No Rock And Roll Fun

FEAT OF CLAY: Poor Gareth-Gates-lite Clay Aiken, suffering so because of his American Idol victory. It's terrible never being taken seriously because you're seen as a reality show whore he wails, as he promotes his "inspiring" autobiography tracing his journey from nobody to nobody with a PR agent, Learning To Sing. (We hope the title is what he plans to do next.) As you'd expect in the current God-sucking US, he's added a healthy dose of The Man Upstairs to his tale, even kicking off his slim volume with a quotation from Exodus. The Bible one, not the Marley one. Clay's people's choice was "the Lord will fight for you; All you have to do is stand still." Which we hope is advice he remembers if the crosswalk lights change while he's in the middle of a six lane highway sometime.

Although Aiken acknowledges that American Idol was a great "sidestep" to fame, he really does get riled that people see him as a flash in the pan just because his fame is based on a gameshow and he has absolutely no secure fanbase to fall back on. Like most people who win these things (and, indeed, the people who don't), Aiken is carrying a belief that he was predetermined to be famous and the gameshow was just a short-circuit to the adoration that he would have achieved anyway. We're expecting a second book, "Buttfucked By Reality", sometime round Fall 2005.