USA Today
If network category-killer American Idol has a fatal flaw, it is its lack of an unforced crescendo. The show kicks off each year with hours of high weirdness and endless possibility, only to run a course that grows increasingly less inspired with each passing week: the "theme nights" grow more rote, the criticism redundant, and eventually, the Peter Principle kicks in and America finds a way to botch the whole thing by eliminating the best contestant early. And, last night, the entire enterprise finally reached its sham climax with a double-helping of "This Is My Now," the tune that "won" American Idol's "songwriting" "competition."
The songwriting contest is an innovation introduced this season by the show's producers who, as the USA Today relates, wanted "to find a fresher song than the tired, cliche-ridden power ballads that professional songwriters had foisted on past Idol winners." Only in the respect that one can swap out the word "professional" with the word "amateur" can the competition be considered a success. "This Is My Now" is a dreary, pageanty mess of cliches, where people play "it safe," look "deep inside," turn "the tide," settle "for less" while being ready "for more," live "in the moment," and finally come to the conclusion: "THAT WAS THEN, BUT THIS IS...uhhh...uhmm...line?
Now, granted, one doesn't look to American Idol for songwriting content that's edgy and poetic. In a way, that's a good thing. One cringes at the thought of these kids warbling through a Jeff Buckley tune, and it's likely that America just isn't going to ever be mentally ready for a "Velvet Underground Night" (presumably, Lou Reed would explain whether they were taking speed or heroin when they wrote whatever song the contestants' chose). Still, "Here Is My Now" is apallingly, trancendently, hackneyed. It belongs on the PA system at Mitt Romney's "Double Gitmo," where it could aurally bitchslap terrorists into submission with the full approval of Amnesty International.
Can the songwriting competition be fixed? A good question. Surely only the most naive expected a good result to come out of a network boardroom, who left it to America to vote for a winner from among twenty finalists. By the time it got to the voters, one can imagine that every available resource had been deployed to ensure that no song with even the remotest chance of offending anyone got through. Our suggestion? Well, we can't believe we're saying this, but next year, hire an advertising agency to vet the entries. In the first place, advertisers have evinced some decent taste in the past several years--that Nick Drake VW commercial from years back basically heralded the beginning of a "good ear" era in advertising.
More importantly though, ad folk make their names by having a keen feel for where controversy and salability intersect. After all, these are the people who said: "Sell high-end cruise vacations with an Iggy Pop song about smack addiction? WE WILL MAKE IT HAPPEN." It's the only way we can see of coming up with a song with off-kilter charm that won't send Coca-Cola or Ford into a spasm of objection.
We'll likely skip out on tonight's big reveal show, if only because it's likely to have more filler than Suck.com on a Wednesday. For the sake of predictions, we'll go out on the safest of limbs and call it for Jordin Sparks, if only because she was the only person in the room who didn't clearly evince contempt for "This Is My Now," and that sort of fakery deserves a reward.
