Adam Lambert

This was all part of a lead-in to the "The Early Show's" interview with Lambert, in which anchor Maggie Rodriguez implored him to think about "the children" and desperately tried to get him to apologize to his "child fans." Thankfully, Lambert got a chance to talk about the double-standard behind the uproar: "If it had been a female pop performer, I don't think there nearly would have been as much of an outrage." When Rodriguez asked whether it was an issue of being male or being gay, he replied: "Both. I think it's a double-whammy." Then she came back with: "But, but, I don't think people have said specifically that they were upset about the fact that you're gay or that you're kissing a guy." Right, people have generally been savvier with their prejudice -- unlike CBS.

You know what? My sensibilities have been deeply offended by this "Early Show" segment -- when do I get my apology from Rodriguez and and CBS?

 

If you're like me, you're thinking, "What's not to love?" But if you're like some Pop & Hiss readers, apparently, you're thinking, "What about the children?!"

Within minutes of the American Music Awards coming to an end, irate viewers had begun writing in. Reader Kathie Kunish declared that the telecast should have been rated 'PG-14,' and user 'penny' noted that she had to cover the eyes of her 10-year-old daughter.

Reader Richard Bowen agreed, posting on Pop & Hiss, 'I know he wants to break out and show the world his dangerous side, but why alienate an entire population of kids to do it?'

Um, because that's part of showing your dangerous side? Who says, "I want my image to be hotter and edgier, but still completely appropriate for a tween audience"? Not Adam Lambert, bless him. "I'm just trying to have a good time onstage," he told Pop & Hiss. "It's a sexy song. It's 2009, it's time to take more risks. It's about entertainment. People want to be surprised. It's too bad that people are so scared."

And of course, what goes unspoken is what people are scared of: The gay. If it were just about a sexually suggestive performance on a prime time awards show, there would be no news; as Lambert points out, female performers like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Madonna "have been risqué for years." But when it's a man groping both men and women onstage, and throwing in a same-sex smooch, we must protect the children! "Honestly," says Lambert, "there's a huge double standard."

Compare Lambert's performance last night with Britney's rendition of "I'm a Slave 4 U" at the 2001 Video Music Awards and see if you don't agree.

 

"But Adam deserves this," he stammered after hearing the results.

See, even Kris Allen knew it was not supposed to go down like this.

The title was supposed to go to Adam Lambert, whose daring performances all season turned the predictable show into must-see TV. We haven't had a contestant with his kind of originality since Fantasia Barrino, and even she didn't set old standards aflame like Lambert, whose version of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" was a trippy, otherworldly barnburner. A kind of goth-vampire-rocker hybrid, he wore black nail polish and eyeliner and enough foundation to scrape off with a fingernail, but it was Lambert's performances that stuck out: His "Mad World" was so haunting even Simon Cowell gave him a standing ovation.

After so many years of talented but dull "American Idol" winners -- a little Jordin Sparks here, some Taylor Hicks and David Cook over there -- it was hard not to go overboard about a performer who was genuinely inventive, who could channel both Robert Plant and Liza Minnelli, who was unpredictable and just a little bit dangerous, who injected a slithery vamp into a show that practically wore a chastity belt, and who, by the way, had a banshee wail that made Axl Rose look demure. Whether you were knocked out by what he did, or you found it to be stunty diva caterwauling (and I found myself in both camps on various occasions), his vocal control, his swaggering stage confidence, his plain old pipes made most of the other contestants just look like chuckleheads.

In fact, up until the moment the winner was announced, I actually felt a bit sorry for Kris Allen, who had been eclipsed by the Lambert supernova throughout the two-night finale. Randy might have claimed there was "a real live competition goin' on," but as far as I could tell, in this showdown, one guy had a Glock and the other had a squirt gun.

On the Tuesday night performance finale, Allen followed up Lambert's thrilling, feverish rendition of Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come" with a bloodless performance of Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On?" that would be more at home on a subway platform than an arena stage. On the Wednesday night results show, Lambert unfurled his freak flag for a duet with KISS -- he clomped around in towering glitter platforms, his eyelids bedazzled, his outfit sprouting some bizarre metal contraption from his arms that looked like, what? Futuristic shoulderpads? It was fantastic to see him in full-blown rock opera mode, as flames shot up in the background and pinwheeling sparklers lit up the stage. Meanwhile, Allen strummed his guitar with Keith Urban like they were a bar band playing for free Pabst. When Lambert and Allen took the stage for a finale, singing "We Are the Champions" with the surviving members of Queen, it was almost as though Kris Allen had disappeared entirely. Here was Lambert, taking the scepter of Freddie Mercury and sending it soaring into the rafters.

But Allen had flown under the radar all season. And for someone who played his own instruments and had his own way with reinventing a tune, he was much better than anyone gave him credit for. Understated and easygoing, he is the flip side to Lambert's electric Southern California flamboyance: a good Christian boy from a small Arkansas town, humble and self-deprecating, married to a blandly pretty blond. He didn't have the biggest voice, but it was downright frustrating to watch as the judges patted Kris on the head and waved him off into the wings after a shrewdly stripped-down version of Donna Summers' "She Works Hard for the Money," say, or a confident, classy performance of "Falling Slowly" from "Once." His reinterpretation of Kanye West's "Heartless" was better than the original, managing to find a warm, easy groove in that song without resorting to typical "Idol" histrionics. I always imagined him on VH1 one day, wearing his kangol hat with flip-flops on a beach, playing his six-string in front of a sunset, filling the soft-rock hole that's been well-served by Jason Mraz and Jack Johnson. I figured he'd make a great fourth runner-up.

And if there was a backlash against Lambert, it's partly that the judges swaddled him in such fawning praise -- "Iconic!"The Michael Phelps of American Idol!" -- and the media treated him like he was a lock (he made the cover of Entertainment Weekly weeks before the finale) while performers like Allen were almost completely dismissed.

It didn't help Lambert that he seemed out of sync with the middle American families that make up the show's fanbase. "I wouldn't plan on going to Nashville any time soon," Simon Cowell told him after his daring performance of "Ring of Fire."

To which Adam responded, "Trust me, I wasn't planning on it."

Which brings us to the subject of Adam's sexuality. By now, surely you've heard the rumors, or seen the pictures, or read the stories about whether he is or he isn't, and if he is, well, could he still win "American Idol"? In an age when Lindsay Lohan dates a woman, Ellen DeGeneres and Rachel Maddow are household names and Neil Patrick Harris actually increased his cachet by coming out, I counted myself among the people who never thought it much mattered. I find it not only believable that we could have an openly gay American Idol, but also that we could have an openly gay American Idol and it wouldn't even be that big a deal. Maybe I overestimated how far we've come. Maybe I overestimated just how much "American Idol" is stuck in the past.

But what I suspect did in Adam was his penchant for risk and his perceived weirdness, the very qualities that made him compelling in the first place. The tweens who are intended to buy these albums -- the raison d'être for the show, after all, is to push product -- want a star who is huggable and easy to listen to, someone who will sing them pretty power ballads. These are the people who are supposed to buy the first single from the winner, "No Boundaries." Co-written by fourth judge Kara DioGuardi, it is an artless mishmash of nonsense about dreams and hurricanes and mountains, a pop song that's practically computer generated for maximum predictability. Kris Allen, bless him, will have to wear that hairshirt.

Meanwhile, Lambert can focus on his own career. Plenty of the most famous "American Idol" contestants never won, after all. And, hey, I hear Queen is looking for a new frontman. 

This year, however, I found myself dragged before the set in mid-season by my 12-year-old daughter, who discovered "American Idol" and got hooked. I figured I would never have a better person to watch it with: Celeste not only loves pop music, she's a trained singer who has been performing since she was 7 with the San Francisco Girls Chorus, a nationally recognized chorus whose top level performed at Obama's inauguration. It's more fun screaming "he was flat!" at someone who has an ear.

The family that watches "American Idol" together may stay together, but that doesn't mean that the show isn't a big, fat portent of cultural doom. (NBC Universal head Jeff Zucker said it might be "the most impactful show in the history of television," and whenever studio execs say things like that, it is wise to prepare for the End of Days.) The show may have a chewy, heartwarming center, but it's unbelievably creepy around the edges. You want the most blatant, unapologetic product placement of all time? The recent Ford "Magic Show" video shoot segment (complete with "arty" Hollywood director) made me feel like I was watching a YouTube video of the Visigoths approaching the walls of Rome. The show prostitutes itself before anything that will sell, from Ford to Coca-Cola and iTunes. "AI" stands for both "American Idol" and "artificial intelligence," and there couldn't be anything more artificial -- or, from a capitalist standpoint, intelligent -- than the way the show manufactures cultural widgets. The show's producers carefully select a group of contestants who drive the show's insanely large (25 million people) viewership, which allows the show to sell 30-second ads for $623,000, the highest rate on TV. It then throws bones back to the sponsors with product placement, and turns the winners, whose contracts "AI" owns, into yet another herd of cash cows. If vertical integration went any further, we'd be in David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest," where the months are named after products.

