LOS ANGELES - American Idol loser Kellie Pickler is providing just what higher ups in the music industry and academia have been waiting for: vindication.
Pickler, whose new album, Small Town Girl debuted at Number One on Billboard's Top Country Albums chart and at Number 9 on the all-genre Billboard 200, proves what music industry executives and academic experts have contended all along: the general population is not qualified to select their own culture.
Pickler is a musical "Grandma Moses," says Albin Q. Zak IV, a musicologist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. "She is a true primitive whose superficial simplicity belies an inner sophistication that only the trained eye or ear can fully appreciate. There is no way an musically uneducated American Idol viewer could hear that."
"Popular music fads, like rock music or hip hop, are cultural natural disasters, and we were in the middle of several," said music historian Philip Dossett, Robert W. Tineker Professor at the University of Chicago.
"Once these music fads get out of our control, they must be allowed to run their course, regardless of the cultural havoc they wreak along the way," said Dossett. "It's akin to a forest fire that jumps the firebreaks; we just have to watch while it consumes the forest and it burns itself out. Fortunately, natural mechanisms, for rock it's fatal drug overdoses and for rap it's hand-gun deaths, will do their work given time."
"But from the ashes a new forest springs, and Kellie Pickler is seeding the vibrant growth that will regenerate a new living and more fulfilling musical culture in America," said Dr. Dossett.
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