Ann Powers: Thoughts on Adam Lambert and the cliffhanger

02:19 PM PT, Apr 30 2009

"It's just a show, it's just a show, it's just a show...." so Yahoo's "American Idol" tracker Lyndsey Parker posted on her Facebook page early in last night's show, at around 6:15 PDT. Idling in bed with a hope-it's-not-porcine head cold, I noticed her status report and started freaking out. Checking my e-mail, I saw a missive from Rabbi Rushfield: SHOCKER! My palms started sweating. Something, I knew, was wrong.

If you're reading this post, I'm pretty sure you know what happened next. Adam Lambert, the seasonlong front-runner in this year's competition, the hot-as-ice performer I've endorsed as the kind of pop star who could change people's lives, had been banished to the bottom bench on elimination night. Worse yet, he stayed there until the very end of the episode! I hyperventilated, hitting the "refresh" button on Google News every 30 seconds as I monitored the situation from my little corner of the Internet.

Adam survived. Matt Giraud departed as expected, going out with a possibly career-making rendition of "My Funny Valentine" after having delivered some even sparklier runs during the night's uniformly excellent (and swinging!) opening number. I went into the kitchen and made some soup. But I was haunted by my own reaction to Lambert's apparent near-elimination. Why do I care so much that he makes it? It's embarrassing.

The cliffhanger forced me to confront my own emotional reactions to this season. As readers of this blog know, I've been a strong supporter of Lambert, not only because of his true vocal genius but also because of what his full-steam-ahead run on "Idol" could represent: a shift, in the most mainstream of pop arenas, toward something freakier, artier, and just plain more exciting than what we've seen lately.

More specifically (since, actually, Lil Wayne and Kanye West do a pretty good job of beng both freaky and arty), I've hoped Lambert might become a fresh new force on the pop side of the rock scene, taking a genre that's grown increasingly conservative back to its liberating, fun, often confrontational, bohemian roots. At very least, he might give Fall Out Boy a run for their money.

But what do I really want from a Lambert "Idol" win? Perhaps I'm longing for an integration that can never really happen -- or one that did happen, briefly, in the late 1960s and '70s, but is utterly irretrievable in contemporary pop.

I'm talking about a healing of the divide between the realm of social outsiders and the realm of the "normal" -- one of those breakthrough moments in which someone who seems truly different uses music to become everyone's ideal.

Great artists throughout pop's history have fulfilled this role, from jazz's ambassador Louis Armstrong to soul's queen Aretha Franklin to dance pop's mainstreaming mother figure Madonna. But the move was worked most often and self-consciously during the glory days of rock, when (so the myth goes) a generation united behind artistes like Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, whose music pointed toward new ways of speaking and being in the world.

Lambert's outsize voice and "theatrical" style link him to that period, as well as the one directly following, when David Bowie and other glam-rock artists played out the counterculture's decadent end. For "Idol" viewers who grew up loving classic rock (and, as Scott Collins reported the other day, more and more seem to be in this category), he's not just refreshing; he conjures up a musical past that seems richer, more meaningful.

That's not what pop is now, however. In 2009, "mainstream" stars are not as culturally influential, appealing to niche audiences instead of an old-fashioned mainstream. The ones who do sell massively are professionals with Hollywood- or Nashville-crafted images (hello, Taylor Swift!), most of whom make bank on singles crafted by pros like Kara DioGuardi and use ear candy like the Jamie Foxx-approved Auto-Tune to hook in ADD-addle listeners. Their songs might enrich listeners' lives, but that doesn't seem to be the primary goal. Today's pop offers amusement, maybe personal succor, but little else.

At least that's the cynical view. I still believe in pop's power: I think fans make all kinds of meaning from even the "dumbest" songs, and that the great big mix of styles and influences better embodies the world's diversity than any mostly white, mostly male rock stars could. The world never really united around those guys anyway. As many historians have noted, Dionne Warwick, countrypolitan crooner Jim Reeves and the Monkees had hits and inspired fans right alongside "heavier" artists like the Beatles and the Doors.

Pop fans find inspiration everywhere; they don't need it handed to them on a big platform. Young women are as jazzed by Beyonce's "to the left, to the left" as they were by Janis Joplin's "take a little piece of my heart"; arguably, more so. Teenage boys who like eyeliner can now look to singers like Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance the way their forebears did to the more groundbreaking Bowie. If nothing dominates in music culture -- if the rock star dies and a thousand different kinds of pop stars bloom -- then democracy, if not the corporate music industry, is better served.

And yet. There's something so seductive about that breakthrough moment, when a generation unites around a transformative artist, and when even those who would scorn the styles and sounds such a star brings forward have to rethink their aesthetic, if not moral judgments, and admit that this kid really has something.

Adam Lambert seems to be living that dream on this year's "Idol," less conclusively than did those giants of classic rock, but he's making a start. His never hitting the bottom two seemed like a crucial part of that trajectory. Now he's just another one of four solid contestants -- in fact, he's arguably less assured of winning than Danny Gokey, who has never stood in the danger zone.

What last night reminded me about "Idol" is that it, too, is part of pop's new subcultural, niche-ified pseudo-mainstream. Each remaining contestant has roots in particular communities: Gokey and Kris Allen are both worship leaders strongly supported by Christian voters; Allison Iraheta, who won a 2006 singing contest on the Telemundo network, appeals to Latinas and (though Rabbi Rushfield would argue with me on this) young girls who've embraced similar gal pals marketed by Disney.

And Lambert? Well, he's a little emo, a little Rufus Wainwright, a little cabaret. I still believe that he's also enough himself that, whether he wins or not, he'll bring something exciting to the pop scene. After last night I just have to admit that what he offers isn't a time machine taking us back to a glorious rock moment that never actually existed, anyway.

Think of all the artists who suffered under the weight of thinking they actually might change the world. The countercultural myth is as famous for its casualties as for its triumphs. Do I need to list the names? Jim Morrison; Jimi Hendrix; Janis Joplin; John Lennon, who retreated into a hermit-like existence for years; much later, but equally tragic, Kurt Cobain. David Bowie went through his own dark period before emerging a more pragmatic man. Lambert, part of a younger and possibly less self-delusional generation, should have the good sense to avoid that fate.

My own life was changed by my silly but magical faith in a world made better by rock and roll. I still vividly remember holding a copy of Bowie's "Diamond Dogs" album in my hands at the bus stop in front of Bishop Blanchet High School in Seattle (it was 1980; I'd checked the 6-year-old album out of the library) and thinking, This guy is really strange and proud of it, I could be proud of myself too. I look at Adam Lambert, and hear him sing, and think he might give that gift to some kids out there. I still believe that he is doing so. Maybe not by winning "American Idol." But after all, this is just a show.

--Ann Powers

photo: Fox