability. The world of ideas doesn’t really need another grad student hauling the brains of dead Marxists around in his suitcase. Niedzviecki can’t (or at least doesn’t) call upon the dour heavyweights of the Frankfurt School, the apocalyptic bravado of the Situationists or the dense aphorisms of Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and company. That sometimes leaves him bumping around in the dark, stumbling over objects discovered long ago by others, but it also lends his account an undeniable freshness and vigor.

Whatever the theoretical or analytical weaknesses of “Hello, I’m Special,” it offers you the experience of an intelligent young writer struggling to think for himself. As Niedzviecki is well aware, this is something that the culture of individualistic conformity has made obligatory, and thereby almost impossible.

In his early 30s, as Niedzviecki explains in his introduction, he experienced a sort of personal epiphany. He had devoted his post-collegiate years to playing the role of anti-establishment, hard-partying bad boy, a “pop-influenced semi-slacker” who celebrated deviance and attacked corporate culture. When his parents, two years running, gave him Hallmark cards that celebrated his nonconformity (“Happy birthday to a one-of-a-kind you!”) he abruptly realized that his alleged defiance of convention had become utterly conventional, a ritualized behavior that was “not merely tolerated, but replicated and accepted.”

“Hello, I’m Special” is not primarily a memoir, but its quality of personal quest, fueled by both confusion and anger, lends it a peculiar power. Writing the book, Niedzviecki tells us, is partly an act of self-indictment; he has looked into himself and found the same infection of “narcissistic I’m Specialness” and “pop-culture-inspired fantasies” that afflicts almost everyone else in North America. His punk-anarchist-intellectual pose was mostly about “exuding a pretense of cool,” and it’s now time, he writes with disarming frankness, to “get on with the business of figuring out what and who I want to be.”

So like any good reporter, he has an emotional stake in the story he’s telling. Late in the book, while attending 2002 World Youth Day activities in Toronto, he meets a group of devout young Catholics from Arizona who are fervently patriotic and fiercely antiabortion. They represent almost everything he has hated and feared his entire life, and he doesn’t share their nationalism, their politics or their religious faith. But he writes about them with a kind of awe, describing their shimmering blond hair and glowing tans. Indeed, his primary reaction is not revulsion but envy: “They believe in something. It’s more than many of us can say.”

What most of us believe, Niedzviecki thinks, is not just a lie but a cheap and secondhand lie. He begins his narrative by exploring the world of backyard wrestling, a tiny corner of pop culture beloved of journalists in recent years. Countless short-lived backyard wrestling “federations” have staged tournaments in which bored young men somewhere in suburbia beat the bejesus out of each other, often using outrageous props, in front of a camcorder and then post the results on the Internet for the enjoyment of like-minded souls. As Niedzviecki observes, the whole enterprise is “an imitation of a TV spectacle (a spectacle that is, itself, an imitation of a sport).”

But the meta-ness of backyard wrestling isn’t what engages him. Most accounts focus on how dangerous it is for untrained teenagers to leap off the garage or bash each other into the cement birdbath (which is arguably the point), or they tell us, with postmodern hopefulness, that these young fans are inscribing their own meanings onto an established cultural practice. For Niedzviecki, backyard wrestlers embody “the kind of specialness that characterizes the new conformity … a genuine desire to articulate genuine individuality that is nonetheless mired in cliché and convention.”

That’s his argument in a nutshell: Those of us who grew up in the post-industrial, pop-culture-saturated West (and a whole lot of people who didn’t) have been raised to believe that we are unique individuals with special destinies. When it comes to imagining that destiny, however, all we have are the mass-produced images of fame and success that everyone shares: Donald Trump in his corner office with its vulgar but expensive furniture, Howard Stern partying joylessly amid pneumatic boobs, pop stars and movie actors trying vainly to imitate the more real-seeming pop stars and movie actors of the past.

Stuffed with half-baked philosophies of self-actualization and self-fulfillment, we also believe that we are ourselves primarily or even solely responsible for reaching that destiny. We have all embraced that e-mail from the cosmos assuring us that we’re VIPs — the Guaranteed Celebrity in the Building can only be us! — even though that requires pretending not to notice that everybody else got the same message.

We didn’t need Niedzviecki to tell us that the Toronto cattle-call auditions for the debut season of “Canadian Idol” — in which 10,000 potential pop stars packed into a gravel parking lot — made for a pathetic spectacle. (Let’s not even ask whether “Canadian Idol” is an unintentionally amusing title in the first place.) Almost everyone he talks to among the “thousands of young people planning on singing interchangeable pop songs” expresses the same New Age-flavored confidence. “Anyone can become what they want to be,” says 16-year-old Brooke. “If you really want to make it there’s always a way,” says Billy, a 20-year-old house painter.

