Talent shows such as American Idol and X-Factor are built on a flawed “winner-takes-all” premise, and inevitably this method frustrates viewers who end up confounded over the ‘winner’.
Both shows start out promising: searching in every burgh to find diamonds in the rough, and hopefully expose some nearly flawless gems. The audience connects with a certain, or several, singers, and begin to feel a personal investment to help these souls to succeed. Each show charades a type of nurturing for these talents, doing the most basic of mentoring, insofar as preparing each singer for the next broadcast. We’re treated, along with the talent, to the most basic tutelage, in a crash course of what should unfold over a decade of care and mentoring. In a more stable world, it’s understood that talent takes TIME to nurture (which record companies have forgotten how to do, or said that it’s not worth doing) and these shows make a career seem so much a overnight endeavor and in essence, ever so transient and disposable, and therefore, nearly worthless. Celebrity is currently understood as “for the very short tolerance of now”.

Are these singing competitions? Style competitions? Music style wars? Model auditions? Dancing competitions? Or all-around ‘entertainer’ competition? Neither show defines the goal. I think they both mumble something about being “modern”, “fresh”, “the latest thing” or “unique”, but after the judges push their preferences for weeks, they turn it over to the public, and it becomes a popularity circus, popularity meaning “what is the biggest viewing demographic?”, and maybe then the advertisers can decide how to style their commercials..?
Did the producers, or the audience, think we’d found a better way to find talented musicians? Was this supposedly the next logical step, since society mentally wrote off record companies and A&R systems? Perhaps the record companies had it coming; after decades of living sweet off of the talents of underpaid artists. Perhaps they had it coming after decades of getting worse at developing any talent at all..
So if it was theoretically a better way to find talent, I think that the TV production minds simply blew it by trying to hand it over to the audiences. In both shows, once the pool is whittled down to a dozen or so, they move the voting away from judges, and hand it to the viewing audience. And what’s so egregious about that?  It’s the voting method: calling to cast a vote, as many times as you feel like it. A fan can call in 1000 times a night, if they feel like it, and this changes the rules: instead of staying a talent contest, it’s wholly a popularity contest.
So in this way, modern televised talent shows fall outside of any reputable talent or singing contest once you reach the final 10.
Talent is taken out of it once the only rule is, “how many times will a viewer dial a number in one night?”.  Every year at this point my mind changes gears, and I’d like to look into the statistics of how crazy, competitive, obsessive, and aimless this makes the modern caller! What this says about modern society is much more interesting than amateurs who are painfully green to watch. I envision sane people calling in once or twice, and the crazy people dialing for three hours straight, just because the singer is cute, or has the right haircut, or etc, 100 things other than if they really sing better than contestant B. You also have to know that people are voting just to make sure contestant C doesn’t get anywhere (the jealousy technique)! Doesn’t that put you in mind of grade school drama, rather than a sensible way to pick a recording artist?

Year after year, my favorite singers on these shows, who seem to have the right balance of raw skill, individuality, potential, and a dash of star quality, are voted off while some one-trick-pony gets to first or second place, and I’m convinced that at this point it’s firmly in the popularity realm, no longer in the singing realm of reality.
Now I’m really tempted to say that I *know* that my choices are the most talented singers, with the most potential in the long run, etc, etc….. actually this much I’m sure of.  I just don’t care to argue about it, so we won’t go there!
Those who win these shows fill a niche somewhere, so good luck to them. BUT those who make it to the top 6 ALL deserve to be there, if due to nothing else that they’re generally diverse at this point, and if commerce really must pay to keep the lights on and all that crap, let’s at least do the right thing.
Let’s just let the top 6 get contracts, and make a CD each. Compared with the lackluster crap that record companies dump on us through their normal methods, the least they could do is take a miniscule chance, especially since they’re the most likely beneficiaries of all this televised exposure.
Because although I’d have loved to have followed the “post-Hollywoood” careers of some of the 5th, 6th, or 7th-place finalists, they simply don’t receive any real exposure after they walk off the TV stage.
The show suffers for this “winner take all” mentality, and surely some record companies are losing out on some lire.
I think the producers adopted the winner takes all idea from sports, and our uber-competitive societies, which really love to bury the second-placers, rubbing some serious dirt during their stomp-down.
But you know, artistic endeavors really don’t need to stomp that down.
If I took you to an art museum, we’d each find six artists that we really would love to see again some day. We wouldn’t say, “Well I like Manet the best, so the rest can piss off and die, and I hope I never see any of them again! Losers!! Manet wiped the floor with the rest of those turds!  Ha-Ha! Second place losers!”   Nope, that’s certainly a sports-centric scenario.
So maybe this year I won’t watch either show. Or maybe I’ll take really good notes, and set off and follow singers who catch my attention, at my own pace and in due time, regardless of how this silly television circus spins. Once these shows get to the phone voting, I just get sick of the circus that’s coming, so why should I keep tuning into that train-wreck? Why be so sadistic, right? I can follow whomever I feel like, and not feel perplexed by the obsessive dialing mentality of whatever makes up the demographics of phone-obsessed America. I really don’t think I want to figure them out, because I’m quite sure they don’t know a promising singer from a cute face, especially if they’re full of the biases of 14-24 year olds. No offense, but someone born in 1995 doesn’t get how good Ella Fitzgerald is, even if she didn’t fit the mold of a TV star.
So I suppose, let the producers overstimulate the minds of their demographics, and may the commercials fit all the right notches so someone feels happy that all the top dollars are shifting hands.
I’ve got to try to recognize some good singers, if they even make it to this stage.  I need to recognize that some years, there might not even be a valuable singer in the top 50, and learn when to stop watching!

