I was a bit lazy with my post. First, the New Radicals song is “You Get What You Give”. I also should have linked to the video, which I have rectified below. She is in the video, but she’s hard to pick out. I think I recall there’s a reason why she was relatively “anonymous”, but I can’t recall it or find it anywhere. I think she’s playing the keyboards in the “group playing the instruments” shots, but she can most clearly be glimpsed briefly in the “dancing crowd” segment that begins at the 3:42 mark in the video. She’s the one in the middle who looks right into camera:

[www.youtube.com]

Final Danielle Brisebois Fun Fact — as a 6-year-old child actress she was the original “Annie” on Broadway. Her voice is the voice in the sample Jay-Z used in “Hard Knock Life”.

Everyone likes to blame the Sanjaya factor, but I thoroughly enjoyed all of his performances. And that’s what it’s all about, I think.

Now it’s just blatantly rigged as well as lame.

Mencken was right – no-one ever lost money by under-estimating the good taste of the American public.

[featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com]

Note that for the first time last season [ignore the "check out this new phenomenon!" first season], the ratings graphs for the performance shows did not look like “W”‘s. Instead, they just continued to slide downward, never picking up [significantly] as the competition heated up [the exact opposite of the first season, actually].

I would have actually suggested if asked [ha!] that they focus on actual talent — like, the people who actually make it to Hollywood — instead of freaks-and-geeks in the audition rounds, and do better screening on the people who make it to the finals. I want to know before I tune in that I might actually hear some good performances [Kelly, Clay, Bo, Carrie, Daughtry, for example].

But that’s just me.

The fans will come back to the teevee week after week *if* the show is entertaining, and the talent is good. They will also by the CD’s, go to the concerts, etc. But only if the talent is good. So it makes perfect sense for the braintrust to actually feature, ya know, good singers and stuff.

I agree that it is somewhat offensive that AI producers are trying to take advantage of some — yes, only some — viewers’ beliefs that they are giving some poor nobody a shot at the big time.

But I also know that the AI braintrust has a serious financial interest in the post-AI success of that “nobody”, so part of what AI is about is manufacturing a fan-base. Ya know, sorta like what MCA tried and failed to do. So, to “just sign her” makes no sense if they can’t put her on the teevee [almost] every week for 4 months.

And I also know that more and more, actual talented singers who are already professional singers see AI as that vehicle they need to reach a mass audience, and that the producers see those singers as — unlike the nobodys — the people most likely to appeal to a broad fan base.

As dickdogfood so succinctly put it, AI long-ago stopped being a chance for America to find a nobody with a dream and turn that nobody into a star. Instead AI has become a vehicle for producers to pull a lot of money out of the pockets of the advertisers who are drawn by the enormous manufactured fan base, and a lot of money out of the pockets of that manufactured fan base when they buy the albums, concert tickets, etc.