Pop Idol Research Articles

Becoming Extra-Ordinary: Negotiation of Media Power in the Case of Super Girls’ Voice in China

This article aims at understanding the popularity and cultural and social significance of the highly prominent Chinese television show Super Girls' Voice (the 2005 season), a talent contest largely modeled upon “reality shows” such as American Idol in the United States and Pop Idol in the United Kingdom. We focus particularly on whether the show, as some critics have claimed, has altered the power relationship between the media and the audience. Theoretically, we follow Couldry's (2000) framework and consider the media's construction of the symbolic boundary separating the “media world” and the “ordinary world” as crucial to the legitimization of media power. Based on an analysis of media discourses, review of publicized materials about the show's organization, and a focus group study on young female audience members, we contend that the Super Girls' Voice has involved a temporary suspension of the media/ordinary boundary. Yet the boundary was re-established toward the end of the show, thus relegitimizing media power. The audience members, meanwhile, were largely complicit throughout the process: They both enjoyed the temporary suspension and the ultimate re-establishment of the media/ordinary boundary.

From Zero to Hero? An Exploratory Study of the Predictors of Success in the Dutch Idols Competition

The successful television show Idols is set up around a talent competition where a large number of contestants compete to become the nation's next Pop Idol. Contestants are selected by expert judges and audience voting determines the competition's outcome. Scarce attention has yet been given to the influence of the contestants' personal characteristics on the outcome of the show. Based on findings from creativity research and career psychology, we explore what individual characteristics predict success within the Dutch Idols competition. A sample of audition contestants (n = 369) and contestants who entered the final rounds (n = 27) completed our survey. We conclude that successful contestants are characterized by higher levels of musical socialization and insecurity, lower levels of intrinsic motivation, more experience in performing and a higher self-evaluation of appearance. We argue that the concept of “preparedness” explains the majority of our findings: those contestants who survive the first selection rounds are not the ones that start from zero.

“Image, Music, Text”: Elvis Presley as a Postmodern, Semiotic Construct

Summary Peter Whitmer has written that around the world the names Jesus, Coke and Elvis are the “only three words that need no translation to convey their meaning” (Whitmer 1996: x). Even in a multicultural South Africa, in the year 2008, the image of an Elvis impersonator was used to market a series of rollerball pens for no other reason than they come in a variety of colours redolent of the ersatz emeralds and sapphires on the singer's jumpsuit (Sunday Times Magazine, 25 May 2008, n.p.)! Elvis Presley, arguably the greatest solo pop idol of the twentieth century and certainly the most recognisable and ubiquitous semiotic marker in American cultural history, embodies the quintessence of “the postmodern condition” (Lyotard). Thirty years after his death – 16 August 2007 marking that epochal moment – Presley's image remains a powerful signifier of the exuberance of post-World-War-Two youth and culture, not only in the West, but worldwide. Drawing on the work of poststructuralist thinkers such as Barthes and cultural theorists such as Simon Frith, Steven Connor and Dick Hebdige, this article explores the mystique of the Elvis image as a postmodern, semiotic text. In crossing the liminal zone between black R & B and white country and western music, Presley, a white southerner, negotiates a fluid, performative identity that characterises the hybrid nature of the rock genre itself.

Extended liveness and eventfulness in multi-platform reality formats

The international success of formats such as Pop Idol and Big Brother owes much to the ways in which they combine a number of broadcast and digital platforms under the aegis of a common 'brand'. The article argues that the media industry strategists behind such formats have come to rely on extending existing broadcast conventions of liveness and eventfulness by means of audience participation via digital return channels. It argues that such participation invites a sense of presence, heightened immediacy and involvement in the live event. The article emphasizes how such features are being developed by the broadcast media industry to exploit audience participation for the purposes of revenue, competitive edge and strategic expansion.

