When Simon Cowell told Paul McCartney that he had progressed to the next round, at the recent X Factor UK final, we all laughed and thought it was a good joke. But like all good humor, it concealed a chilling truth; popular music has become a piece of Cowell’s confectionery that you buy packaged on the shelf, and it’s no longer the engine of true talent that he used to be. Cowell’s joke was a symbolic reception of the baton from one of the all-time greats of pop. The question occurred to me that if X-Factor had existed in 1962, would the Simon Cowell of the time have seen the potential of the breakthrough single “Love Me Do”?
I personally doubt it. The Beatles were young pop revolutionaries who wrote their own music and built a cult following, idolized in nightclubs in England and Germany, by a new breed of youth who had dreams of empowerment. The X Factor audience is predominantly made up of 12-year-olds and grandmothers who vote for cute pop singers singing recycled mush. Its 1962 equivalent would have balked at John Lennon and voted for some Dean Martin lookalike instead, and Love Me Do would never have hit the charts. Likewise, the young Elvis Presley caused such consternation among mainstream society that his presence on a show like X-Factor would have shut it down overnight. Or maybe Led Zeppelin in 1969? What kind of impression would they have made in the X-Factor qualifiers?
Of course, no one would argue that X-Factor is anything but good Saturday night entertainment, and if millions enjoy voting for and buying singles, what harm can it do? Until now the answer might have been to live and let live, but the power of the show and of Simon Cowell in particular is growing so great that he is now imposing absolute dominance on the charts at the expense of the new, original and revolutionary. talent, and as a result we may be sacrificing the golden greats of the future on the altar of short-term gratification.
This is the same process that we have seen occur in other areas, in movies and books, where such a large investment is required to make things work that the element of risk is avoided at all costs. When industries are not prepared to take risks because costs are prohibitive, innovation is threatened and we are left with boring homogeneity and a bland brand. Malls are now the same all over the world, globalized clones of one another with no room for the small business owner to make an impression or try something new. When the same thing happens to our culture, we face a bleak future of predictably low talent being auctioned off at the highest price.
