By Robert Bianco
Apparently, we’re a shockingly talented country with incredibly lousy television sets.
How else can you explain the great TV singing-contest disconnect? In their comfortable studio seats (some spinnable, some not), the judges on Fox’s American Idoland NBC’s The Voice hear nothing but an unbroken parade of “magical,” “amazing,” “beautiful,” “perfect,” “best-ever” singers — all of them, as Voice‘s otherwise purposeless host Carson Daly told us Monday, “incredible artists.”
Whereas at home, most of us generally hear one or two promising talents who, with training and guidance, might develop into popular performers, surrounded by a few contestants who never should have made it this far and a vast majority with the kind of pleasant voices you’ll find singing in any local choir or — as Simon Cowell might have said before X Factor dulled him out — working the lounge at a nearby Holiday Inn.
Really. Two shows, seven music-industry pros, and the best they can do for criticism is “pitchy,” which apparently is now modern talent-show code for, “Wow, what were we thinking when we picked you.”
There are many reasons Idol and The Voice, despite their spots near the top of the ratings, routinely reach about as many viewers combined as Idol did alone at its peak. Exhaustion and oversaturation are no doubt factors, but part of the problem is that we can’t understand what the judges are hearing or who they think they’re fooling.
If every singer involved is a great “artist” (the most abused, overused word in the TV vocabulary), then we should all be able to name every finalist from every Idol and Voiceseason — a tough task, seeing as many people probably can’t name The Voice winner from last year. Yes, these shows can create stars, but if they’re all stars at the start, if none of them can benefit from criticism and competition, then the shows really are just popularity contests — and what’s the point of watching?
If The Voice‘s “battle round” phase is far less entertaining than its spinning-chair auditions, this “everyone’s-wonderful” philosophy is largely to blame. Now each of the four judges (Christina Aguilera, Adam Levine, Cee Lo Green, and Blake Shelton) pits two team members against each other, with the team-leader judge picking the winner — based, it seems, on nothing, as everyone deserves to win.
Listen closely, and you’ll hear some actual constructive criticism during the taped mentoring segments before the singers take the stage. Some of it is even amusing, as when Jewel warned a singer against doing runs just for the sake of runs, only to backtrack when she realized she was standing next to Aguilera.
Honesty ends, however, when we get to the actual performances, which routinely consist of overwrought look-at-me screaming, with little relation to melody, lyrics, musical build or the prior coaching. Not that you’d know it from the judges, who were so eager for an encouraging word Shelton even praised a woman for “diction.”
Still, that’s better than the Idol trio of Jennifer Lopez, Steven Tyler and Randy Jackson, who, picking up where they left off last season, have decided that judging means limiting their criticism to song choices and that inevitable “pitchy.”
As for Jackson’s promises to be tougher, we’ll believe it when we hear it. So far that toughness has boiled down to dismissing a version of Sweet Dreams that was so achingly terrible it may have awakened the dead.
Compare that to American Idol‘s post-performance criticism segment from Jimmy Iovine, who felt free to call people screechy, kitschy and just plain not good enough. But then he was watching on a television monitor. Like us.
I can think of seven judges who should watch with him.
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