Reconstructing the Transgendered Self as a Muslim, Nationalist, Upper-Class Woman: The Case of Bulent Ersoy

Winter of 2007. Another Sunday night, new episode of Popstar Alaturka, Turkish version of Pop Idol. Minority and human rights activist Hrant Dink has recently been assassinated by an ultranationalist youth and Turkey is experiencing of few notable instances of spontaneous collective action in past two decades.1 It has been only days since tens of thousands of people marched in streets, chanting, We are all Armenians! to express their sympathy for Dink and Armenian community. Hence, TV show opens with popular Armenian folk song Sari Gelin-which, later in evening, will lead to rather long and interesting monologue by of jury members. This member is glamorous lady in her fifties, wearing haute couture dress revealing her long legs and shapely breasts. She expresses her discontent with slogan We are all Armenians! Underlining fact that she is the Muslim daughter of Muslim parents, she emphasizes that no can ever make her say she is Armenian or Christian. Claiming that it would be more acceptable if slogan had been We are all Hrant, she deems it intolerable for Muslim person to say that s/he is Armenian-and therefore Christian. But who is this glamorous woman who seems in desperate need to underline her Muslim, nationalist identity? For readers who take an even slight interest in Turkish popular culture, answer would be quite obvious. The person is Bulent Ersoy: self-proclaimed expert on classical Ottoman music-though singer of popular genre arabesk-one of first Turkish men to undergo sex change and very first to ask for female passport, and hater of transgendered prostitutes. Ersoy has been an extremely popular public figure in Turkey since early 1970s and is very likely to remain so. Following Simone de Beauvoir's claim that one is not born, but, rather, becomes woman, in this essay I seek to trace how Bulent Ersoy has Muslim, nationalist, upper-class woman. In doing so, I aim to understand strategies that define spaces of abjection reserved for transgendered individuals in Turkey in post- 1980s and examine tactics for survival that are available to them.2 I will try to explore Ersoy's personal history in context of events in Turkey since 1970s and discuss cultural atmosphere and dynamics of gender in country in light of Ersoy's narrative. A YOUNG, FLAMBOYANT MALE SINGER The renowned singer of classical Turkish music Bulent Ersoy was born as Bulent Erkoc in 1952 in Istanbul. Named after soccer player, Bulent was only son of an urban middle-class family. He was introduced to classical Turkish music by his grandfather, who played zither, and his grandmother, who played lute. Shown to have talent, he took private lessons with acclaimed musicians at an early age and later attended conservatory. While he was still student, he began singing professionally under stage name Bulent Ersoy-the name Erkoc, meaning brave ram, was probably too masculine for this rather androgynous young man, so it was replaced by Ersoy, brave lineage. Ersoy is also easier on tongue. Ersoy's first record came out in 1971. At that time, nighdife in big cities, especially Istanbul, mainly consisted of Greek tavernas and nightclubs called gazinos. Those nightclubs provided middle- and upper-classes with hours-long programs bringing together several singers as well as comedians and belly dancers. There would often be lead singer, called an assolist, who would take stage last and sing classical Turkish music. The extremely competitive atmosphere made it difficult to become lead singer. At time, many established lead singers sang arabesk, genre influenced by Turkish folk and Middle Eastern music, that had come out in Turkey in 1950s and 1960s. Martin Stokes, of leading experts on arabesk, claims that it is a music inextricably linked with culture of gecekondu, literally night settlements which mushroomed around Turkey's large industrial cities after Menderes government program of rural regeneration in 1950s produced large rural labor surplus (1989, 27). …

Lip-sync in Lipstick: 1950s Popular Songs in a Television Series by Dennis Potter

In the 1993 television production Lipstick on Your Collar, screenwriter Dennis Potter foregrounds popular 1950s rock-and-roll hit songs, creating what he has called a “home-made musical.” Characters break out in song—but instead of singing, they move their mouths in synchrony with the voices of pop idols. A study of the effects of Potter's technique, with help from the literatures of opera and film theory and the history of ventriloquism, shows that the songs in Lipstick on Your Collar gain fresh meaning in their new context through the medium of lip-syncing, becoming spontaneous expressions of the characters' psychologies.

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Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization (review)

