![]() ![]() I don’t know if Barry Manilow was smiling when he recorded “Mandy,” his first hit. They were selling themselves, not the songs. It wouldn’t matter if they were singing sad songs. This wasn’t true across the board, but plenty of American Idol contestants would always smile when they were singing - big, toothy, plastered-on pageant smiles. There were many things about American Idol that reliably drove me nuts, but nothing hit me the way the constant smiling did. And yet American Idol was our highest-rated television show, by far, for many years. The American Idol conception of pop music - ballad-centric, based on modern standards, built around the vocal virtuosity of the singers - was foreign to my experience. I spent years writing about American Idol - partly because I was being paid to write about it, and partly because I was fascinated.
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