Over at Press Play, Drew Gardner has written one of the best pieces I’ve ever read about reality television. Focusing on a new show called Killer Karaoke, in which contestants are required to sing while being plunged into ice water, shocked with electric collars, or covered in bugs, he argues that reality television, an innovation in programming is cheaper in part because participants don’t have to be paid anything, has begun driving even the rewards offered to the successful contestant who makes it all the way through to the end down—in Killer Karaoke, the most the winner can make is $10,000—but that Killer Karaoke has exposed the unpaid labor in poor conditions that undirgird the industry as part of its very schtick:

Killer Karaoke breaks with this tradition. There is no panel. The contestants are judged only by the audience, according to whatever criteria they please, probably a mix of singing talent, courage, and how entertainingly they flip out. But winning is not exactly the point of the show. Something of an afterhtought, the anti-climactic final challenge involves singing while remaining balanced on a giant rotating turntable with two other remaining contestants. The point of the show is to see how winningly contestants can suffer humiliation and pain under objectionable working conditions. In contrast with American Idol, Killer Karaoke encourages the audience to sympathize with all the contestants from the beginning: though we’re amused by their suffering, we’re also rooting for them. We want everyone to succeed, in a situation where success comes down to freaking out in the most hilarious way…

Steve-O is very much a traditional game show host in this role on Killer Karaoke, an updated Bud Collyer. He stays out of the action and keeps to the role of explaining the stunts and drawing comments out of the contestants. In a recent interview about the show, he said, “Breaking bones and sticking things up my ass was not getting any easier.” It’s clear that he has a strong grasp of the economy of the show, and perhaps about reality TV in general: “It’s about the misfortune of others and exploiting people’s willingness to sacrifice their dignity and well being just to be on TV for a brief moment.” Steve-O’s host character is an expert on ill-advised activities who has happily gotten himself promoted to a upper management position.

The show sounds horrifying, but it’s a fascinating point. And given what seems like the sudden implosion of the television business model, a heavy reliance on reality television, likely with diminished rewards, seems likely to continue. What’s interesting is whether this particular subset of the industry will reach a point where what’s on offer, be it financial or the chance for exposure, is so minimal, and the challenges or humiliations involved are so great, that reality television will stop finding takers. Hotels, big-box stores, and other employers that rely heavily on low-wage workers increasingly seem to have tested, and found, the floor for what they can ask employees to do and still find a steady stream of labor without provoking union organizing drives. But unlike reality television, low-wage American jobs were never going to offer massive prizes to a few workers to defuse more general discontent about compensation and working conditions. In the lottery that is the American economy, if you promise millions of dollars to a single person, you’ll be able to take many millions more from even those who know they’re getting played for suckers—particularly if you’re asking them to participate in one bad subset of the economy because the one they long to escape is worse.

I’m not quite ready to get hysterical about this study that shows that Americans value fame and other “individualistic” values more than they did in 1967, linking those values to popular television shows:

As predicted, fame, financial success, and other individualistic values, notably achievement, rose in importance across the decades. Fame, the main focus of the study, made the most dramatic shift. Table 4 shows that fame rose from the bottom of the value rankings in 1967 (number 15 out of 16) to the top value in 2007. Financial success also rose in importance, as predicted; it was ranked 12th in 1967, rising to fifth in 2007. Two other individualisitic values showed a major increase in relative importance: Achievement rose from tenth place to second place across the decades, while physical fitness moved from sixteenth place to ninth place. In contrast, communitarian values, as predicted, declined in relative importance over time. Three communitarian values – community feeling, tradition, and benevolence – showed sharp declines in relative importance from 1967 to 2007 (Table 4). Community feeling started out as the top-ranked value in 1967 and fell to number 11. Tradition was ranked fourth in 1967 and fell to 15th place in 2007. Benevolence went from second place to 12th place across the decades. Of all the values assessed, these three showed the largest decline in relative importance from 1967 to 2007.

First, I’m not going to declare the decline of Western civilization on the strength of 60 people’s responses to a questionnaire. But more importantly, there are a lot of alternate explanations for those shifts in values. If you don’t think Social Security’s going to be around, being financially successful so you can be secure later matters. Achievement is so broadly defined as to be nebulous, but pressure to say, go to a good college is obviously up substantially from factors other than entertainment. Standards of physical fitness and what counts as an ideal body have certainly changed, as has our understanding of health and exercise, something our popular culture reflects and magnifies but isn’t solely responsible for.

And finally, it makes sense that fame would be more desirable as it seems more accessible. American Idol‘s popularity is part and parcel of a culture where you can become instantly extremely popular by hitting the fickle sweet spot of the viewing public (it’s also the result of a dramatically fragmented television viewership, so it’s worth looking at a bunch of other shows alongside it, the intensity of viewers’ attachment, etc.). I like the idea of having a luxury yacht, but that doesn’t mean that I aspire it.

Still, I do think there’s something interesting about the shift from television (and other popular culture) where viewers relate to the characters to television where viewers aspire to be like the characters. I remain hard-pressed to identify what caused the shift or what programming was the tipping point — the rise of celebrity reality TV shows seems like a possible, but not totally convincing moment — but there is a difference.

Spoilers from last night’s finale.

I’d hoped we were going to see an out gay contestant win the first season of The Voice, a victory that for me would have clinched the show’s total superiority over American Idol as a more positive, more truly meritocratic show. I remain unconvinced by Javier Colon, so I’m doubly disappointed. But the fact that half of the final four were comfortably out lesbians, and that the show gave big platforms to three gay singers, all of whom will probably end up with record contracts, is without question a victory. If the threat of The Voice as a competitor for ratings and music sales makes Idol and Idol contestants reconsider the idea that being publicly out is a barrier to really competing or to iTunes sales, that’ll be a good thing too.