Reviewed by: Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization E. Taylor Atkins (bio) Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization. By Ian Condry. Duke University Press, Durham, 2006. xii, 249 pages. $79.95, cloth; $22.95, paper. It is difficult to imagine an expressive form more thoroughly "local," rooted in its point of origin, and yet so readily "global" in its portability and potential appeal than hip-hop. "Keepin' it real"—by which emcees mean maintaining, even fetishizing, its longstanding cultural roots in urban African America—is key to hip-hop aesthetics. It is a vision that far too often presumes a uniformity of black experience, that privileges particular ideas, behaviors, and forms of communication as "blacker" than others, and that thus either resists "hybridity" or accepts iconoclasts only on terms established in "ghetto life." On the other hand, as a musical form reliant more on programming skills than instrumental prowess, on rapid-fire rhyming rather than singing ability, hip-hop supposedly "democratizes" artistic production, making it possible for virtually anyone to express themselves—or "represent"—in the genre. This quality makes hip-hop accessible to wider swaths of humanity, regardless of their "street cred" in inner-city African America or lack thereof, and thus a potent site for that epochal process we call "globalization." It is precisely this tension between the "local" and the "global" that constitutes the thematic core of Ian Condry's superb ethnography, Hip-Hop Japan. The most theoretically ambitious of the recent spate of English-language scholarship on Japanese popular music, it aspires both to revise existing notions of globalization—exploring in detail how "localization and global connectedness can proceed simultaneously"—and to probe the limits of the "power of media industries" to control the transnational flows and development of popular music (pp. 18–19). Its exceedingly complex yet energetically persuasive argument makes Hip-Hop Japan a must-read for scholars in a variety of disciplines, regardless of degree of interest in either hip-hop or in Japan. Without sentimentality, Condry clearly views the days when anthropology could take as its object discrete, bounded "cultures" as long past. Though his command of contemporary Japanese society is impeccable, he tackles "borderless ethnography" with gusto and enthusiasm. In order to pursue an ethnography of hip-hop in Japan, Condry has necessarily mastered and gracefully integrated several distinct disciplinary literatures within the broader fields of Japan studies, African American studies, ethnomusicology, media studies, and the anthropology of globalization. His work thus sets a challenging standard for future generations of Japan anthropologists to meet. [End Page 239] Most American readers approaching Hip-Hop Japan will do so with an initial prurient (and self-satisfied) interest in the spectacle of stereotypically polite, well-behaved Japanese imitating African Americana and posing as in-yo-face ghetto thugs. The book acknowledges this fascination, engages it head-on, and dispenses with it appropriately, before moving on to discuss less obvious but more important issues raised by the presence of hip-hop in Japan. Individual chapters are devoted to rivalries over the definitions and soul of hip-hop, fandom and consumer culture, female assertiveness, linguistic politics, and the business of marketing hip-hop. Though the title hints at a Japanese hip-hop "scene," one of the book's most insistent themes is that hip-hop is understood and "performed" in diverse ways in Japan; although pioneer emcees openly pondered the Japaneseness of Japanese hip-hop, the idea of "representing Japan" has yielded to more circumscribed aspirations to represent specific communities, "families," political stances, and aesthetic positions (p. 161). Condry identifies and cautiously maintains a distinction between "party rap"—with its fluffier lyrical content, more akin to the "pop idol" phenomenon—and "underground hip-hop," which adopts a more aggressive oppositional stance on issues ranging from the history textbook controversy to critiques of Japan's "credentials society" (pp. 41–43, 95–98). While acknowledging considerable crossover between these two streams, Condry insists there is a meaningful distinction between them, and his sympathies clearly lie with the underground scene. This is, in part, because the underground scene provides a more provocative answer to his...

The Emergence of Audience as Victims

The Emergence of Audience as Victims

Faking it: the quest for authenticity in popular music

In the last fifty years, the quest for authenticity, for the 'real', has become a dominant factor in musical taste - whether it be the folklorist's search for forgotten bluesmen, the rock critic's elevation of raw power over sophistication, or the importance of bullet wounds to the careers of hip-hop artists such as 50 Cent. Faking It explodes the myth of what it means to be 'real' and 'fake' in pop music. From 30s blues singer Leadbelly to Moby's use of his singing over half a century later, the appropriation of black music by a predominantly white musical fanbase, Pop Idol, the fact that no one in Cuba listens to Buena Vista Social Club to Kurt Cobain's suicide note and the fear it expressed of 'faking it'.

Avoiding ‘Star Wars’– Celebrity Creation as Media Strategy

SUMMARYMedia companies generally enjoy increasing profits if more customers watch a program. The viewer drawing capability of stars serves as a prominent instrument to increase the audience. The literature distinguishes between two different types of stars: highly talented and therefore ‘self‐made’ superstars, and famous but ‘manufactured’ and thus rather trivial celebrities. Whereas ‘self‐made’ superstars attract viewers by providing services of superior quality, ‘manufactured’ celebrities draw attention by fabricated fame. Illustrating thePop Idolseries and comparing the abilities of superstars and celebrities to generate and to capture value, we show why ‘manufacturing’ celebrities is a lucrative business for the media.