Even the 7,000 or so aspirants who don’t make the first cut refuse to act daunted. “This isn’t the last of me,” one rejected girl tells Niedzviecki. “I know I’m going to be a star. The only person who can make your dreams not come true is yourself.” To stop believing in your own specialness, no matter what the evidence, would be to violate the creed of the new conformism. Furthermore, if you fail to realize your dreams — the same “shared, colonized, implanted” dreams millions of other people are chasing — the fault must be yours.

One of Niedzviecki’s sharper moments arrives in his chapter about the teen self-esteem industry, where he points out that this unstable conundrum — we’re all special, but almost none of us actually become superstars, and that’s supposed to be our own fault — creates its own solution. The end product of the “new-conformist society steeped in pop,” he writes, is a solitary “citizen consumer” who is “passive, focused on the self, willing to work hard to buy the stuff that will make him stand out.” If his specialness continues to elude the rest of the world, he “blames himself and turns inward to therapy, image adjustment, altar consultation, yoga” and so on.

There’s a flash of genuine illumination here; Niedzviecki has captured one of the principal personality types of our time (one likely to seem uncomfortably familiar to most of us) in straightforward and commonsensical prose. Still, like a lot of his book, this is overstated and a bit simplistic. So far as I know, no one has previously identified yoga as a modality of social control, and that seems a bit harsh.

It also isn’t half as original as he may believe. The idea that the individual, as a social category, was essentially invented by consumer capitalism is a central observation of 20th century Marxist and post-Marxist philosophy. Individual human beings have existed as long as the species has, and of course no two possess exactly the same attributes. But the idea of the individual as a hermetic entity surrounding a self, a mystical inner well of needs and desires capable of fulfillment, realization, repression and so on, could not have existed before the combination of capitalism, Protestantism and the beginnings of psychology called it into existence. Medieval Christian society had no time for the self; neither of course did communism or fascism.

Liberal humanism, at least in its popular incarnation, has always insisted that while the human body is imprisoned by circumstance, the soul always remains free. Niedzviecki draws heavily on Foucault’s famous assertion that the reverse is actually true: Every human being possesses at least some physical freedom to do what he will with his body, but the soul is an “instrument of a political anatomy,” impressed upon us by the institutions and ideologies around us. We are free, in other words, to become Pilates enthusiasts, drag queens or debauched junkies. We are not free, Niedzviecki writes, “to evoke an individuality that has not already been implanted in us by a combination of state-sponsored regulation and the wish-fulfillment fantasies of our pop culture.”

Throughout his book, Niedzviecki seems to be restating, presumably at second hand, many of the points in the controversial and massively influential 1944 essay “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” by the German-Jewish refugee scholars Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno (from their book “Dialectic of Enlightenment”). All human needs, they write, are “presented to individuals as capable of fulfillment by the culture industry,” but “individuals experience themselves through their needs only as eternal consumers, as the culture industry’s object.” The point here is “the necessity, inherent in the system, of never releasing its grip on the consumer, of not for a moment allowing him or her to suspect that resistance is possible.”

There’s plenty more one could quote; later in the essay Horkheimer and Adorno have a long paragraph describing the “pseudoindividuality” of Hollywood starlets, “serially produced like the Yale locks which differ by fractions of a millimeter.” They conclude, “The peculiarity of the self is a socially conditioned monopoly commodity misrepresented as natural.” I don’t think this similarity of theme is accidental, but I don’t think Niedzviecki is borrowing ideas without credit either. Probably Horkheimer and Adorno’s vision of culture has just percolated so widely in the academic world that it wasn’t possible to receive a liberal-arts education in the ’90s, as Niedzviecki presumably did, without imbibing it.

You could even say that the criticisms leveled at the angst-ridden Frankfurters over the years also apply to Niedzviecki: Like any convert to a systematic ideology, he is overzealous, and he now sees pop culture in dark, Manichaean, monolithic and humorless terms. (Famously, Horkheimer and Adorno thought that jazz and the movies were fatally debased forms, incapable of genuine aesthetic expression.) To suggest that all struggling artists or musicians share the same scripted dreams of “specialness” and superstardom — that if they don’t want to be Britney or Spielberg, they want to be Cobain or Tarantino — is patently false, and Niedzviecki knows better. I suspect he is still trying to explore and debunk his own dreams of alt-world stardom, and I can sympathize. Perhaps a subtler way of making his point would be to argue that, in a world where every form of cultural expression has become an exchangeable commodity, no individual can be so strange and no artist so confrontational as to escape it entirely.

What all this points toward is the likelihood, already mentioned, that Niedzviecki’s book isn’t really about what he thinks it’s about. It’s unquestionably true that a stylized pseudo-individuality is among the hallmarks of our age, but that’s only one limb of a much larger beast. Niedzviecki seems insufficiently alive to the constantly contradictory, push-me-pull-you nature of contemporary pop culture, a system that resembles top-down dictatorship at the top and grass-roots democracy at the bottom, and which could be said to combine the psychoses and superstitions of both.

I’m not sure that celebrity worship, and the dream of celebrity, for instance, is really about individuality at all. It’s more about transcending individuality, and leaving behind its pain and isolation for an identity that is general and universal. In what sense is Tom Cruise an individual? His emotional life, wacky religious beliefs and childbirth principles are public property, more urgent and present to many of us than the fact that our government has been torturing prisoners in secret jails.

When Niedzviecki visits the theme parks of Orlando, Fla., he writes compellingly about the fact that the throngs gathered there seem bored and dissatisfied. (Horkheimer and Adorno make the same observation about movie audiences.) But to argue that anyone goes to Walt Disney World or Universal Studios believing that it’s in any way an individual experience is stretching his theoretical rubber band past the breaking point. Surely the point of theme parks is to replicate real or imagined collective experiences of the past — the county fair, the vaudeville show, Fourth of July in the town square — while somehow supercharging them. (Does the disillusionment come from recognizing that such things can’t be resurrected, or that they weren’t worth it in the first place?)

Yes, the 10,000 kids in the “Canadian Idol” gravel pit are all hopelessly deluded, and share virtually the same delusion. But every high school in North America has 15 girls who all think they’ll become Mariah Carey, when their real destiny is “Good evening, Holiday Inn Express at Saugatuck Center. How may I direct your call?” That’s not a news flash. Niedzviecki tries and fails to make the same point at a karaoke bar, where the patrons are just goofballing, play-acting at stardom for an evening. Nobody is fooling themselves; nobody believes that Simon Cowell’s people will somehow hear their tape. (The same is probably true for the vast majority of backyard wrestlers. Would Niedzviecki feel more kindly to them if they were playing Batman or Spider-Man?)

When he discusses the rise of “neo-traditionalism,” as with the Arizona Catholic teens or the case of his own brother, who became an ultra-Orthodox Jew despite a secular upbringing, Niedzviecki basically has to admit that the issue isn’t individuality but other troublesome categories such as “authenticity” and “meaning.” As another European expat scholar, George Steiner, has put it, we live in a “post-culture” (he means post-Auschwitz and post-Hiroshima) in which all the moral certainties of Western civilization have been stripped away and we wander about with no clear purpose, like ants whose hill has been blown up by a kid with a firecracker.

Some of us try to stride confidently forward, into late capitalism’s model of conformist individualism. Some try to dig existing collective institutions out of the crushed anthill and breathe new life into them (hence the recent rise of fundamentalist religion, Islam included). Most of us are stuck somewhere in between, trying to piece together identities out of incompatible shards of culture: the flag, vegetarianism, Bill O’Reilly, Iranian cinema, the Isaac Mizrahi clothes at Target sewn by some Chinese teenager. Hell, we might as well all answer that e-mail spambot. Am I VIP? I don’t know; probably not. But there will be genuine celebrities in the building. Why be left out?

More Andrew O'Hehir.

Thursday, May 24, 2012 11:51 AM UTC

“American Idol”: Riveting despite itself

We all knew Phillip Phillips would win. Yes, the judges are nuts. So why did I feel real emotion anyway?

By Willa Paskin

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The final episode of any season of “American Idol” is always a smiling show of force, a confetti-laden massacre of time. After a nearly 40-episode season, along comes the gargantuan finale, an enormous spectacle that contains exactly one minute of real content — when the winners are announced — and two-plus hours of filler. Last night’s episode was nominally about who would be declared the winner of the 11thseason of “Idol” — Phillip Phillips, the humorously named yet handsome guitarist with a twang in his voice and shirts cut to display exactly the appropriate sliver of chest hair, or the huge-voiced, personality-less 16-year old Jessica Sanchez. But sleepily good-looking white guys (and Scotty McCreery) have won the last four seasons of “Idol,” and Phillips was pretty much a lock before the night even began. And so it is a commendation to the near-military professionalism of “Idol” that somehow, for the last half-hour or so, I was riveted to the screen.

The beginning went by in a busy, boring blur. Ryan Seacrest in his tuxedo informed the crowd that 132 million votes had been cast this year (the number of votes cast in the last presidential election: 129 million. Though that doesn’t count teenage girls voting over and over and over again for a guy named Phillip Phillips.) John Fogerty and his mop top of dyed dark hair clanked his voice against Phillips for a while. One of this year’s contestants kept distracting me from the group numbers with her uncanny resemblance to Florence Henderson. Chaka Kahn flirted dangerously with camel toe. Steven Tyler was filmed playing with a three-toed sloth, revealing that he and a three-toed sloth have the exact same hairdo. Jennifer Lopez performed a medley in a sparkly dhoti.

