By week two of "AI," we should all be able to spot a season trend and this one has now pretty much already driven into our living rooms like the proverbial eighteen-wheeler barreling down the highway.
Let's call this trend: The Pro Masking As Amateur. There's been plenty of reporting on this so far, so you're not hearing it here for the first time, no doubt, but last night's show perfectly clarified what I'm talking about. We speak of Carly Hennessy - oops, I mean, Carly Smithson, with the husband who looks like a star of "Miami Ink."
She's a pro, but "Idol" - per its wont - dressed up her audition as just another inspiring Horatio Alger tale of the aspiring Irish singer who got a ticket to Hollywood three years ago, only to have her hopes dashed by some U.S. Immigration troglodyte who denied her a visa.
She had an OK audition last night - Simon, more prickly than usual, said the one three years ago was better - but she got a yellow ticket anyway. Not revealed: That Smithson is a pro who once had a record contract with MCA, and even released an album six years ago.
Did poorly. So poorly that the Wall Street Journal did a PAGE ONE STORY on the poor girl.
Here's the top of the piece, which ran Feb. 26, 2002, by Jennifer Ordonez, with other excerpts below:
MARINA DEL REY, Calif. -- Eighteen-year-old recording artist Carly Hennessy is packing up her small apartment. Her promotional posters will go into storage, and the beige rental couch will be returned. A weight-control message that the slender teen scrawled in marker on the refrigerator -- "NO, U R FAT" -- will be wiped clean.
For two years, Vivendi Universal SA's MCA Records paid the rent here while Ms. Hennessy prepared for pop stardom. And that's not all: the label so far has spent about $2.2 million to make and market her new album, an upbeat pop recording called "Ultimate High." "Some people just struggle," she says. "I was very, very lucky."
Not lucky enough. "Ultimate High" was released in stores nationwide three months ago. So far, it has sold only 378 copies -- amounting to about $4,900 at its suggested retail price.
In many other industries, this would be considered an extraordinary bomb. But in today's troubled music business, it's routine. Of the thousands of albums released in the U.S. each year by the five major record companies, fewer than 5% become profitable, music executives say."
[Then, dear TVZone reader, there was this...]
"By April 2001, with the album still unfinished, MCA decided to try to get Ms. Hennessy some notice by releasing her first single, a bouncy tune called "I'm Gonna Blow Your Mind." Its opening lines:
"I really really, I really really, I really really, I really really, I really really want to kiss you/
But much more than that/
Boy, I'm gonna blow your mind."
It was a risky choice. MCA realized the song's subject matter -- oral sex -- made it unlikely to get much exposure on youth-oriented outlets deemed important in launching young artists, like the Radio Disney network of stations. But executives felt it was Ms. Hennessy's catchiest song. MCA spent $250,000 on a video that showed Ms. Hennessy dancing in a disco and jumping around with pals in their sleepwear. On a call-in show, Nickelodeon asked viewers to rate 30 seconds of the video, but the audience was unresponsive. The video was quickly shelved."
[And also this...]
"[Another single] "Beautiful You" got even less airplay than the first single. With no radio play, MCA and Mr. Copeland decided against a concert tour. Retailers, meanwhile, were leery of investing much in an album by an artist who seemed to be going nowhere. Music stores had stocked 50,000 copies of Ms. Hennessy's first two singles, and sold about 17,000, according to SoundScan. So when it came time to order the "Ultimate High" album, retailers bought just 10,000 copies, MCA says. With virtually no radio play or press, there was little hope for the album as it hit stores. 'It was not rejected by the public,' [and MCA exec said.] 'We just never made it to the public.'"
OK, enough with the excerpts. So what's the problem you ask - beyond the fact that "Idol" is up to something sneaky?
The trend is this: That "Idol's" popping more pros/semi-pros into the Hollywood rounds than ever before, doubtless to avert last year's debacle season, and de-fang troublesome websites like votefortheworst.com, and prove to the world once again that it IS picking the best singer. (By the way, vfw has a good wrap on this trend today.)
But what if the "best singer" is a former pro, and the whole selection process has become a sham?
I leave you with that question.