 But as with all reality TV, all this marketing and moneymaking is driven by an irreducible and addictive kernel: real people competing. And that's the part that pulled me, and 24,999,999 other people, in. It's weird, finding yourself passionately arguing about who is best at a genre you don't even like. It's a little bit like comparing different models of Hummers. But the secret of reality TV's success is that just about any human competition can be made interesting: Get the right group of people and shoot them in the right way, and you can turn a game of tiddlywinks into the second coming of World War II. The truth is that TV has been working this vein since the medium was born.

And the show has another trump card: music. OK, it's pop music, but that's such a huge mansion that it contains some rooms everyone is going to like. That may be the ultimate draw of "American Idol": Pop music is so deep in our cultural DNA that we're all experts. We may not all know how to write or produce a hit song, like the judges, but we all have an almost infinite resource of pop-music memories to draw on. 

And that knowledge includes not just music, but that ineffable thing called style -- which is where it gets interesting. For pop music is about both musical talent and image, and the distinction between them is a blurred no-man's-land.

"American Idol" offers a strange, and in some ways subversive, perspective on pop music. Because it features amateurs who lack the seamless, produced polish of pop pros (although one or two ringers have apparently sneaked in), it actually deconstructs the very medium that its contestants aspire to conquer. Maybe the weirdest and most compelling thing about the show is watching real people who, for perfectly good reasons, desperately aspire to be devoured by the great plastic machinery of pop stardom -- but who, in order to seize that gold ring, have to tap into their own naive, mundane talent, have to be themselves. It's a paradox as old as America, and it drives the show. When Ryan Seacrest tells contestants who have been voted off that they have to sing for their lives, it's hokey -- but it's irresistible.

 And because the contestants actually need to be talented, there are fewer of the synthetic hard-body pretty boys and girls who pop up in shows like "Survivor." Whether by the Machiavellian wiles of the producers in charge of the selection process, or more likely just because that's who they are, the finalists are refreshingly unstylish and nondescript. They're basically a bunch of schmoes who can sing.

For its part, the vast audience serves as a kind of Greek chorus, whose job it is to balance all the diverse and sometimes contradictory attributes that go into making a pop star, and deliver its judgment. Sometimes it rewards pure musical talent, sometimes style, sometimes something else altogether. It isn't predictable. And one of the things that makes the show watchable is the sense that the audience might choose someone for reasons that are less synthetic, Machiavellian and coldly knowing than the reasons why a studio exec might choose them.

 What makes the show fascinating is that the criteria the audience uses to determine who will win are uncertain and up for grabs. Pop music is fashion. But good music is also good music, even if it's sung by a dork. Neil Diamond is about as unhip as you can get, but "Solitary Man" is a great song.

Which brings us to the current crop of seven contestants. The odds-on favorite to win, and deservedly so, is Adam Lambert. Adam has towered above the other singers for weeks, to the point where it seems almost unfair. His fellow contestants are all talented, but they're not in his league. He attacks his songs with the fiery assurance of a seasoned artist. His interpretation of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" a few weeks ago was stunningly original. He's a screamer with a killer falsetto, but his rendition of "Tracks of My Tears" on Motown Week demonstrated that he can sing under control, and that song also showed off his near-perfect pitch. This week he rocketed his way through Steppenwolf's "Born to Be Wild," showing off his outrageous heavy-metal upper register. Plus, the man can move -- in fact, he's the only one of the contestants who seems to have a working body. He looks good: His black hair and fleshy cheeks recall Elvis, always a good pop predecessor to have. Finally, he passes the all-important imagination test: You can imagine paying money to see him performing on a real stage right now.

So I'm a big Adam fan. I'm still expecting him to take it all. But this week, for the first time it entered my mind that someone else might win if Adam stumbled, and that I might not even mind that much. Before we get to who that is, though, let us pause, in schlocky, suspense-building, Ryan Seacrest-like fashion, to review the rest of the field.