And in the end, I believe that’s really all that an audition-er should really hope for: to have  a chance to prove themselves, due to the visibility of the show. The rest is up to their true talent, from that day on. It’s just an opportunity, and a cheesy one at the worst of times. But if you’re really exceptional, getting passed by on a TV show is no reason at all to stop your progress. Actually, just add a TV theme show to your set, and sing twice as beautifully, in the quality tradition of those who earned their name for decades before TV became of any importance to anyone. If you’re really good, good fans will find you.

My first thought is, let’s give the guy his Crown right away, because he’s certainly deserved the title over the years! Have you noticed how hard he’s made it to even hear, or buy, his new music? He must be so rich that he just doesn’t give a **. He’s one of only a handful of musicians who can still eat while being this difficult to pay! THAT right there is uber-crazy-man! And when he does tour, twice a decade, the dates are ultra-exclusive and only in the biggest of venues… it’s hard to follow him live, even when you’re trying to support his artistry… ..But you gotta love him for the chutzpa!

Also he’s been very vocal about how music (especially his) should never be downloaded illegally and all the implications of that, namely that he despises the current music industry and fan society, which really have been de-valuing music because we have so many ways to get it free, especially since that’s the way we’d prefer it!

Now you see, I really do agree with him on this issue. The music industry has changed a lot in the last 15 years or so, and it’s really become such a free-for-all frenzy of stuff-yourself-silly with music mindset, with very little consideration of paying musicians for what they give you. This is a huge shame. Good music has value, real value, deep, spiritual value, and the current mindset of the public has stripped much of this value away, because when we insist that we should have access to every recording ever made (via our mp3 ‘collection’) for free, we say quite clearly that we don’t care to pay for music because it’s ‘not really worth anything’, and this is truly a tragedy.

Perhaps it’s only true fans who are buying CDs or paying for mp3 downloads, and keeping their favorite artists solvent. The majority of the public is feasting without even leaving a tip. This is very gluttonous, and sad, and truthfully, criminal. And it insults true artists, because they do create work of exceptional value. Try to think of your favorite songs, and what you’d really be willing to pay for them. What if someone took away your favorite songs; what kind of pricetag would you claim you had lost to an insurance adjuster? I think you know how lost you would feel without your favorite songs and CDs, and if you had to pay to get them back, you’d probably pay full retail and then some. It’s interesting to see so many artists, old and new, giving away a few songs here and there for promotion, in the new business model.

Even more interesting is seeing artists now giving away whole CDs worth of work, just to interest (or keep?) an audience. That, my friends, is not just another cool ‘freebie’ for you and me, but almost a bad omen about where music is heading. It’s like going straight past the clearance bin, and even past the 10-for-a-dollar box at a rummage sale. I guess the plan is to interest some listeners, so maybe they step out and catch the tour. Still, it still looks to me like a dark cloud over music as an artform.

I won’t even get myself started on how music has suffered due to cutback funding in schools, creating sub-par ‘musicians’ who create that one-hit-wonder and disappear, or make a CD with one hit, the rest crap, and then make a 2nd crap CD that they didn’t write, and THEN disappear… awww, let’s just write that off to my jaded side.