And then Ryan Seacrest invited former contestants Diana Degarmo, who was 16 when she was the runner-up in Season 3, and the long-haired Ace Young, a contestant in Season 5, up onstage. They waved hello, and Young said, “This has always been home to us, and I felt this was the perfect place to ask a simple question.” Ryan chirped, “Dim the lights!” And then Young proposed to a surprised-looking Degarmo — with the help of David Webb jewelry. (Never forget your sponsors.) “I love you to death, you’re my best friend, and I will do anything in my power to have the most unimaginable, amazing life together, if you’ll have me. Diana Nicole DeGarmo … will you … marry … me?” he asked on bended knee. She nodded yes, the “Idol” theme music swelled, and these two newly engaged people, having significantly boosted their chances of getting some reality show company to pay for their wedding, embraced onstage as the show hurried mercilessly, ceaselessly on, this time to the thematically appropriate duet “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”

A wave of emotions crashed over me. I realized I had been screaming at the television. (“Nooooarghhhahaahaeeeee” or something like that.) While this was, on a human level, so ill-advised — what is wrong with doing private things in private???— it was also undeniably entrancing television. The “Idol” machine had struck again. What if these two kids had chosen to get engaged off camera? In the relative privacy of, say, a Cheesecake Factory? Would we, the audience, have been forced to watch a supercut of Steven Tyler’s most lascivious comments instead? One of Jennifer Lopez saying sweetie over and over again? Or just more commercials? When I thought of it this way, I could almost appreciate the utilitarian sacrifice of Degarmo and Young’s privacy and dignity: The entertainment of the many outweighs the needs of the few.

But this engagement was not the highlight of this episode. No, the ever crafty “Idol” had waiting in the wings a tactical tour de force: Jennifer Holliday, the Tony Award-winning actress who originated the role of Effie in the Broadway production of “Dreamgirls,” and so is the ur-performer of “I’m Telling You I’m Not Going,” that canonical musical competition song and a number the teenage Jessica Sanchez has been singing for nearly her whole life. Holliday and Sanchez came onstage to do a nominal duet of the song, which turned into an extended solo. (Sanchez’s willingness to let Holliday steal this number right out from under her is the most likable thing she’s done all season.) Holliday, who looks like she can dislocate her jaw on command, and at various points seemed poised to inhale Sanchez with no need for chewing, absolutely destroyed this song, and did so in such joyful, reckless disregard for what she looked like while doing so — here are some gifs of her in the act — that it almost wiped out the sourness of the engagement sequence. Here was a public act, one that was meant to be public, performed with such passion, it felt private: Who can possibly know what is going on inside of a person’s body or mind when they are as possessed by anything as Holliday was by this song?

When Ryan Seacrest finally told Phillip Phillips he had won, after 10 o’clock at night, he picked up his guitar and began to sing. Ever since Kelly Clarkson cried her way through “A Moment Like This” in the show’s first season, the winner is expected to perform their new single at the end of the show. But halfway through “Home,” Phillips broke off, to sob. The background singers kept singing, and the confetti kept falling, but Phillips didn’t even try to get back on the mic. For about a minute, he stood on stage, quiet music playing in the background, trying to pull himself together, to do what was expected of him. He couldn’t. He didn’t sing again. Instead, he walked offstage to his family, who pulled him into a big group hug, inadvertently hiding his face from the cameras. At which point, I think that I got something in my eye.

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Willa Paskin is Salon's staff TV writer. More Willa Paskin.

Tuesday, Apr 24, 2012 12:00 AM UTC

Ryan Seacrest’s bland ambition

He's an asexual icon for traditional cultural conservatism, boring his way into the hearts of millions

By Michael Barthel

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(Credit: Fox/Benjamin Wheelock)

Imagine, for a moment, that Dick Clark had died in 2002 instead of 2012. How would his obituaries have been different? In most ways, there would have been little change. In the last decade, Clark has continued with the ventures he’d been known for, hosting and producing a New Year’s Eve broadcast, various radio programs, game shows and TV specials. But there would have been two big differences. The first thing was Clark’s 2004 stroke, and his courageous return to public life despite a speech impediment modulating his famous voice.

And the second? The second is Ryan Seacrest.

Seacrest appears in Clark’s obits like the Boswell to Clark’s Samuel Johnson, quoted instead of family members as the apparent authority on Clark’s life and legacy. His tribute to Clark on “Idol” the night after his death became a news story in and of itself. For years, Seacrest had been slowly positioning himself as the new Dick Clark, taking over as the host of the New Year’s broadcast when Clark was ill, and modeling his career after Clark’s by taking ownership stakes in radio shows and TV ventures. Seacrest has become so entwined with Clark’s story that when news of the death broke, it was hard not to picture Seacrest kneeling in some dark rite, screaming to the heavens as Clark’s power possessed him, “Highlander”-style.

