Let’s get some of my frustrating white-liberal tendencies out of the way: the title says it all. By aligning oneself with the massive voting bloc that’s ironically supporting the horrible American Idol contestant Sanjaya Malakar as a means of taking down American Idol (Howard Stern et. al.), we are aligning ourselves with the same sort of ignorant angry-white-man half-ironic, half-real racist tendencies that mock non-white cultures for their perceived difference or exoticness.

Much like William Hung before him, Sanjaya is a pop phenomenon in part because of how mindblowingly untalented he is. Week after week he’s forgetting lyrics, showing up with awful new hairstyles, ruining classics with his consistently off-key singing. That this kid, whom a decade ago would’ve been cut from a fifth-string boy band, made it to the finals is the sort of thing that can be chopped up to the little-old-lady sector of the AI voting population, who always throws support to the creepy manchilds of the competition (John Stevens and Kevin Covais are past examples; Clay Aiken parlayed this into an actual career). But not only has he stuck around, he’s only gained in popularity since reaching the top 12.

Much like William Hung before him, much of Sanjaya’s support stems from the Culture of Idiocy’s love for irony, especially irony that coincides with entirely unironic racist discourses. Sanjaya’s ditheringly impotent mannerisms, immasculine preening, and all around dorkiness reinforce hegemonic stereotypes of Asian men in American society. Like Hung, Sanjaya is a representation of all the worst things white people say about Asian men; he stands in as signifier for The Weirdness of the Other. And that’s why the Howard Stern voting bloc (Stern regularly urges his listeners to vote for Sanjaya as a means of disrupting the competition) have taken to him so eagerly, where they haven’t even bothered paying attention to past seasons.

I’ll briefly drag a bit of rockism/poptimism (gag!) discourse into this: much of the contempt toward American Idol by the likes of Stern relates to the fact that the competition is overwhelmingly dominated by (feminine) pop and not (masculine) rock. And (black) R&B and not (white) rock. This brand of rockism/anti-pop discourse reached its nexus a few year’s back on Stern’s show, in which he invited Simon Cowell to critique a mystery singer. When Cowell gave the singer’s herniated, nasal vocals its rightly deserved criticism, Stern showed off his great reveal: the singer was Chad Kroeger of Nickelback. Citing the then-popular cake-of-shit “Hero” from the Spiderman soundtrack, Stern revealed Cowell’s ‘irrelevance’ by showing that singers who aren’t very good can be successful too.

Chad Kroeger is, of course, a terrible singer. I wouldn’t even let him go to Hollywood if I were an American Idol judge (to say nothing of the humorless Kroeger-aping former AI contestant Chris Daughtry, who manages to up the diarrhea-rock ante by making it as wussy as possible). Nevertheless, it’s this sort of asinine self-aggrandizement of white masculinity that’s fueling what is a plainly unveiled movement of mocking contempt for this seventeen year old kid.

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