HOLLYWOOD — In the course of a long goodbye, emotions
simultaneously sharpen and blur. We toast the soon-departed, gobble cake at the
office party, talk about the good times until those memories grow
color-saturated and bright. The other kind, we put aside. The irritations and
worse that may have led to this parting become fuzzy, temporarily forgotten.
Everyone wants to feel good while we’re singing that we had the time of our
lives.
Simon Cowell’s announcement that he’ll leave
“American Idol” at the end of this season to executive-produce and
judge an American version of his hit English program “The X Factor”
was designed to commence one of those extended, heartwarming farewells. What an
instant ratings booster! Now, even viewers skeptical about the ascent of
self-described fans’ representative Ellen DeGeneres to the judges’
table will have to tune in — if only to savor the twilight of Simon’s patented
nastiness.
Instead of waxing poetic about how Cowell introduced a new
generation to the stereotype of the fussy Brit, or listing the five most
ridiculous metaphors he used to describe bad singing, or basking in the glow of
his whitened teeth, let’s talk about something serious. The fact is, Cowell
helped change the way Americans think about popular music. Embodying the role
of the music snob while voicing opinions distinctly different from what that
character usually expresses, he helped make room for a wider vision of what
great American music can be.
Or a degraded one. For many serious music fans,
“Idol” has long represented the triumph of puffery and schmaltz over
sincerity and real skill. The show’s run has coincided with the collapse of the
conventional music industry, the retreat of “meaningful” mainstream
rock and the rise of the multiplatform pop star — an era in which the musicians
making the greatest splash are neither dazzling virtuosos nor rough-hewn poets
carrying forth three chords and the truth, but the thinking showgirls of dance
pop and the self-made androids of the Auto-Tune revolution. It’s also been a
good decade for divas, the soaring sentimentalists long scorned (and even
feared) by rock purists.
Onto this shifting stage came Cowell, who walked and talked
— or rather, sat and furrowed his brow and snarkily quipped — like a rock snob
while expressing exactly the opposite worldview. Here was the very cliche of
the arts critic: a stuffy, middle-aged man, somewhat humorless and very sure of
himself, who wore his superior opinions like gilt secret society pins affixed
to his chest.
Simon knows better than you: That’s one key premise of
“American Idol.” The part Simon plays complements those inhabited by
his two original fellows. Paula Abdul, now replaced by DeGeneres, was the
flighty, effusive classic-pop female, part mother tearing up at the school
pageant and part teeny-bopper reaching to tear off contestants’ clothes. Randy
Jackson, the “real” musician whose background in hair metal
andHollywood studio work exempts him from the snob position, speaks in the
colorful slang of a musician (and, fitting into another designated role, of a
black entertainer), and loses authority in proportion to his hipness.
The addition of judge Kara DioGuardi last season
messed with this formula and may have proven more threatening to Cowell than he
expected. Her similarities to Abdul and Jackson were obvious — she’s female, as
her bikini-baring stunt on the finale painfully reminded us, and she moves in a
younger version of the studio-session scene that earned Jackson his fortune and
his peculiar form of street cred. But she also proved able to judge, in
musicianly detail, what makes a pop performance great. Being both commercially
savvy and aesthetically motivated is Cowell’s shtick, and he seemed to wilt a
bit when DioGuardi showed she could do it too.
Cowell needn’t have worried. DioGuardi can’t fill his
Cuban-heeled shoes because she is a woman, and even though female singers and
dancers dominate American pop right now, certain old attitudes persist,
including the one that values men’s thoughts and women’s emotions. (That’s why
there are still so few prominent female producers, lead guitarists or rappers —
all jobs that call for “masculine” brain power and technical skill.)
As last season wore on, DioGuardi scaled back her musical analysis, maybe in
response to the backlash that characterized her assertiveness as annoying.
On “X Factor,” a show he largely controls as
executive producer, Cowell may choose to reunite with his old foil Abdul at the
judges’ table. He could regain his balance playing the smart, stern Daddy to
her Mama-Baby. But he’ll never have the cultural influence he had as the
authoritative voice on “Idol” — not only because “X Factor”
is campier and more crass than “Idol,” but because the shift in
attitude that he embodies has already taken place.
Or has it? Besides negotiating the deal that’s led to his
upcoming migration, Cowell did something else of note last season: As a judge
on yet another star-making series, “Britain’s Got Talent,” he
guided Susan Boyle from the television soundstage to worldwide fame.
Boyle, the somehow simultaneously pious and earthy new Kate Smith, is that
old-fashioned phenomenon, a massive star whom critics and serious music fans
hate. For all of the success he’s had mixing up highbrow attitude with
middle-to-lowbrow taste, Cowell still has some work to do. Pop history may
still feel the effect of that withering grin.
—
(c) 2010, Los Angeles
Times.
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