‘American Idol’: Sanjaya round-up

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Like a liberation of a foreign nation gone awry, or like a brief fling that lingers on for years and years until your friends and family no longer take your calls because they are so sick of hearing about it - America’s obsession with human singing oddity Sanjaya Malakar seems to grow with every passing week. Is it too soon to start throwing the word quagmire around? Probably.

But we’re getting there.

First of all, it should be noted that of course Sanjaya is not the first novelty candidate to progress to these late rounds of the show. In Season 4 the deeply scary-looking Scott ‘The Body’ Savol a contestant of obscure talents with a domestic violence-tainted past finished fifth for the year, decimating would be pop superstars Nadia Turner and Anwar Robinson as he lumbered on. Not to mention the celebrated heartthrob Constantine Maroulis.

‘American Idol’ survived Savol, and it survived Kevin ‘Chicken Little’ Covais in Season 5. And it will overcome Sanjaya. If there is one corner of our culture that has proven the maxim, ‘There is no such thing as bad publicity’ it is ‘American Idol.’

But will it ever be the same?

What is new about the Sanjaya phenomeon is that (as I pointed out in an earlier post) you have a contestant who seems to be actually embracing his anti-hero stature - striding forth to the Idol stage self-consciously as the great destroyer of all that is Idol.

And there is also the scale of this movement.

Unprecedented about ‘Idol,’ defying all television laws of gravity is the fact that the show gains in popularity each season. Which is in itself a sorta self-fulfilling prophecy - as the audience gets bigger, the stardom of the winner is more assured, the stakes rise, the audience rises even more. (When will it all end? Not until, I predict, we combine Idol with our electoral system and the winner becomes President of the United States. As it should be.) But as the stakes rise, so do the stakes for the haters - the Idol spoilsports. And thus, as the competition is bigger than ever, the evil Sanjaya faction is bigger than ever.

Today’s Sanjaya breaking news alerts:

Yahoo reports that

That news however, should be tempered by the fact that Haley Scarnato scored #2 on their poll. The complete list:

In other Sanjaya news, a press release from Kentucky Fried Chicken PR, posed as a letter from KFC’s President Greg Dedrick to the Big S himself offered:

When God hands you a not at all a stretch for tie-in like that, what corporation in their right mind could turn away?

(Photo courtesy Fox)