'American' Classic

I'm a Critic/You're a Critic
Idol also feeds the fantasy that everyone, not just Simon Cowell or a scrivener in a magazine, newspaper, or blog, can be a music critic. Chatter post-AI is as often about song choice, vocal range, and timbre as it is about fashion and glitz. I've said since the first season that Cowell is, give or take Roger Ebert, the only true critic on television, making shrewd pop distinctions between the quality of a performance and its chances of succeeding in the current music marketplace. And the pros do take notice. Francis Davis, an esteemed jazz critic whose books include Bebop and Nothingness, says that he watches every week, partly for fun and partly out of genuine musical curiosity. He thinks that Randy Jackson's much-derided neologism ''pitchy'' is ''exactly right. Bad pitch is the chief flaw in a lot of the vocals on the show.'' That, and what Davis calls ''the melisma epidemic'': the uncountable number of singers who think demonstrating skill means running up and down a few octaves and holding notes longer than David Blaine holds his breath. Davis is also drawn to the ''human drama'' of AI, for the way it can accomplish metamorphosis; he cites Clay Aiken, who he says went ''from shy nerd to androgynous egotist.''

And like any phenomenon worth its pervasiveness, there are those who find AI despicable because, in their view, it renders all pop songs bland and indistinguishable. Greil Marcus, author of numerous cultural studies, including the finest single analysis of Elvis Presley's career — ''Presliad,'' a major section of his 1975 book Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock & Roll Music — says that the May 9 all-Presley edition of AI proved one thing: ''No question — Elvis is dead. Were he not, he would have killed them all.'' Marcus views Idol as ''a play in which people pretend to believe in what they're doing, but everyone knows they don't, which leaves everyone safe.''

It's a Soap Opera/It's a Psychological Experiment
Idol has the attenuated narrative pace of a soap opera. There is abundant repetition, so that anyone who's missed an episode can still follow the ''plot'': On Tuesdays, the contestants sing, and snippets of those performances are the end of the show. The next night, we see clips of the same songs again and Seacrest summarizes the comments made by Cowell, Paula Abdul, and Jackson. All the while, we become more ensnared in dramas either incited by the producers (why was there time on May 10 for Rebecca Romijn to ''spontaneously'' request a Taylor Hicks performance in the show's always too-tight 30 minutes?) or created by the public via website dither or the phone-vote tally.

Idol also illustrates examples of behavioral psychology. Viewers absorb the visual and verbal clues from the judges and Seacrest, and pick up on the night's pet favorite. I'm not saying millions then take those signals and apply them unthinkingly to their votes — in many cases, as with Cowell's barely suppressed leers at and articulated cheers for, first, Becky O'Donohue and, more recently, Katharine McPhee, voters probably try and prove their independence and vote against a contestant.

American Idol is, then, a sped-up democracy-meritocracy. Whiplash backlash. Idol worship and idle amusement. D.H. Lawrence may as well have been thinking of Taylor or Fantasia or Ruben when he wrote, in an essay about American idolatry: ''The soul has many motions, many gods come and go.'' Which of these mortal gods — which idols — will come and go next week?