Billy Vs. Popular Music

I'm generally not a guy who watches much reality television or listens to music on Z100. It's just not my style music wise, and TV-wise it always seems just so staged and phony and scripted and it annoys me.

(That being said, Jersey Shore is a masterpiece.)

American Idol was a show that I always avoided, and still do for the most part, just because it's a competition show, which I generally hate, and it's to become a singer in a genre I never listen to. And it still is insanely staged and scripted. Obviously these three judges don't listen to 10,000 singers in 2 days. Other groups narrow down the 10,000 to a workable number, and even that number only has a handful of people with talent and the rest are WAAAAAAACKY people wearing WAAAAAACKY clothes being SAAAAAAAASY and WAAAAAAACKY and are delusional and scary and likely coaxed by producers to really play up their WAAAAAAACKINESS. My family got hooked into this Idol thing a few years back, and now watch religously. I'm in that group that is able to watch sometimes during the audition stage for comedy sake, but abandon the show once it turns serious. That's when it bores me. Seeing the really horrible acts try their song and get laughed off the stage is hysterical to me at first, but now the more I think about it, the more horrific it is. The terrible ones will sing, and sometimes the judges will fake being really into it, and singing along, and smiling, and basically raising the spirits of these people, only to burst into laughter when they eventually beg the singer to stop. It's a formula that's worked for years, and it's really all about how we love watching other people in misery. I'm one of them. Those losers with bad hair and two kids and no money and lots of dreams that get called "rubbish" in a pretentious accent crack me up. I started to think about other kinds of auditions that could end the same way.

Imagine being in a job interview, and you get asked a question and what you could bring to the company, and you give an answer that you think sounds professional, and the guy interviewing you is smiling and nodding and seems into it, and then you stop, and the guys laughs, and calls you names and kicks you out.

Imagine presenting a report at school, and the students and teacher watch you read this report you worked so hard on, and they see you sweating and freaking out, and when you're done, they start laughing, and pointing, and mocking your style, and your teacher wonders why you bother getting out of bed at all, because you're such a waste.

These scenarios crack me up, and just give me hope for America, and it's ability to laugh at those beneath us.