Swan's Way: Care of Self in the Hyperreal

Swan's Way:Care of Self in the Hyperreal Mark Poster (bio) Reality Media As the last century came to an end and the new one began, media culture in the United States has taken increasingly surprising turns toward "reality." On the Jerry Springer, show ordinary folk reveal and act out their loves and hates before a national television audience. Broadcasting in talk-radio format, Howard Stern insults listeners and guests alike, and Rush Limbaugh screams at everyone the wisdom of know-nothing reactionary politics. Judge Judy enacts reality court proceedings, and extreme sports shows feature the disgusting consumption of bugs and horrific battles. On the Internet, users earn a living by selling virtual characters and weapons for players in massively multiple online role-playing games. Bloggers are perfecting the literary form of the online confessional. The brave new world of reality television, talk radio, and virtual global gaming introduces a fascinating, novel landscape of mediated popular culture. Are we to take these examples as indications of a significant cultural formation, or simply as an ephemeral passing fad of programmers and audiences alike? If they do deserve serious attention, what frameworks of interpretation can be used to decode their meanings? To render my task a bit more manageable, I will narrow my focus to one category of these examples of media culture: cosmetic-surgery reality TV shows.1 Starting in late 2002 with ABC's Extreme Makeover, [End Page 151] many networks programmed new series that presented run-of-the-mill individuals (almost all women) having their bodies transformed by face lifts, breast enlargements, tummy tucks, liposuction, rhino-plasty, tooth veneers, chin implants-a great assortment of surgeries that promised to alter their bodies into the shape of commonly recognized beauty. These medical procedures became performances visible to television viewers. The market success of Extreme Makeover encouraged other networks to come up with their own variations on the theme. FX premiered Nip and Tuck in July 2003, a fictional series featuring two cosmetic surgeons. MTV inaugurated I Want a Famous Face in March 2004, introducing the celebrity factor: participants modeled their surgeries on the bodies of stars, challenging doctors to reshape them into the image of their favorite pop idol. Not to be left behind, Fox aired The Swan in April 2004, a reality series that included a competition in each episode between two women having multiple surgeries, and culminated in a grand finale of a beauty contest that selected from the winners of each episode the ultimate woman, "the Swan." The E! Network came aboard with Dr. 90210 in July 2004, enhancing the format of cosmetic-surgery reality television with the aura of Beverly Hills. Throughout 2004 viewers enjoyed a cornucopia of action with scalpels. (See Table 1.) The United States was not alone in its fascination with these series. In the United Kingdom in 2005, for instance, makeover television shows included Channel 5's Cosmetic Surgery, Sky One's Sun, Sea and Silicone, and Channel 4's 10 Years Younger. Name of Show Network First Aired Extreme Makeover ABC December 11, 2002 Nip and Tuck FX July 22, 2003 The Swan Fox April 7, 2004 (Season One, 10 episodes; Season Two, 9 Episodes ending December 20, 2004) I Want a Famous Face MTV March 15, 2004 Dr. 90210 E! July 11, 2004 One might easily approach these programs as baleful examples of patriarchy, capitalist ideology, neoliberal market culture, excruciatingly bad taste, the deplorable culture of the masses, shameful exploitation, audience manipulation, heterosexual normativity, the postmodern imagination, decadent American civilization, the relentless barrage of images of beauty, consumer narcissism, boredom, a culture of superficial amusement, and so forth. Yet serious issues are raised by these reality TV series of cosmetic surgery. I shall argue, first, that they exemplify a form of media culture that carries Jean [End Page 152] Baudrillard's concept of the hyperreal to new levels and illustrates a landscape of hitherto unimaginable combinations of humans and information machines. Second, and this is my main concern, I shall inquire if and how these shows illustrate a new variation of Michel Foucault's concept of the care of self.2 To this end, I shall attempt to extrapolate...

Gate-keeping in the New Media Age

A key trend in current broadcasting is the combination of traditional TV-formats and digital media. In these multi-platform formats, the Internet and the mobile phone in particular are used as return channels in order to stimulate audience activity. Studies of multi-platform formats have mainly analysed audience participation with cumulative influence on the production, such as Big Brother and Pop Idol. In this article, I investigate a format that combines traditional journalism with elements of audience participation. In the current affairs format Seven Thirty, the audience is invited to respond to issues raised in the programme by sending text-messages via the mobile telephone (SMS). The viewers are not guaranteed to get their messages aired; the moderator selects and rejects messages according to the editorial policy, and thus functions as a classic “gatekeeper’ The study compares the text-messages received by the TV-station with the ones transmitted on-screen. The main research questions are: What are the main conflicts between journalistic norms of objectivity and participatory ideals of access? How are these conflicts handled in the production? What characterises the “gatekeeper” in the new media age? One of the basic findings is that “gatekeepers” not only select and edit, but also fabricate text messages.

