Is the Idol contest relevent to musical culture?
It is relevant in the sense it illustrates how using a not very original idea can saturate popular culture if packaged right, but kick start a counter revolution where people know what they don’t want in a musical sense. Sometimes it can be about more than making a fast buck and ‘doing a runner’ and less about having some sort of artistic integrity. In Simon Cowell’s world the measure of success is how many records you sell. As for why would someone want to enter the ‘competition’ (and I use that term in the loosest sense of the word) Well people seem to think that it is important to get your 15 minutes of fame however that is achieved and if you’ve got nothing to get something even for a brief amount of time can be an achievement in itself. Then being relegated to tacky nightclub appearances and the occassional commercial still has to be better than ‘normality’!
