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Siobhan Magnus early exit shows it’s really South and Midwest Idol
April 30, 2010 by Beatweek
She wasn’t going to win anyway. But the early exit of Siobhan Magnus, which came three episodes before it probably should have, only serves to drive home a point that we finally learned last season after being teased about it for most of the past decade when it comes to American Idol: “America” isn’t voting. Just ask yourself why every single winner the show has ever produced has come from the nation’s south or midwest or southwest; not a single winner has ever emerged from a place like California or New York or New England.
It’s not the show’s fault, as they hold tryouts all over the nation prior to each season. And it’s not the fault of potential contestants from those regions, as the rise of SoCal-based contestants like Adam Lambert and Katharine McPhee in past seasons has demonstrated that talented individuals from places like Los Angeles have been willing to give it a go on the show. But whether it’s a matter of hometown pride in regions of the country where most people living in a given State were also born there, or whether it be the comparative lack of television watching that takes place in bustling big cities, the lack of votes being cast in places like LA and New York not only holds back contestants who are from those cities, it inhibits the rise of contestants who play well in those cities. You want to know why Adam Lambert lost last year? Because small towners considered him to be so weird that he scared the crap out of them. And while Siobhan Magnus may be no Adam Lambert (although surely her fans will disagree), the fact that the Boston native was by far the most oddly eccentric of the top contestants almost surely caused American Idol’s voters, most of whom are in conservative small towns, to send her packing sooner than her potential as a pop star might have suggested.
Looking at the top five we can see that this season’s winner of American Idol will come from Illinois, Ohio, small town Pennsylvania, Florida or Texas. Sound familiar? It’s not the fault of the people in America’s south and midwest, who do most of the voting; they’re just voting their honest preferences. But in hindsight, is it really any surprise that Siobhan Magnus, whose musical stylings were the least likely to play well in America’s small towns of any of the top contestants, was sent packing when she was?
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