I was explaining to people the other night, but I might've got it a bit wrong – this is just the end of something for U2. And that's what we're playing these concerts – and we're throwing a party for ourselves and you. It's no big deal, it's just – we have to go away and ... and dream it all up again.Dream it all up again, disappear for a while, and two years later came Achtung Baby, a reinvention of U2's sound that was both a radical shift from the blues-based Rattle & Hum (produced by Jimmy Iovine), utterly contemporary in its seeking a more dance-based rhythm (given the contemporaneous Manchester thing) and yet ultimately something that felt very much like the same band.
American Idol, too, needed to dream it all up again. After three straight seasons of increasing bloat and stuck with older white boys with guitars winning -- each defensible on its own merits, but troubling as a whole -- the show last year finally started to decline in the ratings and in our own interest here. Given Simon Cowell's leaving, it was a perfect opportunity to rethink the show and rethink it they have.
We're not going to see most of the changes in tonight's premiere -- the reworked Hollywood (and Vegas) round, a compressed semifinals, the omnipresence of permanent mentor Jimmy Iovine and a run from the final 10-12 down to two which won't force performers into genres with which they're not comfortable. We will see the new judges making their snap decisions on the annual parade of the deluxe and the deluded, always the least-interesting part of the show cycle to me (except for twee urchin Josiah Leming), but as always we won't know what kind of talent the show has until we get to the semifinals, four weeks from now.
And that's what it ultimately comes down to: the talent: give me someone fresh to watch like Adam Lambert, Allison Iraheta, Fantasia Barrino or Chris Daughtry, and there's no amount of judicial hijinks or producer interference that can seriously mess things up. Yes, we watch Idol because it's fun to snark on its excess, but ultimately we're fans of music who would like to see great performances from great young performers. Idol has delivered that so many times over its first nine years; it's time to see whether it still can.
