What Was Howard Stern Thinking (at least in this case)?

As many of you have read, I did a piece last year on the curious manner with which the competition TV show "America's Got Talent" regards what is and is not actual talent.  Certainly there are some amazing acts that make it; it's the ones that are not so amazing that this piece is about.

The 2015 version of the show concluded a week or so ago, with the grand prize going to an amazing British ventriloquist named Paul Zerdin.  Zerdin's performance in the finals was very good; I suspect though, that in this viewer-voting model they use, he actually won the audience with the semifinals, when he turned judge Howie Mandel into his puppet ... ahhh, you had to see it -- so here you go.  It was so good that it allowed him to retain enough audience love to win the following week.

Today's piece is not about the winner, nor the runner-up.  In fact, I'm most curious about an act that made the semifinals but pretty much ended there.  They were a rock band called "3 Shades of Blue", consisting of the usual instrumentation, the usual voices and singing the usual material -- in other words, songs that everyone but me appeared to be familiar with.  Generic as all-get-out.

Despite their mundanity, Howard Stern, the judge at the far left, gushed over them.  We really needed a rock band to do well, he insisted, and they were the ones to do it.  A big fan of theirs, he insisted.  Every week they returned, it was more of the same.

And I simply didn't get it.  As a rock band, they were simply another rock band.  They did nothing that 1,000 other bands weren't doing or couldn't do.  Moreover, they brought nothing new to an entertainment form that has done pretty much nothing for the musical art in at least 50 years.

I don't particularly need to write "The Emperor's New Clothes" essay all over again, but if it is so blatantly clear to me that this band was simply another band, then why was Howard Stern salivating over them?  He was never able to say anything specific about why he thought they should contend, just that they should.  Were they the best rock band in the competition?  Maybe; how easy is it to compare two rock bands when the entertainment form is so useless; it's like comparing two mice, or two trees, or two government buildings.  In other words, why does it matter?

I tried the FTM approach, which works most of the time, but following the money didn't seem to apply.  Howard Stern is richer than Croesus; he doesn't need to plug an undistinguished band for what wouldn't be any real payoff.  Did the network tell him to?  Beats me; this was his last season anyway as a judge.  He could have told NBC to go pound sand.

I can only imagine that among stand-up comics, magicians, ventriloquists and other acts not necessarily geared to a younger audience, Howard Stern felt the need to appear hip by advocating for a rock band, and 3 Shades of Blue were pretty much all that was left.  At 61, with an empire on Sirius-XM satellite radio, maybe he needs to attract new listeners.

Earth to Howard: it made you look sillier.

 Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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