It's Finally Happened
I have sold my soul to pop culture. I am going to the American Idol tour this summer. The tickets are in my hot little hand (or will be, once Ticketmaster completes the handling process I paid so handsomely for). I'll admit it sounds bad, but I have carefully calibrated reasons for this decision. To wit:
50% - Blake. Further breaks down as: 30% musical talent, 15% adorableness, 5% nice ass.
7% - Melinda. I find her to be awesome.
7% - Phil. He totally grew on me over the course of the season.
7% - All the other Idols. Yes, even Sanjaya. Can't stand his "singing," but it will be trainwreck GOLD to see in person.
18% - Cultural observation. There's no denying that American Idol is a singularly 21st century phenomenon. It is the unholy but undeniably entertaining spawn of multimedia technology and the sort of postmodernism lite that populates our cultural consciousness. Take all the self-referentialness and the reveling in the unification of disparate elements and none of these things is a bit like the others but let's pretend they are anyway (so beautifully epitomized in Idol Gives Back) and the mild absurdity that characterize the latter, mix in the conglomeration of TV and internet and phone and text, add a dash of self-awareness, beat the hell out of it and bake until it's definitely burned but not so burned that it's no longer tasty. If you take culture as seriously as I do, why wouldn't you want to see this for yourself?
6% - My own private absurdity. Because there's nothing like sipping Starbucks and listening to Wilco as you discuss Dostoevsky and just where you should hang your soon-to-be-awarded master's degree, and all the while really thinking to yourself, "When will those goddamn Idol tickets get here? And why am I so attracted to Blake when, objectively, there's quite a bit about him that would ordinarily be a no for me?"
3.2% - Hole in my schedule that needs to be filled. I have nothing else planned for that night. What am I going to do? Sit around at home and crochet?
1.5% - Humanitarian efforts. Now, you all don't have to personally endure the concert. Instead, you can read about it here.
0.3% - Concern for the economy. Because if we don't get out there and spend, spend, spend! another recession may soon be upon us.
meegs
And for futher proof of the cultural importance of AI, we need look no further than last night's finale: Good ol' Bette singing the song that is the reigning definition of schlock on American Frickin' Idol while Jerry Springer looks on, touched with emotion. That pop culture confluence is so filled with randomness I'm surprise the universe didn't implode on itself.
This is exactly the genius part of it. In reality, Bette, Jerry and AI have really nothing to do with each other. It's like you stopped 100 people on the street and asked them to write a person, place or thing on a slip of paper--anything at all, whatever popped into their mind first. Then you just started drawing those slips out at random, in pairs or in threes (or, if you really wanted to tempt the universe, in fours). Out comes Bette, Jerry and AI with a side of tears, all wrapped up in schlock.
The only uniting factor between the three is Spectacle. AI is nothing if not Spectacle. Jerry's show is Spectacle defined. Bette is about to open a show in Las Vegas, the Homeland of Spectacle. And this is what postmoderism has done to us. Postmodernism is the Golden Age of Spectacle, where we throw everything into one pot just to see what glorious wonders come out--and the bigger and more self-aware, the better. Suddenly, the uniting of disparate elements makes so much goddamn sense to us that we can't imagine them not together.
It's a heady rush, believe me, seeing all of this happen. I just think one of these days the universe it going to be like, "That's it. Can't. Take. It. Anymore." Et voila, the world implodes upon itself.
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