A woman who was a rejected contestant on the American Idol TV show was found dead from an apparent suicide. These two incidents relate because the woman killed herself in front of A.I. host Paula Abdul's home.Already, there are those who want to blame her death on the American Idol TV show.
If you've ever watched the show (and who hasn't) you know that during the opening cattle call of judging there are a lot of delusional contestants.
A few of them are deliberately bad because they want to get on TV. But many of them really believe they can sing because they are good at Karaoke, or because their friends told them are good. A lot of these contestants get a rude awakening when they are told otherwise. Many of them don’t take this rude awakening very well (As was the case with this woman) and some of them even get mocked and ridiculed for the world to see.
I think that a lot of otherwise normal people (who have no business auditioning for this show) do so, because they where brought up during the time when it was popular to tell kids that “You can be anything you dream of being” mentality rather than the “With hard work you can achieve anything” mentality.
A.I. feeds into this kind of mentality because it really tries to push the idea that their winners came out of nowhere. As if they are Cinderella stories. The truth of the matter is that no one makes the finals on this show without having years of professional experience behind them. I know that at least 3 of last year’s season’s finalists already had label releases under their belts prior to auditioning for the show (A.I. only requires that you not be signed to a label at the time of auditioning).
Now personally I think that A.I. is bad for music. It fosters unrealistic expectations about the music industry, it denigrates the importance musicians and musicianship. It denigrate the importance of songwriters. And it's produced a lot generic albums from it's contestants. But I feel that blaming A.I. for this woman's death is like blaming the Beatles for Charles Manson (IE: Helter Skelter).
Many years back there was a lawsuit against the Heavy Metal Band Judas Priest. Two kids shot themselves while listening to Priest's music. One died and the other was terribly disfigured. The parents filed suit against the band saying that the music drove them to shoot themselves.
The judge (thankfully) found the band to be not guilty.
These kids had issues, If not Judas Priest, they would have found something else to inspire them do what they did.
The same goes for this woman who auditioned for A.I. If not this TV show than something else might have led her to do this.
If you go into an American Idol audition you have no one to blame but yourself if you get ripped apart. Even a pro can get ripped apart on this show and only a real pro can handle that sort of thing.
Once again, This does not mean that I approve of a lot of the things that they do on this show. There are nicer ways to let people down and tell them that they suck and I have even seen the judges be, for the most part, nice to people who are completely delusional.
Since the beginning I have boycotted this show (for many reasons that I stated earlier and a few that I wont get into here) I finally stopped boycotting the show last year, and watched the final 12 compete because I realized that there was too much I could learn as a performer from watching the finalists compete.
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