Historically, geographically, culturally – there are many points of comparison between Australia and its neighbour to the east, New Zealand. But there are notable differences.
This week, The Conversation, in conjunction with Griffith REVIEW, will publish essays examining issues of marginality and modernity. We’ll run articles on the arts, the environment; on the economic and emotional ties that bind people to land, and land to the rest of humanity. We’ll take a fresh look at the 21st-century world that exists just beyond the ditch.
About half way through The X Factor (New Zealand) debut series in 2013 I started making some notes about why I liked the show. I should add that I liked it un-ironically, though not unreservedly; I’m not insane.
Of course the show is mostly reviled. Here are some of the reasons I’ve heard: it’s exploitative of the participants and the audience, cynical, divorced from true ideas about musical talent and embarrassingly shallow; a crass, heavily-scripted overseas commercial operation in the guise of an open, local, community-minded show.
And the judges? No-account has-beens or lightweight nobodies, mangling the language and looking to bolster flagging careers while posing as mentors. I get all that, agree with most of it, and yet I continued to watch. Why?
For those of us long-timers, the series was epic and we did remember faces, pimples, pre-show civvies before Wardrobe arrived and the judges could say things like, “I like what you’re wearing”.
Maaka Fiso, a finalist, auditioned in baggy T-shirt and shorts and looked awful. Turned out he scrubbed up well (and possessed my favourite voice of the show). We knew him back when.
The slump towards groomed emotion, photo ops and product placement made it harder to like anyone walking around in this world but investment is a strange thing; you’re locked into returns. You want to see why you bother caring when drek is all around.
The casual detracting glance sees slick formula in every move but this series was oddly, interestingly messy, productively mismanaged. Two finalists (including the eventual winner) were tossed out and then, in turns I can’t be bothered to remember, asked back. The mess didn’t end there. Again it was easy to find nauseating the judges’ confident talk of “your place in the market” but this was a piece of commerce repeatedly bothered by notions of “art”.
When one of his acts was eliminated, judge Daniel Bedingfield cried at another judge: “I thought you’d vote for art!” (From what I’ve read of Bedingfield, he considers himself an artist, with a significant history of industry abuse.)
We quickly knew who the artists were – they were mainly white and played acoustic guitars. Memorably, Mel Blatt - British pop star and X Factor judge – at the audition stage complained, “What is it with all you people and your bleedin guitars!” – Mel was definitely not an artist.
The brown singers weren’t immediately artists; they had voices which were “gifts”. Brownness was associated with powerful feelings, virtuosic control and unoriginality. “I want to see you girls rapping in Kiwi accents,” Daniel told Maori duo L.O.V.E. When it wasn’t wholesome (Cassie). Whiteness was delicate self-expression (Eden), comic macho strut (Tom), and tameness (Anna).
But a few things made this thoroughly raced show not quite as easy to organise into the above boxes.
First, there was Benny Tipene – Maori name, white act (the infernal guitar, his rumoured “original songs”, his terrible dancing, his Smiths cover). In one of the themed episodes (songs from movies), Benny was criticised by the judges for not being real enough. “But Hollywood is fake,” said Benny sullenly. Of course he was talking about The X Factor. Benny was letting go odd yawns and glancing off to the side of the stage. For a moment it seemed he could do anything: roar, weep, run, laugh.
Whatever The X Factor bible says, its thou-shalt-nots finally can’t fully account for the one defining gamble of the format: it’s live. You see stuff before the machine can snaffle it. Of course whole swathes of its spontaneity are scripted. The license for judges to disagree and badmouth each other, for instance, is franchised and finally not exciting. The license for finalists to act strangely is not extended and such behaviour is usually punished and frequently exciting. Maybe, the judges warned, you don’t really want this, Benny.
Host Dominic Bowden’s mildly ribald banter (the week of “liking bush” and “what are you wearing under that kilt”) is franchised, but not two male finalists kissing each other’s hands a number of times while Dom intoned the script of “being sent home”. (Curious this almost universal infantilising formulation in reality shows: “Leave the kitchen”, “Leave the sewing-room”, “Go straight to bed without any supper”.)