And I expect big things of Dia Frampton, too, especially if she keeps writing songs like this:

On yesterday’s post about what a Muslim archetype might look like in American popular culture, Marcus Richards wisely noted that there was something a little odd about the ideas we were coming up with: “It surprises me that no one has suggested this hypothetical character should be a woman. The female perspective is a huge elephant in the room for Western culture in approaching Muslims, and it feels like we need to come to terms with that in order to approach any positive stereotypes.” He’s right, of course, though I think part of the reason folks were trying to come up with positive images of Muslim men is that Islamophobia’s largely centered around ideas about the behavior of Muslim men.

So of course it was immediately after writing this that two Muslim-related bits of pop culture news crossed my desk. First, a writeup of Janaza, an Iraqi black metal musician from Iraq who is, to put it mildly, not a fan of Islam:

I’m not the world’s biggest black metal fan (I’m more of an Isis kinda gal), and I think Janaza is unlikely to go mainstream. But it still would be interesting to see a conversation about Islam and its role in society get played out in music, between black metal and taqwacore.

Second, a Malaysian television station is spinning off an American Idol-style show that pits aspiring imams against each other and creating a version for women. Given that Morocco just graduated its first class of female preachers in 2006 and wouldn’t even give them full imam status, and that debates are still underway about the legitimacy of women serving as judges in Kenyan courts and interpreting Islamic law, a contest like this that asserts women’s rights to teach the Koran and sets it up as an admirable thing seems pretty cool.

In a networked world, Muslims in American popular culture won’t only be seen by Americans, and will be received very differently by folks in different countries and in different Islamic traditions. We’re obviously not going to come up with something that will affirm everyone’s beliefs and leave everyone feeling happy and comfortable. But even so, we should look abroad for inspiration as we think about getting more images of Muslims into American popular culture: American Islamophobia may be a specific phenomenon, but the cure for it might well be international, from people who have more experience creating Muslim characters than American writers and producers do.

Neil Lambert read my post on The Voice on Friday, and as good brothers will do, emailed me to suggest I hadn’t been entirely fair in my characterization of Adam Lambert’s coming-out story. He writes:

Adam clearly didn’t want to negatively impact his chances by turning the end of the competition into an indictment of his sexuality, but I think also because he didn’t want the story — if it did turn out to be him losing — to be about the Idol audience’s anti-gay bias. He’s proudly gay and I’m proud of him for it, but I’m prouder still that he thinks we’d all be better off the quicker our culture gets past gender and sexuality. I think an important aspect of achieving that goal is not allowing homophobia to make you the victim when things don’t go your way and doubly so if you’re in the spotlight.

You might be interested to know that behind the scenes, the Idol producers didn’t try to persuade him one way or the other when it came to answering the press once all those pictures began surfacing online. They were surprisingly supportive and told him they’d back him either way. This came as a surprise to me and suggests two possibilities: either they’ve come a long way from the gay prejudices they exhibited with Mr. Aiken, or (more likely, in my opinion) past gay contestants were far warier about their sexuality than Adam is and asked Idol to shield them from scrutiny.

Neil and I agree that the larger problem is Idol’s accumulated history and reputation. I wouldn’t really want to choose between the person who wins American Idol and the person who helps the program evolve beyond its early fears of a gay contestant—especially if you think winning could give you longer-term power to act as a role model and sell albums. The Voice has a clean slate in that regard, one that’s being put to good use, and I’ll be curious to see if gains a long-term edge over Idol because of it. But I also thought Neil’s email was an interesting reminder of the frustration of being any sort of first. There’s always going to be some very talented person whose talent is eclipsed by the barrier they broke down with the force of that same talent. I imagine Barack Obama has a keen sense of how he could have used every minute of mental energy he had to devote to speculation about his birth certificate, and that there’s a lot of catharsis packed into “For Your Entertainment.”

I love the idea of a competition reality show based in hip-hop rather than the country-pop fusion that dominates American Idol. In reality, I have no idea how Snoop Dogg, if he gets the show he’s pitching off the ground, would actually execute the show. Idol works, in as much as it works, for the same reason Glee does: the audience is familiar with the songs they’re singing, so it’s all a matter of who can mount a persuasive reinterpretation.

It’s not that covers don’t exist in hip-hop—searching “A Milli” on YouTube brings up 60,400 results—just that the more productive territory in the genre tends to crop up in sampling, which is effectively what Lil Mama’s doing here semi-collaboratively with Avril Lavigne (The get-out-of-my-way declaration of “Eight bars and stop” as she starts a verse is awesome great. Can she and Rye-Rye please record together?):

and in radical lyrical revamps of existing hip-hop tracks, a la Lupe Fiasco’s amping up of the politics in Kanye’s “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” complete with explanation of how bling is a depreciating asset:

But in terms of demonstrating competitors’ skills, I’m not sure it would make sense, for example, to ask competitors to recreate Eminem’s verse on “Forever.” And in terms of pulling a mass audience (as would, of course, be the goal if they put the show on a network rather than a niche channel) that might not be versed in hip-hop’s back catalogue, I wonder if you’d have to get artists freestyling over pop songs, like Queen Latifah does with “Poker Face” here, and hope it’s enough to jump demographics or bring in audiences who wouldn’t normally turn in to a singing competition show: