The Orlando Phenomenon – Boy bands and bad girls made to order (IV)

The idol phenomenon took on a new dimension in 2001, however. A former Chrysalis Records A&R man and artist manager named Simon Fuller took the concept out of the exclusive purview of teens, with the ITV show Pop Idol in the UK. The show, a riff on the old talent-show formula that dates back at least to the Major Bowles Amateur Hour in the 1930s, had singers competing for a recording contract. It became such a phenomenon that Fox TV signed it and Fuller to duplicate the show (and hopefully the success) in the U.S. American Idol debuted in 2002, and became every inch the spectacle that it was in England, making a pop culture hero of the “nasty” judge Simon Cowell. Nearly 35 million people tuned in for the premier season’s finale, more than had watched the Oscars.

“American Idol amounts to much more than the aggregated neediness of its most eager participants,” Simon Dumenco observed in The New Yorker.

As a mass phenomenon it suggests multiple, intertwined orders of psychopathology: The culture at large gorging on hordes of fresh “talent.” A populace parodying the idea of democracy by choosing exactly the entertainment it wants (and deserves). And, perhaps most pointedly, the fame factory engaging in a sort of ritualized cycle of binging and purging… . The core product itself not only shows every sign of being unstoppable, but may just permanently alter the way the music industry molds and markets talent… American Idol… harnessed the reality TV genre to show the fast-fading recording industry a new path to riches, turning poorly paid nobodies into overnight pop-cultural icons, with virtually none of the usual behind the scenes primping and preening. Turns out the record industry’s star-making machinery becomes entirely irrelevant when you really let the market decide.

For the winners, and even the runners-up, it gave the artists the sort of toehold that television had given the Archies or the Bandstand boys or the Monkees or Christina and Britney. Of course, “the record industry’s star-making machinery” becoming “entirely irrelevant” is what many in the record business feared. They liked to think they owned the machinery behind the popular star. It has long been their be-all and end-all, with “talent” being disposable fodder for the star-making sausage mills. Letting television create the demand, and worse, letting the people pick their personal performers seemed to violate business as usual – until the actual albums by the performers came out. Then the record companies had to remind the fans who these performers were and why the fans should care, allowing them to pump them through their own star-making channels, albeit more for a refresher than trying to cut a gold record out of whole cloth.

To the disenfranchised music fan, American Idol and its ilk represented the final betrayal, the last word in processed pop music. “The industry is only interested in prepackaged goods,” said English technologist Gavin Alexander, “there’s no room for development or growth if you’re an artist.”

This leaves fans of more organic music – music that relies on the sinews, brains, and talent of the performers; music that says something to us, that dares – feeling like whole-food devotees at a McDonald’s every time we turn on a radio or walk into a record store. It also makes Lou Pearlman and Simon Fuller the reigning Ray “McDonald’s” Krocs of contemporary pop.

But the boy-band mills and the ready-made pop stars feed many of the major record companies’ needs. They ensure a quick profit, bringing up the numbers on the investor’s quarterly corporate reports. They keep CDs pumping through the distribution hubs. They keep product on the shelves for the young people who actually deign to purchase records. But, while a major commodity, this type of popular music has proven time and time again not to be a lasting one. For an industry that relies on its catalog, where will the catalog come from 10 years from now?