Word: ais
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fourth annual Intercollegiate Karaoke Contest hosted by the Harvard Hong Kong Society (HHKS) Saturday night. Judges deemed the New Jerseyan Miller the “audience favorite” for his performance of “Mouse Loves Rice,” or “Lao Shu Ai Da Mi,” as he held his own against other contestants who were native speakers. “Now that I’ve been speaking for a year and a half, I feel confident in my Mandarin,” said Miller. The HHKS contest, in Boylston Hall...
...Clarkson has the kind of voice that sounds intimate and precise coming out of radio speakers--and because she is far more determined and shrewd than anyone has given her credit for--she has survived the blows that inaugurated her career and managed to free herself from her scarlet AI. Her debut album, Thankful, chugged to double-platinum status while the thoroughly enjoyable follow-up, Breakaway, has sold 5 million copies, spawned four Top 10 hits and earned Clarkson, 23, a prime performance slot at the Grammys this Wednesday. (If justice prevails, she'll also pick up awards...
Seacrest's description may be self-serving and creepy--one imagines herds of wannabe Mariahs staggering through the streets, Dawn of the Dead--style, answering AI's irresistible call--but it's hard to argue with. According to the show, nearly half a million people have auditioned so far. But if the auditions have become the closest thing America has to a national-service program and yet so much of the show is devoted to the awfulness of the applicants, then American Idol's message is simple and unambiguous: America, you stink...
...would 35.5 million Americans tune in to agree? The AI auditions tell Americans as a country--with our massive army and troves of Olympic medals--that it's O.K. to root for the overdog, because, face it, the underdog is usually called that for good reason. But they also make us, as individuals, feel better about our own place in the pack. The American ideal of opportunity for all, which AI embodies, may be a blessing or a myth. But either way, it can also be oppressive. Because the corollary is that if you don't achieve your dreams...
...Because of all the things that most bad auditioners have in common--loud clothes, a taste for the oeuvre of Celine Dion--the greatest is faith. Insulted and denied, they leave believing that the judges are idiots and fame is around the next corner. That is how AI earns the American half of its title. It is a Whitmanian collection of strivers, sounding their barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world, dreaming of their own Clarkson coronation, ready to wait a lifetime, if need be, for a moment like that...