Tabula Rosa: The Blank Slates of American Idol

So, anyone who’s been watching American Idol this season may have noticed a slightly more dramatic tone to the proceedings, especially those auditions that would normally be laughed off. We’ve always seen the people who swear and become extremely angry, and they’ve always been good for a good laugh. However, for some reason, we’re not just seeing the angry ones anymore. We’re starting to see people who are honestly terrible, and who the producers must know are terrible, and yet they give them detailed introduction videos, detailed stories, and then absolutely destroy them from a singing perspective. We’re even starting to see montages of them all performing the whole song, which are clearly being created for the sake of producers. They give the bad singers these songs to learn overnight, and then have them sing them purely for the purposes of making people look silly.

We’ve never seen anything quite like this in the past. I don’t know if it’s that it was always edited out in the past, or if they’re coaching these contestants to be as delusional as possible, but it’s getting quite ridiculous. And, to an extent, one of those crazies (A girl named Sarah) is a perfect example of this, but within her craziness I think she pointed out something quite interesting.

Sarah was a normal girl at first, but then she started singing and was clearly tone deaf. Really, honestly, ridiculously tone deaf. And she knew it. She even said she was tone deaf. And yet, she said, she could still be the American Idol because she was trainable, an empty slate. Tabula Rosa. And she could win American Idol without even singing.

She then proceeded to go absolutely insane with the crying and the anger and the screaming about how she’d made friends with Rick the Security Guard, and about how the judges were out drinking until 3am (Simon having been late due to a “hangover”). However, I tried hard to remember what she had said while being overly emotional, as opposed to batshit crazy.

Because really, while CBC and ABC’s The One purported to be about training a singer, it was still clearly taking good singers and parading them in front of America; and, as a result, there has never really been a reality show which chronicled people learning how to sing and perform…unless we’re counting Superstar USA, which just no.

And really, Sarah may have been out of her mind, but I think she has a point. American Idol likes to parade these singers out in front of the cameras for humour purposes, but what would happen if they take those who actually show some sense of promise, and actually see if they can train them to be good singers? Don’t treat them as jokes, but rather treat them as people who want to try to become good singers?

I think it might be why I’m that much more attracted to the actually competitive rounds of Idol competitions. These audition processes range from the interesting to the atrocious, and there’s just too much repetition for me to root for anything. The good people are good, the bad people are bad, and there’s never a sense of competition. This is especially true when they only show us the good people, the majority of them, at the very end of the episode.

I would almost like to see someone, like a documentary filmmaker, pay for one of the unfortunately untalented people to enter into a year-long boot camp, and then take another shot at becoming the American Idol. While I’m all for victimizing the annoying famewhores, I would like to see if some of these other people could actually succeed. Someone like Sarah, as crazy as she was, could be turned into a good singer with the proper training. She won’t be a star, perhaps, but I think it would be interesting to follow her journey from tonedeaf to…not quite as tonedeaf.