Generic Pop Stars and American Idol

Sadly, I can't follow up on Migs's American Idol post by saying "I've never seen the show". I saw a lot of whichever season it was that had John Stevens, which I think might've been the Ruben-Clay season, but don't hold me to that.


Look, it's Pink!

Stevens is an interesting data point on this idea that Idol is a great way to create boring pop stars, because he was absolutely the least boring contestant his year, while also having absolutely no chance of winning. Stevens, as some of you will recall (but Migs will not), was a Sinatra/Dino/Bobby Darin kind of singer. This was, of course, fascinating in a pop landscape where memories tend to stretch back only about as far as Madonna and Michael Jackson. You can see, though, how Stevens wasn't going to do so well with, say, "Latin Week" (which was, according to Wikipedia, the week he was voted off).

If American Idol were actually intended to create genuine pop stars (rather than simply being a money machine for Fox, which it is), the producers would recognize that even the broadest of pop music is targeted, niched in a certain way. Name some platinum-selling artist and I'll tell you some other platinum-selling artist's catalog that they'd be completely unable to handle. Getting back to Madonna and Michael -- they couldn't have done each other's songs (even accounting for gender differences). Pink and Britney Spears and Lady Gaga and Christina Aguilera are/were not interchangeable.

The format of Idol, though, requires the winner to finish not-last in each week. If you're middle-of-the-pack at every possible song style there is, you'll do very well on Idol, and you may get lucky enough to win. If you're excellent at some things and terrible at others (as most genuine pop stars probably are), you're probably going home early because you'll have a disastrous performance during, say, Country Week.

This isn't groundbreaking stuff, but it's basically by way of explanation of my lack of interest in the program. It's not the only reason, of course (overly bombastic singing, the judges saying the same things over and over ("a little pitchy, dawg"), too many theme weeks I just don't care about, too much puff in between performances), but if I genuinely thought the next Ke$ha or Pink or Gaga was coming out of this show, I'd watch it, even with Randy Jackson at the end of the table.

Watching American Idol

Not as exciting as Wojo's pictures, I know.

Before I discuss watching American Idol for the first time, have people seen these McDonald's ads with the coach telling the kids they can "eat like Olympians" and then taking them to McDonald's? This is an homage to the Little Chocolate Donuts SNL parody, right?

So after 8 years of avoiding American Idol, I've relented and am watching my first full episode as I write this. I enjoy music a lot. I enjoyed the show Rock Star (sadly, that Tommy Lee band from season 2 did not last). So why not Idol? I tend to avoid things that everyone likes which also seem dumb to me. And Idol always struck me as a way to create mediocre pop stars. Did you ever listen to that album Kelly Clarkson wrote herself? Neither did anyone else. Although she can sing a song written by hook-loving Swedes.

Why am I doing this?

Home bar pride. The lead singer of one of my favorite local bar bands, East Coast (no, not the most original name) tried out for Idol... and made it onto the initial show... and made through all the preliminary rounds... and tomorrow, dude performs live on national TV. He's the one they call Big Mike. I want him to succeed, and I care just enough to actually watch and probably even vote.

This will be a bit of a social experiment. Sort of like that guy who hasn't seen Lost watching the last season of Lost. So far, my thoughts? Many of these people are not very talented, and almost all of them are boring. I generally find myself agreeing with Simon.

Also, does Ellen know she looks like an elf? She could do a production of Peter Pan tomorrow.

Our Gossipy Society and Tiger's Statement

I'm interested in the point Jason made about how many people's interest in gossip is driven by their friends' interest. Following gossip is worthwhile if it means not getting left out of the conversation. Our friend Pam quipped that perhaps we should find friends who talk about more interesting things, and while I agree philosophically, it feels like more of my friends talk about celebrity gossip than before. But why?

Other than our culture getting more vapid (a possibility), I think it has to be the ease of doing it. It used to be that to follow the stories, you needed to buy a magazine weekly. Now, TMZ and Perez Hilton and all the others are free, and offer news faster. Moreover, the increasing number of people doing it has decreased the stigma of doing so. Jason referred to sneaking a purchase of US Weekly at the supermarket, but now friends will regularly send me links to gossip. And I need to read them because... well, how else would I follow important sports stories?

I swear, I only watch Keeping up with the Kardashians to inform Wojo of how Lamar Odom is doing.

I haven't watched the Tiger Woods press conference yet, but after reading reports, I'm still pretty disappointed that he hasn't put on the proverbial black hat (funny, since he wears a literal one all the time) and just admit that he's not really sorry for what he did, and that he's going to go out and kick some puritan golf ass. Reading the clearly manufactured statements about being sorry and wanting to be a better person is just... well, boring. If I wanted boring, I'd watch golf.

