The X Factor NZ: Cool/Cruel Intentions

Why throw yourself into being part of The X Factor?

 

Welcome back. Since we’re going to be spending quite a lot of time together over the next few months or however long this show runs for, and because I absolutely don’t want to spend my time dissecting the largely for-nothing run-together blur of yes/no adequacies and inadequacies that is the first couple weeks of this show, I thought I’d write a column about intentions instead. It was either that or seriously examining the prospects of a band called Man Sweat. So here we go. Let’s get serious.

THE PANEL

Of all of the X Factor’s many moving parts, no entity has a role more difficult to define than the four-person judging team. At the very base level, and in each season’s early stages, what they do is reasonably simple: their workdays comprised mainly of making innovations both in cheerful homilies and withering critiques. As the show continues, though, and as they’re tasked not just with offering ostensibly qualified opinions to the questionably grateful performers that grace their stage but also with mentoring these poor, misguided souls, things get somewhat murkier.

Leaving aside all speculation about the true weight of their input versus that of the show’s producers, it’s important to note that, even if the judges commit themselves entirely to the development of their charges, their level of input essentially vanishes entirely once the show leaves the studio. Unlike in the American incarnation (and earlier seasons of the UK version), in which Svengali industry executive/spooky ghoul Simon Cowell presides as both judge on the show and founder of the imprint on which the winner’s album is ultimately released, New Zealand’s X Factor champion will be sent into the world sans-mentor, with only the ragtag crew at New Zealand’s Sony Music office for company and moral support.

So since there’s no direct professional imperative for any of the judges to secure for their mentee the show’s ultimate prize – and also since I googled “X Factor judges performance pay” and “X Factor judges win bonus” and the results were VERY inconclusive – it’s safe to say that their reasons for being there are at least semi-self-serving. Let’s take a closer look!

Melanie Blatt (UK) – Mel is obviously here to pick up cheques and to be mean to middle-aged men on TV, and that is very cool. Despite All Saints’ reformation post-season one, she doesn’t seem to have any further lofty aspirations as a performer in her own right, and is probably content to just have semi-regular holidays in the Antipodes. Might as well get paid for it.

Stan Walker (NZ) – Hugely popular here, slightly less popular in Australia and unfortunately unknown pretty much everywhere else, Stan is nonetheless a bonafide national treasure and I will defend him forever. I genuinely think that he does this show because he really likes music and helping people and no one will convince me otherwise.

Natalia Kills (U…K?) – Although she’s been grinding for, like, 10 years, catching cosigns from artists including will.i.am and Akon and enjoying a brief stint on our charts in 2013, Natalia Kills has never really taken off. Given that she seems like the most professional of the judges, she’ll have a lot to say to contestants about both stagecraft and musical technique, and will almost definitely release a single to coincide with the show. Given that she’s still a working songwriter, aside from a steady paycheck for half-a-year and the opportunity to shore up her New Zealand fanbase I’m really not sure what she’s hoping to gain from the show. Probably just really wants to visit Hobbiton.

Willy Moon (NZ. WE ALL KNOW YOU’RE FROM NZ) – I’m in two minds over ol’ Bill, because although his personality seems entirely derived from a Hallensteins suit ad (uncool), he also seems very uninterested in the show and uninvested in its outcomes, and even reasonably disinterested in his own musical career (incredibly cool). He’ll probably perform one of his songs at some point, but he probably doesn’t want to. Is he only here for the money? Uh, yes.

THE PERFORMERS

“But o wise X Factor sage, what of those who swallow their pride and their five shots of tequila and take to the hallowed stage of SKYCITY Theatre in front of our divine leaders Blatt, Walker, Kills-Moon and Moon-Kills?” That’s a slightly simpler question to answer, by which I mean that it’s an incredibly simple question to answer. Nearly every single person that treads those boards is there for one of three reasons:

1. They honestly believe themselves to be a true, genuine, rare and beautiful talent

2.  They honestly believe themselves to be a true, genuine, rare and beautiful hard case crack-up

3. They live pretty close to SKYCITY anyway and I heard you get a free cheeseburger if you audition so whatever I guess I’ll try and get on TV then.

There are occasional exceptions (hi TrendPrince, how much do you guys pay for freelance contributions?), but otherwise, that’s pretty much it. DONE. EASY.

THE PRODUCERS

And finally, the Powers That Be. Yes, the X Factor’s ultimate aim is the discovery, nurturing and eventual release into the wild of a potential Globe-Conquering Entertainment Act, but anyone who’d tell you that the ideal way to foster a true and real talent is to put them up in the SKYCITY Grand for 12 weeks and intermittently force them to perform at themed karaoke nights in West Auckland is probably going to lose their A&R job reasonably soon.

Instead, like basically every other successful television show that has ever existed, The X Factor is all about characters. The show subsides largely on a diet of product placement and cross-platform tie-ins, using presumably lucrative partnerships with McDonald’s, Coke, VO5 and the like to spread not just their own gospel, but that of the wider Mediaworks family (more about that in a later piece) – it seems obvious that if we’re going to watch long enough to start dropping stacks on sub-salon quality hair products and vaguely themed family burger meals, we’re going to need to be engaged, and a show detailing the actual day-to-day processes of a New Zealand record company is emphatically not going to put numbers on the board.

Just to clarify: this isn’t intended as some Spurlockian call to arms vs brands in entertainment. Honestly, I love brands. It just bears noting that without heavy embedded marketing, it’s pretty likely that expensive, gleefully maximalist shows like the X Factor wouldn’t be able to exist. My only real issue with the way the show works is that before the higher drama and more compact cast of the live rounds, it means padding out the myriad Just Good Enough performances with more than a few obviously awful ones.

This isn’t an X Factor-specific tendency – in fact, there’s an whole subset of “reality” shows for which othering is the entire start-to-finish gimmick – but it’s one which rings especially obvious when a single episode boasts both a vocal-and-beatbox duo's cloying anti-ode to bullying and a dire but earnest rendition of ‘Natural Woman’ by a pair who met in a library, the latter met predictably by jeers from the audience and contempt from the judges.

Those who subscribe to the tenets of entertainment libertarianism will point to the fact that the women were there on their own accord, but that’s only partly true – having made it through pre-audition vetting, they were quite obviously there because the producers knew they were both tragically bad and tragically lacking in self awareness, and in the hopes that they’d get mad post-rejection. Which they did.

The show hasn’t stuck exclusively to this formula, but it does tends to oscillate between schlock and schmaltz - last night’s installment was especially heavy on weepy backstories that only occasionally hit the mark, presumably as a distraction from the horribly bleak hit parade of clearly terrible bands and over-25s making it through to boot camp. Even then, the promotional material for the week still focuses heavily, if not entirely, on Natalia’s monumental dropping of the F-Bomb.

It’s boring, empty provocation, there for the sole purpose of building buzz for the show as a concept before it can be marketed on the strength of its as-yet-undefined cast, and it’s a large part of why I typically find these first few weeks pretty painful. As such, if you need me, I’ll be sleeping in my Dracula coffin until boot camp’s finished, waiting to get down to the serious business of mocking and ridiculing fully fleshed-out three dimensional characters instead. Or I’ll be back next week. Probably the latter. Give me strength.