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 |  Subject: Kris Allen & Adam Lambert: Ricky Nelson meets Elvis  04.07.09 0:12 | |
| I got this in an email from our friend MsAlex. It's from The Baltimore Sun on May 15th 2009 - Quote :
- Who knows how honest the vote tabulations on "American Idol" are? After all, no outside source verifies them. But no matter how Fox and the producers of the series managed to get here, they now have their most culturally potent finale ever in the showdown between Adam Lambert and Kris Allen.
Each embodies an archetype of musical and sexual identity at least as old as television. And the choice viewers and voters make this week will have something very important to say about where we are as a nation and what kind of pop star we are willing to celebrate and embrace.
Allen is a direct descendant of Ricky Nelson, the youngest son of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, of the white-picket-fence 1950's sitcom, "The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet." A 1956 episode of the NBC series featured teenage Ricky Nelson forming a rock group to play at a high school dance. His first recording, "A Teenager's Romance," sold over a million copies in the real world.
Ricky Nelson -- with his crew cut, penny loafers, V-neck sweater and guitar -- was a sex idol all right. The female, teen demographics for the series went through the roof once he started the band and launched a singing career. But he was the safe, TV-and-parent-approved version of teen sexuality in the 1950s -- chaperoned sock-hop dances in the high school gym with no slow, pelvis-to-pelvis-grind dancing.
The icon of that era from which Lambert descends is, of course, Elvis Presley, who in those same 1950s was recording songs like "That's All Right, Mama" and "Hound Dog." He was either being kept off network TV altogether -- or shown only from the waist up because of the nasty things censors thought his hips were saying to teen girls.
It goes without saying that Presley was a sex symbol, but the difference between him and Ricky Nelson matters -- just as it does with Allen and Lambert. Presley was non-parentally approved, bad-boy sex in the backseat of a hot car parked down by the deep, dark river with lots of pelvis-to-pelvis grinding in the midnight hour.
Lambert's best performances embody that sense of transgression -- and then some. The "then some" includes many of the rock transgressors who have come since Presley: Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Prince and, perhaps, even Cher (this is not the place to argue about where camp meets transgression with her).
And this is where things get most interesting with Lambert. After the sexual revolution of the 1960s, there was hardly an aspect of heterosexual behavior or identity that was widely considered to be transgressive any more. But then came androgyny with Jagger, glitter and glam with Bowie -- and whatever with Prince.
Lambert channels all of that, and it is at the heart of what makes him so dynamic to watch onstage. He is a self-contained drama of identity reminiscent of the great Japanese actresses who with each pass of their hand-fans would assume a dramatically different identity.
In the middle of sounding exactly like Steven Tyler on an Aerosmith song, he'll suddenly soar into a falsetto scream somewhere up in the Holy Land of Patti LaBelle -- and he'll stand there looking contemptuously like he could hold the note forever if he wanted to.
Which brings us to gender and sexual orientation. (You knew we were going to wind up here, didn't you?) After having everyone from Simon Cowell to "The New York Times" acting like it was all right to just assume Lambert is gay -- in part because of his Joan-Jett-like dyed blue-black hair, earrings, painted nails as well as the ability to hit those LaBelle-like notes -- we have now come to a kind of don't-ask/don't-tell relationship with the 27-year-old singer from San Diego and his sexual orientation.
All Lambert will say on the topic is: "I know who I am. I'm an honest guy, and I'm just going to keep singing."
All anyone connected with the show will say is what Cowell told TV Guide: "We've obviously never had an issue with it, and nor should anybody else. It's a huge step forward for the show."
Not really. Coming out or not is absolutely a matter and right of the individual -- not any media outlet. But to flirt with gay identity and present personas infused with gay identity as Lambert has consistently done, and then decline to talk about it, might suggest to some that gay identity is something that cannot be talked about openly -- that it is something to hide.
And that kind of thinking is further suggested by the fact that the "American Idol" producers offer only sketchy details of Lambert's personal life while they give us lots of Allen and more of the recently eliminated Danny Gokey's world than anyone could possibly want.
If Lambert is gay and he says so, it could be a "huge step forward for the show." But either way, it will be watershed if he is the one chosen the new "Idol" by viewers this week.
For more than five decades, prime-time network TV has taught us to embrace the safer, less dangerous and daring model of behavior -- Fonzie Fonzarelli instead of Marlon Brando's leather-jacketed character in "The Wild One."
This is our chance to choose the artist rather than the mere performer -- the musical tightrope walker willing to break taboos and cross boundaries. Do we dare? | |
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