Tiger and the media on the media

One of the things that's interesting about the celebrity culture we're in now and the media environment that's created that culture (or fed it, whatever) is when those media organizations responsible for the around-the-clock coverage Migs refers to recognize just how responsible they are for the whole world they've created. I've been letting my TV run Sports Center at night while I play poker, so last night, I saw (two or three times) a piece on Tiger Woods in anticipation of Woods's prepared-statement-reading schedule for today. A significant portion of the piece was about the media's coverage of the car-crash incident, the later revelations that Woods basically had a harem, Woods's refusal to say anything, his entry into rehab, etc. etc. etc. And a significant portion of that significant portion was about ESPN's coverage of same. The audience was shown the absurd parade of New York Post covers, of course, but also clips and audio from Sports Center, including anchors saying things like "nobody really knows what's going on".


Come on, it's my shtick now.

What is interesting about all this is the way that media outlets seem mature and intelligent enough to realize what they're doing when they report breathlessly on Tiger Woods and yet they do it anyway. It's sort of the analogue to the person who buys Us Weekly at the grocery store and hides it from her friends. We know it's an unhealthy obsession, we know that it does far more harm than good, but we don't know how to quit.

Part of the issue gets back to my initial parenthetical above, about whether the media has created the culture or merely fed it. I'm not sure there is an answer, except for the bromide that we all bear some responsibility: if ESPN and TMZ didn't create the stories, we'd have nothing to click; and if we didn't click the stories, they wouldn't make any money from the creation. The media organizations can always fall back on the old collective-action problem, though: ESPN can't stop reporting on this stuff because no one else will stop, and so they'll lose viewers, lose money, and so forth. Consumers do have a version of this excuse, actually: if all your friends care, then you have to care or else you won't have anything to talk to them about.

Given the lack of solution, I guess we just have to hope for one of two things. First, the continued rise of meta, the media covering the media, which is covered by the media, ad infinitum. If we continue on this endless loop of coverage of coverage, the whole thing will have to just implode on itself at some point, and give us the opportunity to start over. (And thus my motivations for participating in this blog are revealed.) Second, we can hope that people just get bored. "Another steroid story. Blah. Another sex scandal. Blah." Sex and drugs are titillating material, though, so I don't really see this happening anytime soon. Sadly.

The Personalization of Celebrity Gossip

The John Mayer Playboy interview has got me thinking about a lot of topics, but the one on the table for this post is the way people now interact with celebrity gossip. There's always been an aspect of judging celebrities based on gossip stories, but it feels like that's increasing. I've talked to plenty of people who don't listen to John Mayer's music that don't just have an opinion about him, but have a strong opinion about whether or not he's a douchebag, whether he was a good boyfriend to Jennifer Aniston, and whether he's a misogynist. I've been trying to work through why that is.

I think there's two main contributing factors. The first I'll refer to as TMZ, but it really encompasses all of the expanding celebrity paparazzi coverage. As the coverage has gotten more constant, people feel like they know the "real story" moreso than in the past. Of course, we don't. We have no idea what went on between John and Jen, even if we saw more pictures of them than an analogous couple from 20 years ago.

But I think the bigger change are personal blogs and Twitter. They allow celebrities to speak directly to their fans. This is of course a lot of fun and occasionally enlightening, but it also gives people a greater sense that they "know" a celebrity. Of course, the picture you get of a celebrity from Twitter is still a mediated one - 140 character thoughts are to understanding a person what a paparazzi photo is to knowing what's going on in a celebrity's life. This works both ways: on the one hand, people have a greater sense that a celebrity is their friend, but they also judge a celebrity negatively if they say something provocative in a tweet.

What it all adds up to is that a person in the limelight now is subject to a scrutiny that is much more personal and heated than it was in the past. This has to be hard for celebrities who are aware of how they are perceived, and have to deal with the inaccuracies and out and out lies that get passed around as news. Of course, if they try and fight back using Twitter, they get an unfiltered communication device - but they also subject themselves to even greater scrutiny.

Championships and Luck

I think Wojo's point about the mano-a-mano nature of baseball is a good one. If a star player goes 1-for-18 in the playoffs, there's no one else to blame but the player, and maybe the quality of pitcher he faces - in basketball and football, its much easier to credit the defense. Now, if that 1-for-18 streak happened in May, we'd simply call it a slump, and people are now even well-versed enough to say things like "regression to the mean" and "small sample size." But only in May. Why?