The problem with this image is that it’s far too interesting to have anything to do with Ryan Seacrest, a man who has made a career out of being professionally boring. If we’re going with a sci-fi reference, it’s easier to think of him like the bureaucrats in “Brazil,” toiling away in some back office, looking up briefly as an intern arrives to tell him the news, nodding curtly, shedding a single tear, and immediately returning to work. (During his tribute on “Idol,” he said that Clark was “in a better place saying, ‘Hey, let’s get on with the show, OK?’”) Seacrest is not someone who does dramatic things in fields. He is a person who stands in places of no place and intones blank words like a priest performing some long-deprecated rite. And he’s been very, very successful at it.

Seacrest’s extraordinary rise, so counter to the prevailing trends of the time, points to a current of artistic and social conservatism in the mass audience that persists despite the relentlessly progressive story we like to tell ourselves about the march of culture.

Like Clark, Seacrest got his start in radio. Clark’s early jobs were in an industry where local was king, getting spots at small-bore stations in upstate New York and only going national when “Bandstand” was picked up for TV distribution. Seacrest, however, came to radio just as it was being deregulated and local stations were being eliminated in favor of national conglomerates like ClearChannel. As such, he was able to move to Los Angeles and, at the age of 20, take over a morning radio show that became nationally syndicated. He followed that up with his own form of conglomeration, taking over the weekly “American Top 40″ from Casey Kasem in 2004, and launching his own new programming ventures, like “On Air With Ryan Seacrest,” a four-hour block he records daily and which is distributed to more than 150 stations nationwide.

But his big break was “Idol.” Premiering in 2002, it at first seemed an unlikely phenomenon. Why would anyone want to watch a “Star Search” where the contestants didn’t change? The country did not lack for pop stars, after all: Between “Total Request Live” and Radio Disney we were experiencing something of a bumper crop in those years. The success of “Idol” speaks to both the unalloyed effectiveness of its format and something deep in the national mood at that moment. Bathed in post-millennial anxiety, and eager as always to avoid discussing the possible causes of and responses to a national tragedy, “Idol” seemed to reflect our best selves. It was meritocratic (the best will win, regardless of their social position), individualistic (only single singers, no messy bands), populist (the people vote), and aggressively cheerful.

Key to that success was Seacrest. The judges represented the business aspect of the transaction, the reward at the end. The voters were America, of course. But Ryan was the Idol. For struggling amateurs, he was the end product they were training for, smooth, professional and unchallenged, a perfect pop product encased in a suit. While the contestants’ images varied, Seacrest’s presence on stage was a constant reminder of what the producers had in mind when they talked about a pop star.

There have long been rumors that Seacrest is gay. It’s hard to know what to do with these, exactly, but there is something undeniably unsettling about his sexuality. The image he projects is that of a non-threatening teenage boy, a pre-pubescent heartthrob like Ricky Nelson, David Cassidy or Justin Bieber. But Seacrest, who has dated Teri Hatcher and Sheryl Crow, is decidedly post-pubescent. He is, as they say, a grown man. Merv Griffin, who hired him to host a children’s computer-themed quiz show called “Click!” in the mid-’90s, said that “he had this spiky haircut, and we knew all the little girls in the audience would love him, and they did.” And they do. And he doesn’t care. Which is, maybe, a big point in his favor.

But it’s a point against the audience. All teen idols grow up, and as moral panicky as the process can be (“I’m Not a Girl,” etc.), we’ve seen it happen enough times now to know that part of the pleasure of a non-threatening teenager is knowing the threat they will inevitably become; Justin Bieber is fascinating because we want to see how it all spirals down. For Seacrest to stay in that neuter state reflects a childish, eyes-closed denial of reality among those audience members who still like it. The last decade has seen a remarkable opening of public discourse about all kinds of sex; currently the news media is tirelessly (and tiresomely) covering a story that basically amounts to “Hey, some people like bondage!” Adult sexuality is at least an option for our public conversations now, and lots of openly gay celebrities have remained idols in their own way, able to publicly pursue relationships without having to maintain the facade of blank sexlessness. But if Seacrest, the Delphonic seer of conventional wisdom, is in fact gay (or sexual at all) and truly thinks breaking face would kill his career, then maybe he’s right. For all the recent gains we’ve made, there’s a sizable portion of our fellow citizens who would much rather have Ricky Schroder stay a boy. Whether you want to have Seacrest or be him, he is selling the troubling fantasy that desire doesn’t have to be dirty.

Throughout a decade in which celebrity scandals were everywhere, Seacrest himself remained steadfastly above the fray. The scandal boom was great for entertainment news, but unstable workers are bad for the entertainment business. Scandal-plagued actors may get more publicity, but they make it a lot harder for a production to get insured, and the harder it is for the talent to hit their marks, the longer it takes to make the product. You never had to worry about that with Seacrest. A tireless worker and consummate professional, a morality clause would just be superfluous for any contract you might want to strike with him. In a decade of turmoil, Seacrest was the rock, the thing you could always depend on.

