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Spoilers for last night’s utterly shocking, unless it wasn’t, elimination on American Idol coming up after the jump:
And so Casey Gets Voted Off Week on American Idol concluded with Casey getting voted off. Casey James’ elimination seemed like a foregone conclusion even without the song-choice disadvantages that this week’s performance episode heaped on him. If it’s any consolation to his fans, at this point he’s received all the exposure—musically and chest-wise—he likely needs to launch a career.
As for Idol’s next champion, the producers may have something of a problem. Not to take away anything from Crystal and Lee musically, but neither of them still seems to have the stage-performance chops that some of Idol’s past winners have. Love their music or not, they still both seem most comfortable planting themselves behind a microphone and singing—which is fine, but great stars have both that musical ability and a performer’s sensibility. So last night’s episode, involving the traditional visits home, may have been more important than usual, by giving fans a closer look at Lee and Crystal’s home lives: anything to build up an identification with them.
Don’t get me wrong: obviously they both have passionate supporters who they can probably count on to buy their albums. But as past Idol successes (e.g., Carrie Underwood) have shown, becoming a post-Idol hit on the scale that their producers would like means the ability to fire up listeners who weren’t passionately voting for them on Idol. And as Chris Daughtry showed, the person who wins that challenge isn’t necessarily the person who wins the season.
And I’m thinking, especially based on last night’s musical guests, that it’s pretty important to Idol’s producers to show they can still create real stars. The emergence of people like Justin Bieber (who rocketed to fame in part through buzz on Twitter) and Travis Garland (“discovered” by Perez Hilton) shows that Idol is no longer the only game in Mediatown when it comes to turning unknowns into celebrities that fans feel intensely invested in. When a viral video can launch a career or get you national TV exposure, that’s moving in on Idol’s starmaking turf. And I have to wonder if the greatest long-term threat to Idol is not Simon Cowell’s The X Factor, but YouTube and other social media.
So if you have a prediction as to who wins next week, I’m glad to hear it. But I also wonder: which contestant this year—not limited to Lee and Crystal—has the best shot at a big-selling career as a recording artist?