If we recognize that a player's performance in an important baseball game is as likely to be good as performance in a regular baseball game (and lots of studies have showed this to be basically true), then a 3-for-4 game is just good luck, and an 0-for-4 game is bad luck. What follows from that is problematic for a lot of people - the outcome of a baseball game is determined by the talent of the two teams and the way the two teams match-up, but also by the luck of the draw in terms of players' performance levels. This idea is anathema to the way people want to think about champions as "the best."

Baseball is an interesting sport to discuss for this point, because teams are much more bunched together than in other sports - no team has ever had a regular season approaching the '07 Pats or the '96 Bulls in terms of winning percentage (or, on the flip side, the '08 Lions or the current Nets). Good baseball teams win 60% of their games, and bad ones win 40%. It's not completely uncommon for a bottom team to sweep a series with a very good team. So, when two good teams play, the odds of either team winning have to be close to a coin flip (a better discussion of baseball odds appears in this Phil Birnbaum post). But the winner of that coin flip is exhaulted, and the loser is questioned. We don't give a title to the team that would win the most if we played the season 1000 times - we only play the season once.

To simply explain the results of a 7-game series as luck would make sports seem hollow. Who cares about a dice roll? So instead, we look for reasons why performance was good or poor in that moment. We find character flaws in the losers, and build the winners into supermen. Now, these discussions aren't completely without merit. How a player responds to pressure must have some impact on performance, particularly on the negative side (anyone who's played sports knows the feeling of being "tight" in a big moment and having to overcome that). But it's generally less than one might think.

Recognizing that doesn't necessarily take the fun out of sports, but it does take a lot of the morality out of sports, and baseball writers/fans love morals (see any discussion of steroids ever). Perhaps that explains the resistance.

Bad arguments about baseball and football

Migs's point about the relative mutedness of the discussion of Peyton Manning's testicle size seems dead-on to me. I suffer from even more selection bias, though, since I don't really read about football. I follow the Football Outsiders guys on Twitter and I read Bill Simmons, but that's about it. I'm much more well versed in baseball, so that's where I'm going to take this.

It strikes me that almost 35 years after Bill James hit the scene, seven years after Moneyball, almost fifteen years after the founding of Baseball Prospectus, five years after the founding (and two years after the shuttering) of Fire Joe Morgan, ten years after Voros McCracken published his Defense-Independent Pitching research, we're still having a lot of the same discussions about "clutchness", the value of a home run (every year, without fail, someone argues that homers kill rallies, and thus are sometimes less valuable than doubles), and the "hittability" of pitchers that we've been having since time immemorial.

In football and basketball, I understand why we're still clinging to outmoded ideas. Baseball has a long history advanced stats that doesn't really exist in the other sports. (John Thorn and Pete Palmer wrote "The Hidden Game of Baseball" in 1985. Earnshaw Cook wrote "Percentage Baseball" in 1964.) Second, interactions are vastly more important in football and basketball. Baseball is essentially a one-on-one-on-one sport, where a pitcher faces a batter, who then tries to put the ball where a defender can't get it. Defensive responsibility zones overlap to an extent, but for the most part, if a ball is hit in a particular area, we can assign almost all of the credit or blame for catching or not catching that ball to one defender. Thus, in football and basketball, it is more difficult for stats to have meaning because they have to account for significantly more context.

Perhaps it's that mano-a-mano atmosphere that has retarded the conversation in baseball. We know that fans and writers (through some interaction effect of their own -- I'm not really clear on how much I should blame fans for being who they are and thus forcing writers to write what they need to hear, or the writers for creating the myths fans believe in) love to oversimplify and focus on one particular aspect of a game or a team. Alex Rodriguez is the root of all evil for the Yankees, and Derek Jeter is responsible for all good. Peyton Manning is the greatest regular-season quarterback ever but chokes when it matters. Kobe Bryant has the balls of a horse but Dirk Nowitzki is soft and weak. But when you make these arguments in football or basketball, you don't have to make sophisticated counterarguments to shoot them down -- it doesn't take a stats genius to look at the video of the Manning interception and see that there might've been a slip or a miscommunication between Manning and Reggie Wayne.

In baseball, though, Alex Rodriguez striking out can only be placed on him. He doesn't have any excuses. The arguments have to get more subtle, because you have to point to studies about how clutchness doesn't exist as a skill. You have to impart the concept that 40 at-bats in the post-season just doesn't provide the same evaluative window as 600 in the regular season. What it all comes down to is that you have to convince people of the huge role that randomness and luck play every single day.

I'll conclude by going back to the word "understandable". I get why people have a hard time accepting this. We want to believe that we are in control of things. It's why we have debates about welfare and affirmative action, and why some people were actually on Paul Shirley's side regarding Haiti. The idea that the course of a significant portion of our lives (maybe more than a significant portion, depending on how you feel about free will in general) is determined by factors that are 100% out of our control verges on heresy.