But since when has good TV been about dependability? The fun of watching “Idol” is its anarchy, whether it’s Paula’s looseness and Simon’s free-form contempt, an unknown amateur maturing into a star or flaming out under pressure, or the direction of each season, which producers, for all their tinkering, ultimately leave in the hands of the audience. “Idol,” at its best, is a show that can genuinely surprise everyone. In the midst of that glorious chaos, Seacrest stands apart, a stable center. His ability to parlay that personality into lucrative positions on other shows indicates that stability is what a certain portion of the audience wants. And that’s worrisome.

During an authoritarian period in American politics, culture was the lone bright spot. It seemed to be rapidly democratizing: corporate conglomerates were failing, user-generated content was everywhere, and even highly controlled mediums like TV were expanding their offerings to become far more adventurous. But no shift brings everyone along with it, and as easy as it now is to find people who like “Mad Men,” cultural progressives are haunted by fears about what everyone else is watching. Maybe, like Glenn Beck said, we really are surrounded; certainly a lot of people seemed to watch “Two and a Half Men.” Seacrest is like your square brother who went into banking: His success makes you wonder if the cultural power you feel when you’re with your people is really all that strong. Despite the fact that Ryan Seacrest has never done anything even slightly objectionable, people hate Ryan Seacrest. And that’s why.

“Idol” has, inevitably, begun to wane in influence and audience. As the paying audience for pop music massively declined during the ’00s, “Idol” had been able to stay ahead of the curve by making it about competition and narrative rather than music. But that audience had broken down too, splintered into niches by the expanding array of entertainment options. This should have spelled doom for Seacrest, eternally a mass-market guy. But he saw it coming, saw that the family-friendly audience he served would soon just become one market among many, and formed Ryan Seacrest Productions in 2006. His major hits so far have all involved the Kardashians, but he just signed a big new deal with Comcast, and more could be on the way.

If Dick Clark is an eternal teenager trapped in a ‘50s image of adolescence, Seacrest is a teenager from 2002 who’s persisted across time, simultaneously trying to please parents and safely experience more sensual pleasures from the standpoint of a moment when America had a serious interest in being pure and virginal. He’s achieved this by splitting his personality across business ventures, appearing as a squeaky-clean host on TV and radio while using his production company to push delightfully trashy reality fare like “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” When we look at Ryan Seacrest, we see innocence; when we look at Ryan Seacrest’s productions, we see naughtiness framed as a secondhand experience. A man so averse to scandal that he takes pains to present himself as asexual, Seacrest is one of the few remaining examples of television’s “Least Objectionable Programming” doctrine, a remnant of the era of mass audiences. His particular evil genius has been to recognize that you can do just this but for every audience. Give the family hour what it wants, give the late-night gossipers what they want, and keep it all firmly separate with plausible deniability.

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Michael Barthel is a PhD candidate in the communication department at the University of Washington. He has written about pop music for the Awl, Idolator, and the Village Voice. More Michael Barthel.

Monday, Feb 27, 2012 5:38 PM UTC

“American Idol’s” niceness problem

With toothless judges and 24 forgettable finalists, the venerable talent contest slips behind "The Voice"

By Roger Catlin

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Steven Tyler, Jennifer Lopez and Randy Jackson (Credit: Fox)

Two big things happened on “American Idol” last week. First, the top 24 contestants were chosen. They were a largely bland, unsurprising bunch, selected by one of the most toothless panels of judges on TV, but they’ll still be the ones viewers will vote on for the rest of the season.

More significantly, perhaps, “Idol” was usurped (just barely) as the top show on TV by a fresher-feeling copycat, “The Voice.” There’s actual enthusiasm for the biggest hit on NBC in years and waning excitement around “Idol,” whose tired format in its 11th season is undermined further by judges who have been sweetened into acting all nice, all the time.

Throughout this season and last, the three “Idol” judges loved just about every audition home audiences were allowed to see. Nobody was terrible, or awful, or the worst thing anybody ever heard, to use the phrases of Simon Cowell, whose brutal honesty made the show in the first place.

That left with Cowell, leaving the teddy bear Randy Jackson as the meanest of the three, of all things. And the worst he’ll ever say is, “Dawg, singing is just not for you.” But mostly all he, Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler will ever say to the rare reject is “You’re not quite ready, sweetheart” or “Come back next year.”

Cowell was a record producer who didn’t have time for the bad, and no inclination to encourage the mediocre. More than that, he acted as if he had something on the line in considering these voices. The present judges, especially the marquee names, have no such urgency.

This far into the show, every remaining contestant seems a reminder of a past one: DeAndre Brackensick has the flowing curls of a Jason Castro (but a better voice); teary father Adam Brock the bespectacled look of Danny Gokey with blue-eyed gospel voice of Taylor Hicks. Fifteen-year-old Eben Franckewitz has the pre-puberty voice of a David Archuleta or some kid from “America’s Got Talent.”

