LA Times Writer Wants American Idol to Address Societal Issues

Ann Powers of the LA Times just wrote an intriguing and very curious story called "American Idol needs to open the closet door". Here's a link:


http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/music/la-et-american-idol10-2009mar10,0,5548765.story


Miss Powers thinks American Idol is in a unique position due to its incredibly large, voluntarily captive audience. It is her position that the show ought to use its twice-weekly forum to help break down society's barriers regarding homosexuality, race, and ethnicity.


American Idol, she says, being a "family show", has danced for too long around its gay contestants' sexuality. It has not done enough to advance the cause of minority contestants. Further, in focusing on predominantly white "soul" singers, it continues the pattern of white performers stealing black musical styles, and edging those black performers out.


These positions can all be refuted, to an extent. Only someone living, to pardon the expression, in a closet, would not have recognized season seven's Danny Noriega or this season's Nathaniel Marshall as gay. We don't need an interview package in which they declare their love for another man to get that. And did anyone see any evidence that Danny or Nathaniel had been asked to tune down the flamboyance so as not to tip off anybody in Middle America?


Without statistics in front of me I'm willing to agree that the majority of American Idol contestants, at least in the live-broadcast stage of the show, have been white. What I also don't have, and I don't imagine Miss Powers does either, is a statistic as to what percentage of overall applicants, at the open-city calls, are minorities. Nor do I expect they're asked to fill out a questionnaire detailing their complex racial background.


Regarding the transition of American popular music from its beginnings to the early 21st century, and the appropriation of black musical styles by white performers, I must seriously question the notion that the countless white kids who audition---no older than 28 and as young as 16---have a solid grasp on the issue, or an agenda to usurp anyone's racial and musical heritage. I bet the minority contestants don't either. In fact, I'd say that since the current contestants have only been in our world since 1981 at the earliest, they may not see musical styles as immutable and homogeneous, but liquid, dynamic, and "racially blind". And isn't that how it should be?


But ultimately I have to question the notion that American Idol can, or should be expected to, address complex societal issues like homophobia and racial bias. American Idol is escapist television, entertainment. It is, as Simon Cowell likes to say, a "singing contest". It's not an "out gay singer contest", or a "black singer contest", or an "only-sing-in-a-genre-consistent-with-your-racial-background contest". And television producers aren't in the business of altering society's mores. They're in the business of getting ratings and making money.


Miss Powers, consciously or not, recognizes that at this point in human civilization, only the major media and those who control it have the power to address the issues she's concerned about (or any societal issue) on a grand scale. And, perhaps rightfully, she decries the media's disinterest in doing something worthwhile with its significant power. But what exactly does it say about us as a society that we ask our commercial, revenue-driven popular entertainment to act as a public moral arbiter? Exactly how much personal responsibility should we, as individual citizens, families, and communities, cede to a necessarily amoral industry, namely the pop culture machine?


It's easy to imagine the future as Miss Powers (and I) would like it to be: a society in which every person, gay, straight, bisexual, black, white, what have you, can live as they wish, without fear of harm or recrimination. And in that future, I expect television---if it still exists as we know it---will accurately reflect that society. Until then, television, and American Idol, can only reflect the society we live in: in which homosexuality for the large part is politely tolerated, in which minorities are overshadowed by whites, and in which whites have so often, and rarely with apology, appropriated the intellectual and artistic property, not to mention the actual property, of other cultures.


For now, we have to be hopeful that some of American Idol's voters, perhaps even a majority of them, are not watching through the filter of some presumed sexual and racial bias. Perhaps they don't think of the contestants as gay singers, or white singers, or black singers, but just singers. Perhaps they simply want entertainment, and in the end, to help choose a winner whose music would fit in nicely on their iPod.