I’ve forgotten most of the performances but I remember Benny and Tom’s thespie hand-kissing. Before Tom exited, the host suggested it was a very tense moment but the two lads were grinning goofily, and when Tom’s name was announced as the loser, he looked positively delighted to leave. It was unclear who’d got the better news.
This was also the night of Benny’s rather beautiful and saving reading of schmaltz classic I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You. That struck me somehow as a Maori note. In contrast, his white bro’s Jim Morrison impersonation was comedy that never approached feeling but was still delivered with weird intensity so that it almost crossed into something else.
Daniel Bedingfield’s put-down about Tom being a pub-band singer was right and wrong: a pub band wouldn’t hold this guy unless he was devoid of ambition – and maybe he is. “Wanting it” seems to count, and it was surprisingly easy to read.
The key material, then, which casual watchers or avoiders miss or avoid, is not repellent industry grooming but nuanced, dynamic response to shifting moods. Grant the performers agency and the show becomes more than watchable.
Alongside the rote statements (“I’m just going to take those criticisms as fuel”), there was a palpable drama of striving and doubt that, unlike, say, the manufactured malice of so many other reality shows, didn’t rely on competitiveness. The competition among the judges to mentor the winning contestant was weak enough but it failed to find any purchase in the acts themselves.
Unlike other reality shows, The X Factor contestants aren’t invited to comment on each other, to confess to camera some behind-the-scenes nastiness. The vibe is family, clean. The contestants’ parents come to the live shows. “Yes, we’ve very proud of him.” Nor does the format, unlike say in MasterChef, centre authority around experts. The judges aren’t really in control.
It might be Sony, to whom the finalists are all apparently contracted, calling the shots. But affective power is another matter and, under these conditions, that sort of power is more diffuse and mysterious; it’s also capable of defeating the judges, who occasionally voiced pique: “I know you’ve got a fan base but I just don’t get you”.
The performers did also seem genuinely supportive of each other. When they gathered together on stage at the end of each show, it was a motley bunch. You couldn’t say there was a shared body shape, a norm of attractiveness. Tom looked like he had false teeth; there were big stomachs, short legs. Loveliness was there too, of course, though not decisively so.
A group of singers such as this made me think that showbiz is and always will be about freaks, oddballs, misfits, queers, characters prepared to dress up for us and for themselves, characters saved from other lives. “I don’t know what I’d be doing if I wasn’t here,” said Whenua, who was constantly told he wasn’t connecting with the audience and ended the phone poll as runner-up.
Transformation is what the X Factor deals in. Of all the reality shows, it makes the most powerful and natural connection between what the contestant has to do and what the viewer experiences. I mean it requires considerable adjustment of one’s reality to fully compute the significance of an adult making a cupcake. But someone singing live – that has a head-start.
Another way of saying this is that song itself is about transformation – the singer’s and ours – with the process astonishingly fragile, resting as it does in phrases, breaths, the chemistry of diaphragm, larynx, body. “You sounded a lot better at rehearsal,” the judges said. “You were closed up just then.”
On a good night, visibly, audibly, the cupcake of song appears out of thin air. And of course we can’t choose transcendence; it chooses us. Who knew that a weightless tune from the wretched Twilight films could be an emotional highlight? I certainly didn’t think the weightless Anna would make anything of Stevie Nick’s Landslide.
The last puzzle for me in my X Factor “journey” was Stan Walker. In 2009, Stan won Australian Idol, or as he referred to it on this rival product, “another show”. Readily lampooned, his self-mocking appearances on TV comedy shows around the same time as Idol proved he was easily ahead of the satire. Radiant, kind, silly and limited but frequently forceful and articulate, humble but also grand – he was the undoubted star of the show.
When Moorhouse performed one of his anonymous songs Stan was briefly overcome (“I am not crying! These aren’t tears!”). He often said, “I’m speechless, eh.” He communicated delight and practised decency, sometimes in a cringe-making way: “You look beautiful,” he told 14-year-old Cassie, before quickly adding, “but not sexy”. He told Anna (over 25s), “You look hot, eh, but not in a skanky way. Some people dress like that are skanky.”
He always seemed surprised into emotion or statement. I found his klutzy openness winning though I have no further desire to investigate his music. “You and me come from the same place,” he told Whenua. “Look at you! You’re in the final!” Then he said something interesting. “People think it’s because you’re Maori I like you but that’s not it. I like you because of your voice, bro. Because of what you do to me inside.”
