Published in Beat Magazine, June, 2002

With the commencement of the rapid rise-and-fall of Scott Cain, the latest Channel 7 Popstar (™ © ® Pty. Ltd. Inc.), I thought now might be a good time to check out the history of the Popstars (™ © ® Pty. Ltd. Inc.) phenomenon across the world.

The first ever series of Popstars (™ etc) was in New Zealand. Really, people. This should have been a clue. After the usual parade of the hopeful, the hopeless, the brainless and the made-up-within-an-inch-of-their-lives, the girl group True Bliss was born. I tried to do some research, but if you enter the words True Bliss into an internet search engine, you… well… you don’t get music. What you do get, however, is a massive credit card bill. As has been the pattern worldwide, their first single debuted at number 1. The song was called “Tonight”, and featured the intriguing lyric of “Tonight we make love ‘til the end…” It fits that their debut featured words that sound more at home in a suicide note. Their second song was actually called “Number One”, peaking on the charts at “Number 12”. Thirdly, they released a cover of Wham’s “Freedom”, featuring the line “I don’t want your freedom.” Obviously this was dedicated to the contracts they’d signed.

From there, the idea leapt the Tasman to the recently-departed Bardot. I realise some parts of the country are mourning the passing of the first Aussie Popstars (™ blah blah); those parts should, of course, have fences put around them. Bardot apparently broke up for a “well-earned break” after – and this comes directly from their publicity machine – “a phenomenal two-and-a-half years”. You can just hear the Rolling Stones shaking from here, can’t you? Well, you probably can, but that’s more about the fact that they’re getting that old. Of course, Katie Underwood had left Bardot previously in order to join the cast of the musical “Hair”, which turned out to be an outstanding example of jumping off a sinking ship and onto a sinking lifeboat. A couple of the girls have made various noises about solo careers. I’m guessing that they think these careers will actually still be in music. While I wouldn’t normally use the Spice Girls as examples of anything, I would suggest they see what happened to England’s pop puppets in single combat, and scale it down to fit a much smaller country. Catch Bardot at a Centrelink near you.

From there, the phenomenon exploded worldwide. In Europe, the flagship was England’s Hear’Say, which marked the first case of Popstars (see above) apostrophe abuse. Canada came up with Sugar Jones, which suggests to me that someone in marketing had watched too many blaxploitation films. The US takes special pride of place; they created Eden’s Crush – correct apostrophe use, but a name that suggests little more than apple juice – but America was also the land of the first rip-off version of the series, as MTV created the enigmatically named “Making The Band.” The optimistic part of me (note: for those who know me personally, yes that part does exist, however small) clings to the hope that someone within the pop idol factory has a sense of humour, as the collection of teenage boys that formed the product of this series, O-Town, released as their first single a song entitled “Liquid Dreams”. When talking of someone just out of adolescence, particularly with lyrics that describe the perfect woman, Liquid Dreams only has one meaning… the kind of dreams that make the sheets crunchy. I still hold out hope that this was a deliberate act of subversion, instead of more evidence that America’s irony embargo is intact.

In the meantime, Scandal’us flared briefly, and despite having male members, one of whom was funky enough to actually have a piercing, their star seems to have faded quickly – their second single didn’t even crack the top 30. As I have said before, it seems that the public quickly caught on that Scandal’us are Shit’ouse.

So where does that leave Scott Cain? After the least successful series of Popstars (ditto), and spending one week at the top of the charts, reality may now be setting in. He has a contract that gives him less money than OneTel’s creditors, and for the next month an appearance schedule that will wear out a couple of decent pairs of boots. The pattern is well established worldwide… a sped-up cycle of celebrity then obscurity. Scott, holding fame will be like holding water in your hands, if your hands were made out of a particularly coarse mesh. Hope you had fun.