OK, I’ll admit it — my guilty pleasure is that I enjoy watching “American Idol.” Oh, it’s not my only guilty pleasure, but it’s the only one I’m willing to admit for now. Stay tuned.
For the record, the show today is way better than it was at the beginning, 22 years ago. Back then, the main focus was on delusional dreamers who had no idea how bad they were, and the only reason to watch the early episodes was to find someone to laugh about at the water cooler the next day. It was a guilty pleasure back then, too, I guess, especially if you found pleasure in cruel ridicule.
But all that has changed. This season, all the featured performers are good. Some are excellent. Some even outstanding.
There’s not a lot of coaching or criticism from judges Lionel Richie, Katie Perry, and Luke Bryan, who mostly offer praise and encouragement.
Some of the performers are as young as 15, and many of them younger than 18. And maybe that’s why I find myself drawn to the show lately, because I spent a 35-year career around kids that age, as a teacher at Maine South High School.
In those American Idol hopefuls, I see the same glimmer of potential I saw in every student I taught or coached. And also the pain of insecurity, the crushing burden of being seen as somehow different.
In intimate interviews with the performers, many are reduced to tears when they speak of the painful path on their way to becoming Idol entrants.
That’s because most of them have been lashed by needlessly cruel criticism, mostly on social media. They rarely faced that level of hatred from live audiences, because criticizing a performer face-to-face requires at least a modest level of courage. But the words “courage” and “social media” don’t belong in the same sentence.
All musical performers have bombed in front of a live audience. I’ve done it. So have Richie, Perry, and Bryan. And the audience knew it was a bust, and then we all shrugged and moved on to the next show.
But with social media, the rules are different. It might even have been a triumphant show for the majority of the audience, but one troll has the power to turn it into a nightmare on the Internet—a cheap-shot sucker punch review that never goes away.
And it’s hard to get beyond that one singular review, especially when you’re 15 or 16 years old, and your worst fear is that someone — anyone in the world — might hate you.
I give credit to recent seasons of American Idol for highlighting performers’ tearful tales of struggling through insecurity, through cruel treatment from anonymous Internet trolls. There is no telling how many young artists will be inspired by such tales to soldier on through the pains of cruel social media reviews and continue to develop their special gift.
My teaching career ended 20 years ago, just as American Idol was beginning, and before children lived both in the real world and also in the social media world. But although anonymous trolls today have way more power online than they did decades ago just by spreading rumors, I think the lesson is still the same.
And the lesson, as I see it, is this:
As different as we all are, every person on the planet wants the same thing: We want to make a difference. We want to feel that we matter.
It’s a fundamental need that demands to be satisfied — for better or for worse.
A musical artist makes a difference by bringing something new into the world, making the world just a bit larger, whether it’s an original lyric or a fresh reimagining of another’s song. That’s the very definition of creativity: Giving birth to something that didn’t exist before.
For some performers, that difference might someday be a platinum album that millions will sing along to as the soundtrack of their lives. For others, it might just be a smile on Granddad’s face as his life ebbs away. It could be argued which matters most.
But what of the Internet trolls who go out of their way to anonymously trash performances? Well, that’s a way to make a difference too, isn’t it? That’s another way to “matter”.
Because, lacking the power to create, if you have the power to crush another artist’s dream, to make them walk off the stage and never return, you’ve succeeded in making the world just a bit different than it would be if you had done nothing.
And for some, that’s the best they can do: Breaking what others have built.
In the end, it all boils down to each of us expressing the need to matter, to make a difference, for better or for worse. And it’s sad that bashers have nobody in their life to make them believe they could make a better difference.
And so my advice to those young troll-troubled performers would be not only to embrace their gift, but even to embrace the social media backlash, as proof that they have noticeably made the world just a bit bigger. Audience praise is great, and criticism is painful, but silence is worst of all, because it’s evidence that you haven’t made a noticeable difference one way or the other.
So I hope that young artists will be inspired by criticism of their gift. Because the more bashers that rear their ugly anonymous heads, the more proof that the artist has built something that matters, something worthy of being bashed in the mind of a troll whose only tool is a bludgeon.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com