At this point, there are four serious contestants and three doomed souls. Doomed soul No. 1 is Anoop Desai. Anoop has a fine voice, like all of the contestants at this stage. He did an almost uncannily exact cover of Smokey Robinson's "Ooo Baby Baby." But he sounded like a tape recorder. There's something smoothly empty about his singing. It's a little too easy to imagine him crooning in a Las Vegas ballroom.

Doomed soul No. 2, Lil Rounds, has a strong gospel/soul voice, but has struggled to make the transition to singing pop. She does not seem to inhabit her songs, but only visit them: It's hard to get a read on who she is. After her last song, Bette Midler's "The Rose," she complained that the judges had told her she wasn't artistic enough, but then didn't reward her for trying to give her own imprint to the song by adding an R&B middle. Basically, she was saying she'd been jerked around, and that no matter what she did, they didn't like it. There was some justice to her charge, but ultimately the problem is hers. Lil just hasn't figured out how to negotiate her way to her musical persona. Her singing, while better than Anoop's, isn't extraordinary enough to overcome that problem.

Doomed soul No. 3, Matt Giraud, was saved by the judges, who appear to like him more than they like Anoop or Lil. Matt is a solid R&B belter, but probably doesn't have the breeding to finish in the money.

That leaves the four who could still win. The most intriguing of them is Allison Iraheta. Allison has a stunning alto voice, throaty and deep and smoky, almost freakishly mature for someone 16 years old. She killed doing Bonnie Raitt's "I Can't Make You Love Me" a week ago. No other singer left has pipes like hers, which gives her a legit dark-horse shot. But she may run afoul of her vague and amorphous image, which is reflected in her less than impressive wardrobe choices: She comes across as a confused combination of thrift-store gamine, aspiring punker and girl next door. The fact that she's just a kid and can't be expected to have figured this stuff out, alas, will not help her: There are no handicaps given for youth on this show.

Kris Allen is an extremely solid performer -- he's good-looking in a boyish way, with a fine voice, excellent phrasing and an attractive, slightly vulnerable intensity as a performer. He also plays a nice guitar. If he kills every song from here on out and Adam stumbles, he could sneak in. But that's unlikely.

And that brings up the one contestant besides Adam, and possibly Allison, who has a chance to win it all: Danny Gokey. It was only Tuesday night that it struck me that Danny could have an outside shot to beat Adam, and that if he did, he would have earned it. A church choir director whose wife just died, Danny has been strong all along, but somehow I never took him seriously. Maybe it was his material, or his appearance. He's a stocky man with a likable disposition, but no one's idea of a pop star. On Tuesday, performing Lionel Ritchie's "Endless Love," he started out slowly, hampered by clunky harp chords that got in his way. But then he came to the chorus and hit the big note, nailed it with his gorgeous rough-rich voice, showing tonal quality that Adam, for all his skill and swagger, doesn't have. I don't think Danny has the chops to overtake the Adam juggernaut, but if everything falls perfectly into place, he could.

Which brings up the elephant in the room: Adam's gayness. (He has not actually come out, but pictures of him kissing men and a video of him saying that women are not his preference are all over the Internet.) No gay man has ever won "Idol," which raises the sociopolitical stakes of the show's finale considerably. If Adam loses, will it be because of homophobia?

Since we don't know how the contestants will perform, there's no way to say. It's not impossible, sadly, that bigotry could play a role. But if Danny or Allison, or somehow Kris, sing the songs of their lives, and Adam is off, it is at least conceivable that the long shots could win fair and square, simply because more people decided that the sounds coming out of their mouths were more beautiful than the ones coming out of Adam's.

 Adam also has a great voice, but he excels at the other side of pop music -- the stylish, the theatrical. He's a performer. In this light, a final showdown between Adam, Danny and Allison would be rich with cultural ironies. Adam, the outsider, the gay man, is actually the one riding our dominant cultural wave, the one dreamed up in the dream factories in L.A. and New York. He's the maestro of spectacle, the flashy performer. All Danny and Allison offer, by contrast, are great voices. They represent the values of the heartland, but the heartland does not stoke what Joni Mitchell called "the starmaker machinery behind the popular song."

Who is the master here, who the slave? Who is the favorite and who the underdog? Who will America reward? And why?

True cultural democracy, on four! One, two, three...