So Prince, I feel your frustration, but I don’t think you should charge this windmill, of denying performing musicians the right to play your songs at their concerts. That has always been a gesture of respect and love, and it can only strengthen your legacy. Think of all the jazz standards that are kept alive out of love and respect for the quality, and know that it’s the best type of appreciation. So please relax, get out there and tour every other year, and let your frustrations out on that ol’ Hofner Tele, and we’ll scream as you deserve to hear, and we’ll buy the shirts and the CDs while we’re there, no stolen mp3s for this fan. You’re the real deal, so get out there and share your gift, let the music business disintegrate back at the office. Reign on, Purple Prince.

What makes me bring it up, is a case in point, playing out as we speak.
A new band from Indianapolis, “Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s” came to my attention just after their first CD, and I was hooked by their instrumentation and attention to detail, important additions that made their songs stand out.
Their 2nd CD was caught up in record-company drama, which is almost a cliche by itself. Still, they held it together. Well sure as shingles, as they were writing their 3rd CD, the singer took off to Egoville and declared himself Mayor, whining that the other bandmates distorted his vision by adding all those special ingredients.
The special ingredients were booted out of the recipe before recording commenced, and now I’m supposed to enjoy the 3rd CD full of Tofu. Great. They’re even coming to town, and I’ll have to act excited about a set full of 90% new stuff, filtered down to 3 people performing.
Of course, this is nothing new, as I can attest to 20 or so bands I could have grown old with since I started caring about bands around age 15, but No, I could write 20 pages of tragedy for each of the 20 bands, but I won’t depress myself that way.
Wait.
Maybe I should, as a form of cheap (free) self-therapy. It’s good to feel sorry for yourself, and to console yourself, isn’t it? Let’s give it a try.
Level 42: Mark, man up and play nice with Phil. He’s the best drummer, suited to the material, and he wrote half of the best songs. Work it out.
Duran Duran: Guys, listen to Andy; he’s wot gave the edge to your best songs. The band needs a infusion/transfusion, really getting back to your debut sound, and then another groundbreaker like “Rio”. And if you were smart, you’d go ahead and release a polished “Reportage”; don’t throw out something happening just because of a conflict.
Postscript: Arcadia, we need another offering; So Red the Rose was wayyy too good to be an empty reserve.
Jayhawks: Gary, Mark, get over your whatever; your sum is better than the parts, clearly. Although, if I’m being
brutally honest, the post-breakoff CD Sound of Lies was reeeealy reeealy good, so…
John Waite: get a full band again, write power ballads, just get out there! I’ll buy anything you record.
Del Amitri: Justin Currie, your lyrical and songwriting skills are unparalleled, but again we see that the whole had a magic beyond the parts. Mend the old fences; we deserve the quality, even if radio is clueless.
The Cure: Bob, take some time to remember how you wrote The Head on the Door, don’t write 10 minute songs without hooks. Whatever it takes; take the ol’ drugs, get hungry again, whatever!
Billy Idol: You still rock it, but the Rebel Yell sound needs a revisit, because it was so much more interesting than straight rock. God bless ya for still kickin’ ass, Thank You!
Depeche Mode: You need Alan Wilder. Again, thanks for still throwing it down, but there’s a crucial ingredient missing.
Eurythmics: Dave, buy another synthesizer, pull out the guitar just for after-touches.
INXS: It’s a cosmic crime that Michael quit. PLEASE keep writing; I KNOW you’ve got a great CD left in you!
Police: Sting, get over yourself. Andy’s the best guitarist ever, and Stewart’s the best drummer in many styles. Give them each 2 songs per CD, and make some millions, could ya?
Prince: Listen to 1999 and Purple Rain; rinse, repeat. Quit being all crazy.
Smiths: You’re all still alive, aren’t you? God knows you’ve got 3 more killer albums amongst the 4 of you.
Talk Talk, Tears for Fears, Howard Jones, Psychedelic Furs: You each must have one more CD in you.
Beatles: Make it happen, surviving kin…Dhani Harrison is a clone of dad, and Julian Lennon does John as good as John ever did. Guys, you have nothing to gain but clout & money…..

Quality music needs to rule radio again, the way you can’t forget the best of 60′s, 70′s, 80′s and 90′s hits, because there was substantial song-smithing going on, which has stood the test of time.
I’m not going to go on about the transparency and dilution of what passes for hits in 2010.
In a time when music is worth almost nothing, and the fans don’t even care to pay for it, quality still needs to be an aspiration, and if I’ve learned nothing else since 1975, the best music comes from collectives.

Well forget all that heavy-duty stuff for awhile. We haven’t solved any of that in 3 million years of humanity and I’m not about to put on my ass-whoopin’ boots. Some of these things won’t be resolved in ten lifetimes.