There’s one guy with an unfortunate Vanilla Ice haircut and another who seems a little unstable until he’s allowed to play drums while singing; a third has just discovered he is the biological son of the lead singer for the truly terrible ’80s band Flotsam and Jetsam – a little flotsam off the old jetsam, if you will. It’s my favorite fun-fact about any contestant and he’s the last offspring of a famous person, since Jim Carrey’s daughter didn’t make it through Hollywood week.

Hollywood week was so hellacious this season, OSHA may want to investigate labor violations, since it pretty much forces newly formed groups to practice into the evening. So when they do perform, they’re sick or falling into the orchestra pit, or both.

If the current season has a voice of conscience it may be Heejun Han, who makes frank comments about the process and other contestants as if he’s not part of it, until it’s time for him to sing.

All of the guys are pretty good singers and already have an edge over the much more generic group of young women. Among them is David Leathers, an adorable round-faced kid with a voice like young Michael Jackson and the nickname “Mr. Steal Your Girl,” who is so obviously right for the show he plays the role Melanie Amaro played on “X Factor.” Her ouster was so glaringly mistaken, she was asked back to the show and won.

To get back on, Leathers will have to beat a giant with a soulful voice and another deep-voiced country kid with too big a cowboy hat (like the one who won Season 10 – can you remember his name now?).

The top 12 women, by contrast, seem too similar in their passable voices and smiley good looks — even their names are ridiculously similar: There’s a Hollie, a Hallie, a Haley and a Baylie. There are a few country belles in there, should audiences hanker for some more Lauren Alaina, who was runner-up last year in the all-country finals.

Among the women, there seems just a single standout: Big-voiced Jennifer Hirsh, who could be held back only because of her normal, healthy and non-traditional (that is to say: non-size zero) look. Unless voters with a long memory won’t mind harkening back to the first “American Idol” winner Kelly Clarkson, who by the way will be serving this season as a mentor … on “The Voice.”

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Wednesday, Nov 2, 2011 7:00 PM UTC

Is a teen “Idol” star suddenly too skinny?

Lauren Alaina celebrates becoming "extra small." Her weight obsession might send other girls an unhealthy message

By Mary Elizabeth Williams

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Rest easy, America. Lauren Alaina, the 16-year-old “American Idol” runner-up, has lost 25 pounds. In an interview this week with Us, the country crooner — whose debut album is perched just below “Idol” castmate Scotty McCreery’s on the Billboard top-10 — talks about “changing my diet” and learning “correct portion control” to achieve her newly slimmed-down physique. Whew, now she can be a real star.

Naturally, the online and print tabloids have eagerly celebrated her triumph — noting how weight loss success “does a body good” and marveling that “her figure is looking fabulous.” Reminder: This is copy written by adults — about a 16-year-old-girl. Suddenly I’ve lost my appetite.

Alaina tells Us that in addition to cutting back and doing “lots of squats,” she’s also relied on the low-carb, high-protein food delivery service Sunfare. And in an interview with Taste of Country, she admitted that she also has a personal trainer.

A young woman with a show business career and a deep-pocketed record label has every right to, as she puts it, better herself. Likewise, there’s nothing wrong with learning portion control, especially in a country where super-size is the norm and restaurant plates run to the size of manhole covers. And physical fitness is a sadly diminishing priority in too many young people’s lives.

Health and weight are not the same thing, however. And excuse me, but I don’t recall ever hearing a peep about the diverse bodies among other “Idol” contenders, including the generously proportioned Jacob Lusk. Alaina’s maxim that “you have to do it for yourself” sounds like a positive message of encouragement to other adolescents struggling to make healthy choices. But she’s also said things like: “I’m 10 pounds from my goal — almost there! I wear size small and extra-small now!” What’s 10 pounds less than extra-small? Lauren Alaina’s goal weight.

Earlier this month, Alaina told “Access Hollywood” that, “as a girl, a teenage girl, without even wanting to, you constantly compare yourself to other girls. It’s like I was in this competition with all these beautiful girls. Sometimes it would swallow me up. I would compare myself to those other girls to the point where it would make me sick, because I’m not like heavy, heavy, but I’m not the skinniest girl in the world.” Don’t worry, Lauren. Just a few pounds and a little more slavering encouragement from the celebrity press, and you will be.

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Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams.

Monday, Aug 15, 2011 4:30 PM UTC

The night my family won “American Idol”

It was just another night in the cheap seats -- until a random encounter turned everything around

By Mary Elizabeth Williams

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Haley Reinhart, Scotty McCreery and Lauren Alaina.

