American got talent sends condolences 💐 to family of Simon Cowell 😢 sadness read more below 👇
Can he really have been here for only six years? Already there’s something of the Dick Clark about him, and it’s possible to look at him with forgiving affection, as if you associate him not with your own childhood but with that of your parents. His hair reinforces this feeling. Dannii Minogue, younger sister of Kylie, recently solved a minor technical riddle for us by describing it as “square.” What she said was, “His hair’s too square.” Not that his hair makes his overall head look square, but that it could be mistaken for a cube of hair that has been hollowed out underneath in the shape of his head and placed atop it like a crown.
In the airports on the way out to L.A., I amassed a briefcase-shaped bag of new music mags. Idol had achieved saturation; this was the year in which it became surely the first television show ever to generate Grammys, Emmys, and Oscars (after Jennifer Hudson won for Dreamgirls). You could flip open anywhere: It was Chris Daughtry’s tour notes; it was a review of Kelly Clarkson’s album; it was an article about an Idol boot camp where they train young hopefuls, girls with braces. Or else it was Carrie Underwood in the celeb weeklies. Fantasia on Broadway. I’m just going to start naming these people. Clay Aiken. See how many of them you know. Sanjaya. Bucky. You know them. Princess P., Constantine. You may not know Ryan Starr, granted. But if I say From Justin to Kelly. If I mention the time Justin nearly mowed down a little girl with his personal watercraft, your face might not move but something’s happened in your brain. If I’ve got you wrong and you have no idea what this is about, for Christ’s sake put down the magazine and run tell others what’s happened. Except there are fewer and fewer places you can go. It’s in more countries every year.
There’s an Iraq Idol. They had to broadcast from Beirut. Two years ago, it became the vehicle for a 12-year-old boy named Bilal, from Mosul, who during his audition sang a song in formal Arabic about a destroyed people, a people crying in the streets, which ended with everyone in the room sobbing, including Bilal. Even the old irony shield doesn’t always work when you are in the arena of the dark powers.