No, that makes it all the more essential that we fix a few things in the name of gosh-darn commons sense. Of allllllll the crap we can’t agree on, surely it’s time we put our cool headgear on and get together on these silly little items.

#1. Let’s all just drive to one side of the street, for Jesus sake! It doesn’t matter an ounce of difference what the HELL side it is, let’s just agree on this silly little thing, once and for all. Let’s sell some lottery tickets, have the money all go to charities, let the winning ticket go to some crazy dear old peasant from Slovenia, and we’ll set her up on a hill to do a final deciding coin toss. Heads we drive on the left, tails we all drive on the right. That’s the end of one ridiculous crossroads, so then we can all explore fun new lands and drive safe as you please!

#2. I understand we have to keep languages, native tongues to maintain heritage, culture, all that, OK, good on all of us. Wonderful. Darling.  BUT, from now on, for any languages that use Latin-based characters, let’s go with a better standard, with an imperative: whatever the SOUND is, you gotta use univeral LETTERS to express that sound!  No more G’s that sound like J’s and J’s that sound like C’s or CH’s or Z’s that sound like TS’s or E’s that sound like I’s or O’s that sound like AH’s, no more no more NO MORE!!! If your dear, darling, charming language makes a JJJ sound, let’s use some J’s!  If you make a TCH sound, write that shit down! Just a little consistency, man, that crap would go a lonnnng way towards diplomacy!

and finally, #3. Can we just get rid of daylight savings time once and for all? All across the world? It is simply a MESS, the whole world over. Seriously, look it up, it’s like a jigsaw of who uses it and who doesn’t, and those pieces don’t even fit nicely. Back in simpler (stupider) times, it was about two things: saving lighting resources and letting the farmers have some light at the beginning of their day. If you research DSTime you find repeated conclusions: there is no conclusive evidence that we save energy or add productivity or reduce crime; the best of estimates keep returning to a figure of 1%, which is to say NO conclusive evidence!

It is MY assertion that we only are F*in’ things up every 6 months, causing accidents and confusion for a weekend and into Monday, all to fool ourselves that we implement some clever scheme, when in fact we DON’T gracefully implement it! And Goodness knows, you KNOW your damn computer never does the F&@%!n switch right, does it?? Ever??? No, no it doesn’t. YOU gotta manually fix that thing on like 8 devices in your house.

Here’s the wise Deaner solution: for those geographically angled lands which give a crap about an extra hour of daylight, here’s what you do: from the months of November to Feb. 28th, you just go to work an hour later. Everybody agrees, hey that’s cool if Joe comes in at 9 instead of 8, he’s getting his work done. Farmer Joe, you sleep in an extra hour so you’re not plowing in the moonlight. Everybody else, you’re going to work where they have electricity and all modern buildings have run on timers for decades, and at home the extra electricity you used last winter evens out when you use less this summer. Mystery solved!

People the world over will be ten levels of calmer & sunnier when they rest easy knowing they can leave their clocks and watches and DVDs and appliances and computers the heck alone and the world will still spin on just fine. Let’s do this one for the team; team Earth, look how nice we’re all playing ball together!

…and once we get those done, we can seriously have a beer summit and solve the silly meter/foot/celcius/fahrenheit folly!

Oh, you sassy young millennium, your reckless behavior is embarrassing the family! Such rage, such clumsiness, such impatience, such lashing out without wisdom! Just like a human’s life, your first decade, you’ll look back someday and be astounded that you survived at all! And then, you’ll shiver doubly so for your teenage years! Braggartness and egotistic drama, here it comes!..

I believe that the ‘teens’, as we may come to refer them, will be seen as the decade where we tried like hell to have iChips implanted into our heads so that everything can be done as fast as our Internet connection service will allow. A chip in our head, whether it’s wise or not, just as long as we’re the first on the block to get one… I started out 2000 wanting to be on the crest of upcoming technology, but I’m really convinced that it’s just the saddest new means to separate ourselves from each other. I mean, are you really connecting with or enriching your human experience when you ‘Twitter’? I’m beginning to see the allure of the Amish! All I’ve observed about technology so far is that it allows us to acknowledge each other, without spending any real time amongst each other. And that’s kinda sad, really. Not an improvement.

But to me, 2010 and the ‘teen’ years should be a time to refocus, and get serious, again, and for a change. I must face that, success-wise, I fairly well just pissed the Aughts away. All the projects I should have done, got lost in the shuffle as I traveled around in a huge geographical circle. Wisconsin to Oregon, Oregon to California, California back to Wisconsin. It was an eye-opening adventure, and actually a time of growth (in a formative way) for my sons, which possibly helped them grow more than a stay in Wisconsin would ever have done.