E-Press and Oppress

E-Press and Oppress

ALCOHOL IN THE WIDE WORLD: A SERIES OF COMMISSIONED EDITORIALS

Addiction is setting up a series of editorials which will provide updated pictures on national experiences with, and responses to alcohol, drawn from around the world. The journal is immensely grateful to the people who have agreed to help. It is, of course, impossible to cover the whole globe, but there will be statements from every continent and from the developed as well as the developing world. The launch piece comes from Russia (Nemtsov 2005) and as well as telling us about the current situation in that country, it provides a deep historical perspective. Why this initiative? Addiction is in general intensely committed to the strengthening of international communication in its field and we believe that our readers will value updated accounts of what is happening with alcohol across a broad spectrum of nations and cultures. People may these days often watch the same cable television, pay homage to the same pop idols, sip the same cola, but the world of drinking is still one of very diverse experiences. So far this series has lined up editorials from Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia. If there is anyone from another country who would like to make a contribution we would be delighted to hear from them. Contact Patricia Davis at p.davis@iop.kcl.ac.uk for the series guidelines for authors.

Feeling the Noise: Teenagers, Bedrooms and Music

How does music transform the contemporary teenage bedroom from the mundane (doing homework, sleeping) into a dynamic cultural and social space? Previous research has suggested that, in an exclusively female sphere, the role of music in teenage girls’ bedroom culture was purely one‐dimensional, part of the ideology of romance that rarely went beyond the adoration of the pop idol. More recent research not only demonstrates that both teenage boys and girls engage in bedroom culture, but also that, as a cultural form, music is integral to the creation and evolution of their youth cultural biographies, and works as a ‘soundtrack’ (DeNora 2000) to their social lives. In this paper I explore the dynamic relationship of young people, bedroom space and music. Through in‐depth ethnography, the complexities of the musicalisation of everyday teenage life are examined using the theoretical concept of ‘zoning’. Music is used by teenagers as a way of creating a specific type of atmosphere in their bedrooms. The dynamics of this are primarily controlled by the individual, depending on their age, their mood, the time of day, what other activities they are involved in and who else is occupying that space (friends or siblings for example). The creation of atmosphere through music is often spontaneous, of the moment and inter‐changeable. Significantly, music is a medium through which the boundaries of public and private space are necessarily blurred. For example, music played at a high volume spills out of the bedroom zone into other rooms in the house. Music is also used as a ‘prequel’ and a ‘sequel’, facilitating getting ready for nights out on the town, setting the right tone and atmosphere. The further multi‐layering of bedroom and music zones is also explored in relation to new technologies such as the Internet, which have the capacity to zone music from the physical into the virtual and back again. Finally, what is the significance of music in shaping a teenager’s cultural biography? Here teenagers’ influences on their musical interests are examined as evolutionary, alongside how musical biographies are translated into bedroom content.

'The Only Place Where ''Success'' Comes before ''Work'' Is in the Dictionary...?'

'The Only Place Where ''Success'' Comes before ''Work'' Is in the Dictionary...?'

Hypertrophic Celebrity

Hypertrophic Celebrity

‘But this Time You Choose!’

The concept of ‘interactivity’ has gained increasing currency in relation to television. At the level of programming, at least, this has been made visible with the phenomenal rise of reality TV. Phrases such as ‘ You decide!’ ( Big Brother), ‘But this time you choose!’ ( Pop Idol) and ‘If you want to have your say’ ( The Salon) proliferate in contemporary television, articulating a rhetoric that insists pressingly upon a ‘new’ participatory relationship between viewer and screen. The aim of this article is to consider the political implications of this shift for existing approaches to audience-text relations in television and cultural studies. This involves a consideration of a number of broader issues which currently raise questions for the study of television and its audience, particularly the increasing criticisms made of the active/resistant audience paradigm, the relationship between television and the internet, and the status of the televisual ‘text’ in a proliferating intertextual field.