On The Air

I have made my peace with Sanjaya. There is plenty of outrage and confusion over his continued reign on American Idol. People are blaming Vote For The Worst and Howard Stern, although previous Vote For The Worst picks were Sundance and Antonella, and you see how well the site help them stick around. And Howard? Please. Howard Stern is even more irrelevant and washed up after his move to pay-only radio than he was before. His dwindling listener base keeps hoping that people are still paying attention to him, but they aren’t.

No, Sanjaya’s longevity on this show is just one of the mysterious vagaries of American Idol. Maybe it’s Indian-American voters putting him through. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s the only teenage boy. Maybe it’s million and millions of Ashleys out there. Or maybe, like everyone jokes, it really is the hair. Or it’s all of that put together. Whatever. He’s an unstoppable juggernaut on AI, and he’s going to cut down several singers who are better than him before he’s through, and I’m okay with that.

If the producers want to blame anyone they should blame themselves for putting him into the Final 24 in the first place. They had every opportunity to cut Sanjaya loose in Hollywood and put someone better in, but they didn’t take it. Maybe he really was better back then, and he hadn’t started to blossom into the never-ending high-school talent show he has become. Or maybe it’s true that they put bad people through, even in the final round, to make the show more exciting and give their favorites a better chance of being safe. I’ve got a working theory that this is how Taylor Hicks made it into the semifinals, more as cannon fodder than anything. If it ends up backfiring on them, they really can’t blame anyone but themselves.

Sanjaya, though is taking the suck to a new level. Not content with just singing badly, he’s now taken to assaulting our other senses. His rendition of “You’ve Really Got Me” last week was a fiasco on the level of Kevin Covais’ “Part-Time Lover”, but you know what? He owned that damn stage. And last night’s fauxhawk/ponyhawk/Marvin the Martian costume is just the latest sign that Sanjaya gets the joke. He’s come to realize that he’s nothing more than a punchline, and he understands that there are two options: either take the criticism and make an earnest try to do his best each week, ultimately failing and going home three weeks from now, or to just go balls out and become a full-blown circus. He, fortunately, has chosen the latter. He’s decided that if he can’t be good, then he can at least be horrible, and he can have some fun with it, and he can take his horribleness and stuff it in your face and make you eat it.

The good news is that Sanjaya isn’t as objectionable as some of the previous contestants we’ve had that we can’t get rid of. He’s no Constantine, for God’s sake, or Carmen Rasmussen or Kimberly Caldwell or any of the other “precocious little monsters”, as Simon put it, who not only got voted through week after week but who also made you want to put a boot through their neck. There’s nothing particularly wrong with Sanjaya, not in that way. You don’t hate him, he just can’t sing. And, sometimes, on American Idol, that’s not a problem. After all, as Peter Noone so perfectly put it last week (and I was really surprised to see such an on-point observation come from someone who’s more well-known for his infomercials than his music), “this isn’t a singing competition, it’s a voting competition.” Sanjaya kind of perfectly embodies that statement.

And so I’ve made my peace with Sanjaya. I see him as a representation of the “American Idol as Carnival” phenomenon, which I fully embrace. He’s even got Simon throwing up his hands and saying that what the judges say is irrelevant. Which is true, and has always been true, but for them to actually say it on the show, out loud, is kind of an uncomfortable fourth-wall-breaking moment. There’s a lie to this show, but the show is supposed to keep the lie going. That’s its job, and there’s an awkwardness that comes along with the lie being dissolved before our eyes. This is what Sanjaya is doing to the show. He’s blowing it up from the inside out, and he doesn’t even realize that he’s doing it, probably. I find myself starting to actually look forward to his performance each week, wondering what kinds of horrors he will unleash. And isn’t that what it’s all about, really? He’s taking the show to a new level, an admittedly weird one, but American Idol is hitting brave new frontiers where any good sociologist with a sense of humor could spend years dissecting what’s going on here. What going on with society, with the voting, with the ratings, with all of America. Sanjaya is indicitive of something in our society, and I don’t know what it is, but I’m having a hell of a lot of fun watching it unfold.

And according to Dial Idol, Sanjaya is safe, so it’s going to keep unfolding for a very long time.