That “same place” Stan mentioned couldn’t fail to resonate with any viewer up-to-speed on Walker’s back-story. Born in Melbourne to Maori parents, the family moved back to New Zealand and Stan grew up in a Mount Maunganui household marked by poverty, alcoholism, and violence; in interviews he’s described it as “like Once Were Warriors”. Both parents spent time in jail for drugs and Walker was a thief and troublemaker. He was also sexually abused by a relative.
He’s said that moving back to Australia, and turning to religion, saved him. Before entering Idol, Walker was a shop assistant at a menswear shop in Coolangatta. After winning the competition, to protect his financial interests, he set up his own company, Stan Walker Music Pty Ltd, run by his mother, April.
Australia may have saved him but his return to New Zealand was, infectiously and revealingly, an identification with voice: “Over there,” he said in one interview, meaning Australia, “I have to talk proper. But now I’m back here in Aotearoa, I can just be me!”
If there’s one thing I’ll remember from The X Factor, it’s Stan’s “Maori-ising”. I liked the eruption of that into middle NZ; liked it in my own house too. He repeatedly identified himself and others as Maori. The first line of his Twitter bio is “i love Jesus” but his crusading here, thankfully, found a better topic.
My favourite moment was when he said to Jackie early on in the live shows that he’d always thought she was “this little white girl” but he’d just found out her dad was Maori. Jackie grinned and looked at the floor. Was anything else ever said about her Maoriness? The Greymouth haka that ended her local town performance before the Grand Final was perhaps the only other signal.
(Whenua’s local return was to his Christchurch rugby league club; Benny Tipene’s Palmerston North home was a farm with chickens.)
The signals then were muted or not depending no doubt on the normal patterns of each person’s life (and their choices about what they wanted to show of those patterns) but make no mistake, this was triumphantly a brown show.
Stan Walker grasped that at once and made sure we did too. In another interview, he spoke about “the shame buzz”: “Sometimes you know, within the Maori community especially, people are held back by shame and a fear of succeeding.” He saved the best line for last though: “It was the move to Australia that actually helped me,” he said, before slyly turning the solemn admiration into something more complex and funnier too, “because Australians are shameless. They’ve got no shame at all.”
There is, of course, that final question, which detractors love: what lies at the end of all this? Surely, in voting and watching, we were colluding in a vast empty promise. Setting aside the way the question assumes naivety and ignorance on the participants’ part – belied, for example, by Benny Tipene’s post-show media appearances (“I got what I wanted out of the show”) – and looks to deny them the chance we all have to fail spectacularly, it’s still worth asking. What kind of model of success, for instance, do the judges’ own music careers offer?
Most of the guest stars were almost laughably transient. One whose name I’ve forgotten was asked his advice for the contestants. “Enjoy it now cos it could all be gone tomorrow!” he said, and meant it.
Haunted by art but ruled by contingency, fleetingness, the scrapheap, this was always going to be an inauspicious setting for credible tales of lasting transformation. With vicious transparency and utter realism, the judges each hoped to avoid the “Over twenty-fives” section as mentors. The word “over” said it all. Predictions of a quick return to obscurity look accurate.
Yet for months of prime-time episodes, The X Factor – pure global product – sent a messy local version into the mainstream and in its anxiety-laden self-image showed us as complicated and involving a picture of our aspiring selves as we’ll see all year.
In this picture a lot of us have secret talents alongside our secret lives of pain; a lot of us are also not very well-off and brown – even if we’re white.
Naysayers also forget what even young Cassie knew – that performing a song is itself so chancy and so mysterious, that all bets are off until the last note sounds. How outrageous to want “a career” from something so flimsy, elusive and charged. Week after week we saw people lose the fight to – key word for the series – “connect”.
The rare successes were startling surprises, making Stan Walkers of us all.
The co-editors of Griffith REVIEW: Pacific Highways, Lloyd Jones and Julianne Schultz, and contributors will be discussing all things New Zealand at The Wheeler Centre in Melbourne (Feb 26), National Library of Australia in Canberra (Feb 27),Adelaide Writers Week (Mar 3) and New Zealand Writers Week (Mar 12).