On a Wednesday evening last March, my daughters and I had an “American Idol” campout in our living room. I made hot dogs and microwaved s’mores as we watched the contestants croon through a crowd-pleasing roster of Motown hits. The next morning, my father-in-law died. That night, the girls and I gathered again in the living room, huddled on the couch in our pajamas, and watched Casey Abrams sing just a few bars of “I Don’t Need No Doctor” to be granted reprieve from elimination.

For a decade now, “American Idol” has been winning fans with its weekly wallop of suspense and surprise, along with a fairy-tale conceit that fortune can smile on even the most obscure among us. It was a message that never really resonated for my family and me until this past season, when its variety show shtick turned out to be a surprisingly effective balm for our heartaches. The competitive song showdowns of James and Paul and Naima got us through a lot of rough, tearful nights, and so a pilgrimage to see our vocal heroes on their Idols Live tour seemed like an inevitable indulgence of grief therapy. And this week, after a new round of doctor visits, setbacks and concerns for loved ones, we had found ourselves clinging again to the prospect of awkward dance moves and Journey covers. Yet before last night, I’d never imagined how potent the show’s magic could be.

My daughters and I had never been to Newark’s Prudential Center, but as we stepped inside from a torrential summer downpour, we nonetheless instinctively beelined for our usual seats. Remember where Harry and his friends sat for the Quiddich World Cup in “Goblet of Fire”? That’s always us. Forget the nosebleed section — on my budget, it’s strictly the altitude sickness section for my kids. My children are accustomed to open rehearsals, Shakespeare in the park and college football games that start at halftime, when they let you in free. So accustomed are they to tickets that read “partial view,” they instinctively roost next to the back exits even at the movies.

Despite my daughters’ — and my own — genuine excitement at being part of the enthusiastic crowd, of getting to hear Pia, Lauren, Jacob and the rest belt out a few favorites, my heart sank as I approached our seats, located in an altogether different ZIP code from the stage. I wished, just once, to be someplace other than the last row. “Idol” had been a bright respite in an unbearably bleak period of illness and loss. I couldn’t resist a pang of envy for the families striding front and center, the ones swarming the concession stand for $30 souvenir books. “This is awesome,” I told the girls as we headed to the ladies’ room before the lights went down, “but sometimes I wish I could give you more.” Then a funny thing happened.

No sooner had the words left my lips when a man with an “Idol” staff badge casually nodded to us and asked, “You excited for the show?” And when my girls and I whooped in the affirmative, he asked, “Would you like to meet the Idols?”

As a skeptical New Yorker, I gave the only logical reply. “Look, dude,” I said, “I don’t have any money.”

“I’m not asking for money,” he said, handing us badges. “Come downstairs after the show for the meet and greet.” He was already walking away by the time we could sputter amazed thanks.

And so, after the show, a group of us — some clearly with connections and some just randomly selected goobers like us — found ourselves ushered through the bowels of the Prudential Center. We wended our way through a long tunnel until suddenly, there at our feet, was Lauren Alaina, plopped down on the floor signing autographs for a group of rapt fans. There was Casey Abrams, giving an ecstatic bear hug to fellow former contestant Brett Loewenstern. There were Pia Toscano and Haley Reinhart, hands on hips and posing for photographs. It was like opening a door to Wonderland. For a brief, happy time, the girls snapped pictures and gave eager, giddy hugs to the young men and women they’d passionately championed week after week all season long. (James Durbin, perhaps due to the Asperger’s and Tourette’s that can make socializing in crowds a challenge, wasn’t present.) My younger child, her loyalty to Lauren still fierce, refused to even approach this year’s champion, Scotty McCreery, preferring instead to engage in a serious bout of high-fiving with Jacob Lusk. Eventually the crowd thinned, and two train rides and much, much later, the kids made it to their beds, exhausted and exhilarated and still insistently wearing their badge-festooned T-shirts.

A few minutes with the stars of a TV-show-based musical revue won’t cure cancer, and they sure as hell aren’t a substitute for a lost family member. But that time last night was something else for my family, something nonetheless important. A little entertainment. A little bit of grace.

Soon after I was diagnosed with cancer, a friend who’d had his own harrowing year emailed me a few words of wisdom. “I’ve discovered the answer to ‘Why?’ is ‘Because,’ and the answer to ‘Why me?’ is ‘Why not you?’” he wrote. “So let people do astonishingly generous things for you. Know why? Because why not you?” As my beloved says, “Every time I have a worst-case scenario, I have to do a wildest dream come true as well. Every negative projection deserves a positive one. It’s only fair.” I like those odds.

Life is random and surprising. But it’s wonderful to remember that it’s often not just in the “oh crap, assume the crash-position” way. Sometimes you find a quarter on the sidewalk. Sometimes a friend calls right when you’re thinking of her. And sometimes, a fairy godmother in the form of a New Jersey security guard plucks you from the back row to backstage. Why? Why not? For no better reason than just because it’s your lucky night.

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Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams.