Idolized: Music, Media, and Identity in American Idol (review)

Popular music and multimedia are increasingly visible topics in ethnomusicological scholarship. Katherine Meizel combines participant observation, interviews, music analysis, and archival work in order to present the first nine seasons (from 2002 to 2010) of American Idol, a singing competition in the form of a reality TV series, as a site of interaction between the music industry, performers, and audience. Meizel's main research objective is to explain why American Idol matters. Although the show may be packaged as light entertainment or guilty pleasure, Meizel argues that it does important cultural work by contributing to dominant post-9/11 American national ideologies.

Two themes in Idolized: Music, Media, and Identity in "American Idol" explain the show's success. First, participatory viewer-voting appeals to Americans as a semi-democratic process. Second, contestant stage identities are carefully constructed through physical and musical markers. As contestants carefully navigate cultural tropes about personal and national identities, their negotiations of race, ethnicity, religion, class, sexuality, and gender influence audience perceptions of authenticity and group membership. Meizel chronicles the ways contestants voice these stage personas during the television show, and how fans respond.

Readers need not be American Idol fans in order to appreciate Meizel's analysis, but readers are expected to come to the book with a basic knowledge of reality television programming. Thousands of Americans audition for the game show each year with hopes of appearing on television and winning a coveted recording contract. After semifinalists pilgrimage to Los Angeles for callbacks, twelve finalists are systematically voted off the show each week until a winner is determined.

Meizel describes American Idol 's marketing strategy as an exploitation of national myths about diversity and social mobility. Producers highlight contestant diversity in order to widen audience demographics and simultaneously attract lucrative corporate sponsors/advertisers. Meizel convincingly argues that American Idol sells stories to Americans about the boundaries and virtues of their post-9/11 nation. Idolized links American fixation with identity markers to the increasing global reach of politics, commerce, and technology. Part of American Idol's appeal is its ability to simplify identity politics. "America" as a definable, performable, musical product is achieved by blending multiculturalist ideas about America as a melting pot, and assimilationist values of transformation and conformity.

Similar to beauty pageant contestants or political candidates, Idol winners are supposed to personify American purity, and their performance identity is expected to make sense within the show's larger narrative about the American Dream. Meizel uses music to complicate Idol 's nationalist reductionism by positing that contestants navigate an individual/communal dichotomy by performing two stage identities; the first marked by recognizable ethnic, racial, religious, or regional tropes, and the second marked by difference. Performance identities are communicated through body image, rhetoric, and song. When contestants successfully perform their dual identities, they win votes from television viewers.

Campaigning and voting fosters group identity among viewers. Meizel posits that voting is symbolic of democratic processes because Americans interpret voting as political agency and consumer choice. Game shows are compared to political elections, contestants compared to political candidates, and audience to party factions. Television audiences interact with American Idol performers and producers through voting. During the 2009 season, fans purchased approximately 624 million votes. Audiences and contestants evidence awareness that the show is manufactured, yet they continue searching for the most authentic performance that reflects the audience's desired reality. If manufactured stage personas are intended to reinforce the political identities of American Idol's fan base, then the absence or failure of certain identity types on the television show is telling evidence of who actively participates and financially invests in the show. Contestants perform songs that pander to the political identities of the judges.

Meizel terms American Idol voting procedures as "pseudo-democratic," the creation of stage personas as "personal authenticity," and public expression of these personas as "self-knowledge." Personal authenticity and self-knowledge are largely...