I Are Serious Singer This Are Serious Television

Bruce over at Hypebot drops some rather astounding factual stuff on us about Simon Fuller's wholesale takeover of the American pop charts. Unfortunately, he then gets his briefs in a twist about things like "authenticity" and "meaning " and "depth" in music, something neither he, nor the argument, is necessarily cut out for.

What's amazing about Simon and Idol, and much more interesting than bar conversations about how plastic pop music is today (check the post's comments for some tidy refutations of Bruce's thesis), is the manner in which he and the show have so effectively and thoroughly narrativized (and turned into a form of participatory culture), the process of creating and rewarding a pop star. Think about it--17 songs on the Hot 100 simultaneously, all because of a genius cross-media (TV, CDs, Web, uh cell phones) idea to grab and keep viewer/consumer attention by giving people a sense of ownership over their music, but filtering the experience through a few storylines that have been told a billion times and never get old and several recognizable character types/tropes. Voila: you've mastered the pop music sector of the "attention economy."

I'm not the full creator of all of these thoughts: Charles Fairchild has written a much more in-depth piece on this w/r/t Australian Idol. His words:

Crucially, it is ''Idol's'' system of aesthetic order, in the guise of gradually branded contestants acting within a rule-bound series of media events, through which the larger values of the music industry are made comprehensible and material...(Idol is) designed to clarify and contextualize the very idea of what it means to be a pop star in an environment in which many of the traditional methods of producing musical celebrity have been shaken to their foundations. ''Idol'' claims to put things right for us."

Fairchild's type of "authenticity" is much more productive in a discussion of Idol than a taste-based one of the sort at Hypebot. Fuller, the other judges, and the show itself must be seen as a credible venue in order for the show, and its artists, to mean anything at all to viewers. He phrases it brilliantly: "We are reminded constantly this is 'our' Idol. We created them so we should take them seriously."

Again, we're back to crafting and maintaining affective relationships between consumers and products at a time when there are more consumers and products than there have ever been, and those consumers are getting sued by the makers of the products, the latter calling the former "pirates" even though there is most certainly no direct correlation to loss of income on the makers' parts, and certainly no eye-patches. No parrots either. Where was I. Fuller's managed to maintain extensive brand-awareness for a product that most people get for free, and has convinced them to buy it in large amounts by, essentially, letting them think they're helping to tell the story. And all whilst smirking beneath an indefensible butt-cut. Impressive. Who's ready for a Trent Reznor/Saul Williams buddy-cop flick, where they take down Glintofhope Records in a monstrous, fiery climax as revenge for its CEO kidnapping Reznor's Powerbook G4 at the beginning of the film? Jake Scott directs.

There's not really any precedent for Fuller's Fortune, of course. There's Brian Epstein in 1964, as Bruce mentions, but well, there were five guys much more responsible for that success than he was. As evidence for, well, what can happen when this sort of thing doesn't happen publicly and in narrative form, and, okay, when the svengali in question is boinking his prodigies, Tom pointed to this "morbidly absorbing" Vanity Fair piece on Lou Perlman. Yeeeee.

Whatever happened to Maurice Starr, anyway? Is he getting a piece of this?