Sasha Frere-Jones is among pop music columnists an estimable combination of influential and excellent. We follow his work with care and admiration. And he is our man. But periodically, though we here at sugarhigh! are just a blog, we find ourselves in such consternation that we must lay out our disagreements. This is one of those times.
The matter at hand is American Idol, and S-Freezy's account thereof. It is well-written in the eloquent-yet-jocular style which feels like a happy medium of authorial and house style. Here is a pivotal passage:
The judges on the show—Cowell, the singer and choreographer Paula Abdul, and the musician Randy Jackson—critique contestants on their vocal ability, song choice, presentation, and other aspects of pop craftsmanship. The American public, though, decides who remains in the running, by phoning and texting in votes after Tuesday night’s broadcast. On Wednesday night, a singer is eliminated, at the end of the episode. Except for the early stages of the competition, when the judges winnow a group of about two hundred down to twenty-four, they can only file amicus briefs. They can say, “It was just O.K. for me, dog,” banish singers to cruise ships, and make everyone cry, but the people have the power.This seems from here to miss the boat on three levels, which we might call the descriptive, the historical, and the ideological.
As description, it seems to draw a quite broad distinction between what unfolds on Idol, and how a Billboard-pointed pop performer might otherwise end up with a label contract. Is this right? At the label we would have a little group of savants auditioning an act: the A&R dude who brought them in and plies the assembly with enthusiastic blandishments (Paula: "you're standing there in your truth"); the technician who knows what can and can't be fixed in the mix (Randy: "a little pitchy, dawg"); and the no-nonsense exec with the overview (Simon: etc etc). They are charged with choosing a performer who is exactly distinct enough from like performers to establish product differentiation in a crowded market, but not so distinct as to freak out any potential customer. Hence the judges' (largely Simon's, as the big picture exec) oscillation between you have to make it your own and why would you do that to a great song? — which seems schizophrenic only until you recognize the expression of a music label's monolithic marketing imperative. At this point, before investing vast sums in recording, marketing, and distribution, any capable music label will test-market the shit out of the artist (they used to do it rooms that looked like lecture halls, gathering responses from gizmos that looked a lot like remote controls, or cell phones for that matter). Once a contract and then a product is derived, customers do or don't buy the product. If there is a change in Idol's process, it is simply that the test marketing is now conducted via remote technologies of video monitor and cell phone (distanced learning redux!); respondents solicit themselves for participation; and the latter two phases have been brought closer together, such that the voting-with-your-dollar phase begins a bit earlier for the "people." In terms of the making of the pop star, they retain the exact "power" they might have had before; that there are more of them involved sooner does not change the structure of the overall event into something more democratic.
But this is not to say that there is no real novelty in the AI process. There is. Pop Idol debuted less than three months after the MPAA awoke with a start from the industrial nightmare that was Napster, and confronted the new day that dream presaged. The Idol franchise should be understood in no other way than as a specific solution to a historical problem: how to re-monetize pop music in the face of a certain decline sales of both in hardware (CDs, players) and software (songs as such). Idol is perhaps the most successful — and clearest — response to this economic crisis. Whether or not anyone buys the David products Cook or Archuleta, the revenue is shifted to advertising, and to service providers for downloads, online views, and cell phone usage. Which is to say that the reputed "democracy" of the Idol process is nothing other than the industry's monetizing of participation in its own marketing plan.
SFJ would perhaps back away from the phrase "the people have the power" as something meant lightly, in a flighty context — and regret that it might be taken as an actual political claim. We would. The problem with the claim is that, however flippant, it just happens to partake exactly of The New Yorker's house ideology (a failing that SFJ has in large been at pains to avoid during his tenure). The equation in brief: active participation in the market = real freedom. The incredible corollary: intensifications of that market = even more freedom.
We aren't saying watching American Idol — perhaps even rooting for a David, a Syesha, or rooting for Paula's spasmodic poetry (as we do) — isn't a good time. We also prefer buying a Coke™ to being thirsty, but try not to misrecognize this as people having the power. We do, however, recognize in The New Yorker a fairly clear (kneejerk, even) articulation of liberalism as nothing but capital's official ideology — a logic and alibi for its drive to marketize more and more of human life.
Posted by jane at May 29, 2008 01:31 PM | TrackBack