In its very first season, though, American Idol happened to spotlight a born pop star through something like sheer dumb luck. Instead, Idol winners tend to be anodyne, technically gifted ciphers - nice-looking faces with winning personalities and musical sensibilities at least a couple of decades behind their eras. American Idol is a TV show about pop music, but it’s never really existed in conversation with the pop music of its moment. But then television came calling.Īmerican Idol was always a strange institution - a slick and glittering television product that existed, and technically still exists, to sell sentimental human-interest stories and deep-catalog ballads to the people of the United States. At the time, it must’ve felt like nothing was going to happen, like her chance had come and gone. But shortly before Clarkson suddenly vaulted into millions of living rooms, she’d moved back to Texas and worked odd jobs, including that one in the cocktail bar. I’d like to imagine that Clarkson would’ve reached pop stardom with or without the new TV singing-contest machine rumbling behind her. She’d moved out to Los Angeles, worked with an industry legend, and turned down a couple of major-label contracts that didn’t smell right to her.
The 20-year-old Kelly Clarkson was destined for pop stardom, and she’d already taken active steps to reach that destiny. She was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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