But what would have happened to ME if I’d stayed in Wisconsin? That’s a contemplation I really can’t put to words. I have no idea. I probably would have stagnated in many ways, yet probably would have bought a house…  how can you quantify such a grand diversion? How can you set up the scales? I keep thinking of some phrase about how the adventure is in the journey itself, and the best part about the journey was that I saw ‘a whole ‘nother country’, in a real sense. And it absolutely guided me to change careers, for better or worse. Would I have lasted in commercial printing for 20+ years? Would it have been satisfying? Truth is, probably not, on both counts. So I diverted to graphic arts, graphic design, newspaper design, reporting, editing, reviews, etc, and then shifted gears entirely and moved to warehouse work. What did I learn from all that? That I enjoy staying active, and deskwork sucks! Now here I find myself in 2010, and I’m a half-time desk jockey, and halftime warehouse walker… who would have guessed?

Anyways, the point is that 2000-2009 was the decade of raising my boys and finding other options for ‘career’. With my sons being ages 7 to 19 in these years, I sort of had to focus on them a bit more than myself, and I think I made the right choice. Parenting is a fine line between being there to lift them up, while still kicking and huffing to secure time for yourself; it’s a peculiar dance of growing up in the secondary tier.

For this entire time I’ve talked and talked and talked, trying to guide, convince and threaten my sons to find a wise path. And now I’m very near sick of talking. If they don’t see the value of making good effort by now, they never will, and I’m starting to see a reason to cut back on my proselytizing, for their ease and mine. Youngster Andrew needs a few more nudges, but overall, I’m growing so weary of preaching the same 5 things. Like I’ve said, perhaps a few well-placed nudges…

So 2010 really must be the decade of doing things for ME. I’ve got Nick on a step into college, and hopefully Andrew will revelate through example (since he repels at heeding dad’s drones), so I’m a little bit off the hook, little bit coming up for air. And the funny thing about aging is, the older you get, the less enthusiasm (or strength) you have for anything at all, or at least that’s my experience. So many things seem like futile expenditures… but again there are times when I know I’m too young to give up, and anything good is worth the pursuing. So God help me, this must be the decade where I do all the “Me” things that I put on standby, presumably for this decade to arrive. Such a nice round number, it must be the perfect corner to re-assemble myself at.

I’m not going to embarrass myself with specific goals for each year or the entire decade, especially with specifics, since I have so many hobbies I’d like to revisit, but the biggest goal I’d like to challenge myself with, and the world can taunt and shame me into sticking to it; I welcome it.

By 2012 (since the world’s ending in 2012 anyways, right?), I want to have written my first 3-book series, with illustrations. That’s a book every 8 months. If I budget my life accordingly, I believe it shall be done. Done donedone done done!

I’ve got to quit making excuses, and I’m starting to believe it’s just a matter of better time management… In earnest effort to achieve this, I must adopt a new mindset, of: How bad do you really want this? What is the best way to keep progressing? And if I finally encourage myself to set these things in motion, I’ve got to realize that time is not my best friend, and I need to be respectful that there might not be surplus time, on my road. Then, the biggest truth I need to absorb is, at the end of my day, my only meter of worth must be: “Am I proud of my efforts and what I’ve given back to the world?” If I don’t present my wholehearted contribution, I cannot really claim a satisfied life.

So 2010, a toast: To your challenges, a Story to be told! A story of real living.

Update: December 2010- I think I was pretty on the money with my forecast & assessment. I think I’ve talked and talked to my sons, and I need to have faith that they’ve listened, that they take serious the things they should know they must do, and that I need to offer advice when they inquire it, and not fret so much. I can’t live their lives for them, or suffer through their stumbles. I need to be supportive and encouraging, not doting, nagging or controlling. I need to keep all that in focus, even when they come to me with their woes.

Because once I am comfortable with my role in this next phase in their lives, I can get more focused on the things I’m needing to do for myself. Writing, drawing, painting, recording, carving, designing, these are all things I’ve put off because of my fears of not doing enough for my sons. But in retrospect, I think I’ve done quite a lot, and of course I will do more as needed, but I really need to focus on my goals, so I can be happy with my life.  2011, please give me the clarity to get things done which will make me happy, and keep me positive for those who need me. Or should I say, God; God please give me these things. Then the years will simply get better and better.