The X Factor NZ: Embrace the insanity

The X Factor NZ is back and praise be, it’s definitely going to be weird as hell.

 

After a glorious birth and fast rise in the nation’s pop culture consciousness (peep the post-first season infographic if you’re somehow in need of a recap, because duh it was huge), New Zealand’s first tilt at a full-fledged X Factor seemed like a real, true, important event. And then it finished. And then, the comedown.

Stars freshly anointed by the Mediaworks/Fremantle dynasty and by popular vote of their compatriots vanished near-entirely from view (although Benny Tipene played at a work party I went to last year), their efforts soon overshadowed by the fact that local artists in their intended lane were, against all historical precedent, actually becoming organically popular both here and elsewhere.

After millions of votes cast, thousands of litres of approved-brand cola consumed on screen and 28 episodes of what truly felt like a quasi-vital televisual and musical enterprise, the underwhelming post-show singles (especially that of Jackie Thomas, the show’s hugely popular landslide winner) brought into stark relief the fact that, outside of the hermetic world of its Henderson soundstage home and with time to break the production’s high-budget hypnosis on its audience, its ultimate output was actually kind of garbage.

Having left an initial legacy of such unfortunately predictable disappointment, you’d be more than justified in wondering whether the show’s carefully constructed sets would return to our fair industrial estates. Thankfully, for the naïve, the optimistic and the masochistic, the various erstwhile rights owners and production companies responsible for the X Factor’s existence hold one thing dear: making a LOT of money. So here we are.

The last time this show happened, I wrote weekly power rankings for local music site The Corner, an endeavor in equal measure fun and torturous. It was fun because I love nothing more than taking frivolous-by-design cultural content deeply seriously, torturous because attempting to quantify regularly the standings of a show that allows the New Zealand public to judge singing-as-sport without ever revealing anything of its internal workings or vote tallies is basically just a great way to confuse yourself and irritate your wife for a few months. 

This time around I’ll be leaving the ranking part out, focusing more on the functions, dynamics and innumerable peculiarities of the show; trying to understand better what the contestants, the judges and, ultimately, the producers are trying to achieve, and endlessly criticizing them for their attempts. I’m sure my wife’s going to love it.

ANYWAY …

Obviously that’s a pretty long preamble, but the format of shows like the X Factor seems pretty pointedly designed to allow for preamble – the first couple of weeks are almost entirely scene-setting, oscillating between montages of auditions show-stopping for the “right” reasons and the “wrong”, but ultimately there to establish our relationship with the judges and with the format. This season sees both receiving shakeups of sorts.

Absent one D Bedingfield (presumably sent back to his home planet à la Poochie) and one R Frost (relocated to Sweden, recently released a very good EP and a music video that looks a LOT like an Acne Studios lookbook), the judging panel is made up of ice-cold Melanie Blatt and heavenly Stan Walker, plus New York via London via Hutt Valley power couple Natalia and William Kills-Moon.

I’ll look more deeply at the judges in next week’s column, but briefly: they seem good. Mel and Stan are much as they were for the entirety of last season, if maybe a little less optimistic, and their new deskmates seem thoroughly unimpressed by absolutely everything, an understandable and frankly laudable shared quality. Long may it last.

The other major curveball thrown by this season – albeit one announced by necessity prior to auditions – is the addition of bands to the contest. Not attempted in the show’s previous incarnation, and presumably driven by the fact that 75 percent of New Zealand X Factor hopefuls turn up with a damn acoustic guitar anyway so hey what the hell let’s just see what happens surely it can’t be that bad right I mean come on, the stage has been opened to bassists, drummers, and probably even at least one keyboard player.

Unsurprisingly, in last night’s first episode, this newly open-minded attitude reaped disastrous rewards – a show predicated entirely on finding an act suitable for molding into a strong, dynamic, internationally-marketable pop star devolved for a solid while into something more akin to an adult Smokefree Rockquest, delusions of grandeur and claims to REAL ARTISTRY still intact.

Eventually their selfless search yielded a band deemed good enough to continue, the kind of technically-very-good-but-creatively-well-hey-I-guess-the-60s-WERE-pretty-cool blues rock trio that you absolutely loved in your first 1.5 years of university, but hardly a world-changing find. Mr Moon raised at this juncture a point that we’ll likely return to, that with a band whose aesthetic is as strongly defined as Firstname Lastname and the Nouns, there’s something of a limit to the level of creative influence that can be exercised.

The rules were obviously relaxed in the hopes that a group as handsome and musically proficient as 5SOS would emerge fully formed yet still malleable from the North Shore’s mangroves, but it’s reasonably likely that all we’ll get is existing bands that are very good at making (or at least emulating) musics that aren’t near as marketable as that hugely fruitful splicing of One Direction and Blink 182.

I’ll be very surprised if this gimmick makes it further than the first couple rounds of live shows, and I’ll happily print out and eat these words should my cynicism proven misguided, but if I’m forced to endure a ‘psychedelic’ version of 'April Sun in Cuba’ when New Zealand week rolls around, I will be throwing my television and this computer into the Hauraki Gulf.

And so that’s where we currently stand.

Of course, last night’s show saw a range of the usual suspects through to boot camp – beautiful soul from Invercargill with a weak voice but a strong story, dedicated young dad back for a second shot, spawn of Ardijah (YES YES YES) beatboxing into a loop pedal (NOOOOO) – and tonight’s will too, but honestly I find it tough to pay a whole lot of attention to every single auditionee.

Right now, I feel like it’s more fun to focus on the fledgling personalities, the burgeoning relationships and the subtle new ways in which sponsors’ products are being placemented - the X Factor is back and praise be, it’s definitely going to be weird as hell. Let’s embrace the insanity. Let’s do X together.

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Willy Moon last made an album 2 years ago and he last made a facial expression 20 years ago #XFactorNZ

— Sanjay Patel (@spat106) February 15, 2015