Katharine McPhee

The fifth season of American Idol will come to a close with the crowning of a new champ tonight. This season, my casual Idol fandom became a full-fledged addiction. I knew things had taken a turn for the worse when I started weaseling out of dinner party plans because I couldn't bear the thought of missing Queen week.
Of course, I'm not alone. Idol's already stratospheric ratings soared higher this season, and last week more than 50 million votes were cast in the balloting that set Tuesday's final showdown between Taylor Hicks and Katharine McPhee. Once, pop's A-listers turned up their noses at the show, but this season Mary J. Blige, Prince, and Bruce Springsteen agreed to let their songs be performed, and Stevie Wonder and Rod Stewart showed up to tutor the competitors, a gig that has become one of the most coveted in the business. And Season 5 has already succeeded in catapulting one unknown to the top of the charts: the Canadian singer-songwriter Daniel Powter, whose year-old song Bad Day rocketed to No. 1 in the Billboard Hot 100 after repeated airings during the farewell montages when contestants are sent packing.
The fact is, season by season, song by song, the show has gotten better. Five years after its launch there's little doubt: The music on American Idol is often very good, and American Idol is good for popular music. Consider the track record. Carrie Underwood (the 2005 idol), Fantasia Barrino (2004) and Kelly Clarkson (2002) have all recorded solid-to-excellent albums, none of which sound remotely amateurish or karaoke-like. (Only Studdard, the 2003 champ, released a dud.) More surprising are the toughness and eccentricity of those records. Underwood's chart-topping country single Jesus, Take the Wheel is a ballad about a young mother's spiritual crisis and near-fatal car accident, and Fantasia's hit, Baby Mama, is an even grittier depiction of single motherhood. Clarkson won Idol on the strength of her feathery Mariah Carey-style melisma, but she has since moved out of what Abdul would call her "comfort zone". Her 2005 smash, Since U Been Gone, was an angsty breakup ballad with an irresistible hook and a galloping hard-rock chorus. Idol has not only produced successful recording artists, it's produced interesting ones.
In the first couple of seasons, critics (including yours truly) complained that Idol was too immersed in one style - that it was a Mariah impersonation contest, with vocalists vying to outdo each other's acrobatic gospel "runs". But as the show has evolved, the singing has gotten more stylistically diverse, and more adventurous. Today, Idol is an occasionally revelatory, often garish, but always engrossing collision of genres and traditions.
This season's finals featured a couple of country singers; a twee boy-soprano whose voting block of pre-pubescent girls and their grandmothers kept him in the running for a while; and a large-lunged gospel diva who was eliminated at least a few weeks too soon. The most compelling character was The Rocker, Chris Daughtry, who, despite his knack for turning every song he touched into joy-killing post-grunge dirge, earned admiration for his fine chops, and what judge Simon Cowell rightly identified as his refusal to compromise.
Yesterday's final presented a stark choice. McPhee would seem to be a record executive's dream candidate: a classy, pretty girl from Los Angeles who can really sing. But there's only a few record executives out there, and many millions of Idol voters; and I suspect that they, with guidance from the show's judges, will choose Hicks, the prematurely gray-haired doofus who has spent the past several weeks jerking across the Idol stage like a spaz while belting out classic R&B covers.
There's something vaguely unsettling about his shtick: Although he's not black, he calls his fans "The Soul Patrol", and although he's neither black nor blind, he insists on lurching backward when he sings like his idol Ray Charles. Still, I'll be rooting hard for Hicks. I wager he'll win in a walk, as well he should: He's just a more interesting singer. A Hicks victory would be the ultimate answer to critics who have slammed Idol for its plastic pop-music values. And it would continue the Idol voters' streak of choosing talent over beauty - think of pretty boy Justin Guarini falling to Kelly Clarkson, who despite the best efforts of a battery of stylists still looks more like a Dutch mastiff than Jessica Simpson.
No matter who wins, I'll be watching tonight's show. And like other members of the Soul Patrol, I expect to come away happy.

(National Post)