American Idolatry
With his mile-wide smile, unreliable voice, and parade of hairdos, Sanjaya Malakar became a star—and a pop culture punch line—on American Idol.
By Emily White
ON THE LAST WEEKEND IN JULY, SANJAYA Malakar and his sister Shyamali left their borrowed apartment in Tacoma. In the year since Sanjaya had become a star on American Idol, they hadn’t seen enough of each other, and they needed to catch up, breathe some Northwest air, and maybe even vanish into a crowd unrecognized. They walked over to Wright Park, determined to have an ordinary day in the sun at Ethnic Fest, the city’s annual event celebrating diverse cultures with world music, gospel, and African dance. “We were sitting on the grass, just having fun listening to the music,” Shyamali remembers, “and we start hearing Sanjaya! Sanjaya! Sanjaya! We walked away and this pack of kids started following us around.” Sanjaya! Sanjaya! Sanjaya! they repeated, drowning out the music. The pack began to turn into a mob. There would be no more lying in the grass that day.
Half East Indian, half Italian, the Malakar siblings would attract attention even if Sanjaya had never appeared on American Idol. They are radiant, exotic, and young (he’s 19, she’s 21). They often stand close together, as if their bond shields them from the blows of the outside world. In conversation, they complete each other’s sentences. True believers in each other, he says, “She is so smart, up in her head, so cerebral… She knows how to break down to the perfect word for every emotion.” She says, “He is so calm, nothing bothers him. It is like he lives in a bubble.” He concurs: “A lot of times I just feel like I am floating above my life.” She has been floating by his side for a long time. Maybe she keeps part of him on the ground—whatever it is, it seems to work. They call themselves Team Malakar.
Seattle-born Sanjaya Malakar is the most memorable character ever to emerge out of the reality show/sadomasochistic amateur night called American Idol. While most of the kids who make it onto American Idol are well trained in the ways of television and pop culture, Sanjaya was, and still is to some degree, an outsider to both. The boy’s outsiderness, his absolutely odd quality is part of the reason he transfixed American Idol audiences. His brief reign lasted from January to April of 2007. By the time he was eliminated on April 18, after making it into the top seven, Sanjaya had become the boy people loved to love or to hate.
The myth of American Idol is that winners are insanely lucky and that landing a place on the show means a performer could become a really, really famous person, not just some obscure wannabe. The realities, which have been well documented, are that singers are bound to restrictive contracts that allow them little creative input, and losers are tied down to solo tours and guest appearances well past their freshness expiration date.
As an Idol contestant Sanjaya gave wildly uneven performances. He sang a pitch-perfect “Bésame Mucho” but limped through a cringe-inducing, spaced-out “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” When he performed “You Really Got Me,” he didn’t sing the words so much as shout them, as female fans in the audiences deliriously shouted back. When he finished, the camera panned to a sobbing preteen girl, her face red and swollen as if she’d been stung by a swarm of bees. Sanjaya walked over and hugged her for a long time, like he meant it, as if the entire song had been for her.
Sanjaya, it turned out, made a perfect teen idol in the mold of adolescent heartthrobs from Shaun Cassidy to the Jonas Brothers: slightly androgynous, sexy but unthreatening, with a high voice that apparently hadn’t dropped into manhood yet. The kind of boy who would kiss a girl and then ask, “Are you okay?”
And then there was the hair, a shining black mop that he transformed from week to week. Wild curls that incited the judges to say he looked like Diana Ross; a flat-ironed, shoulder-length hippie ’do to accompany the protest tune “Waiting on the World to Change”; a pomade helmet for Tony Bennett week. Most memorable was a teetering faux-hawk, which he trotted out on March 27 in honor of guest judge Gwen Stefani. The faux-hawk subsequently enjoyed a fame-life of its own. A Google search for “Sanjaya Hair” turns up half a million results including a People magazine timeline entitled “Sanjaya’s Hair: A Look Back.”
In the early rounds, the judges trash-talked him relentlessly. But every week, voters in the TV audience kept dialing the number to bring him back. Some of them were prompted by a campaign by radio host Howard Stern, who urged his millions of listeners to vote for Sanjaya. (An ardent Idol-basher, Stern believed that if Sanjaya won, it would mean the end of the show.) Then there were the girls, dialing to vote for him over and over again, racking up enormous family phone bills. _Idol_’s most acerbic judge Simon Cowell threatened to quit if Sanjaya made it to number one. A blogger calling herself “J” launched an anti-Sanjaya hunger strike. She was “not at the point of hospitalization yet,” her post read. “It won’t be long now until Sanjaya is gone.”
As the judgments came down Sanjaya maintained a goofy brand of cool, a loose-limbed mischief. At times he seemed like the class clown, waiting patiently for the teacher to lose it.
By March 13, 2007, the contestants had been winnowed down to 12, Sanjaya among them. The featured guest artist would be -Diana Ross, and Sanjaya had settled on “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” as the song from her repertoire he would perform. When he entered the practice studio before the broadcast, Ross stood by the piano, a diva in waiting. As he started to sing, she stopped him, slowed him down. “I felt like I was being taught by van Gogh,” he says. “I wasn’t sure if he had the beat,” she later said. When Sanjaya took the stage he hit notes way below the mark and had the unmistakable look of a kid trying to recite the words of a masterpiece memorized for class, the charm gone out of him as he concentrated on remembering. Afterward, the judges pronounced their verdicts.
Randy Jackson: What’s goin’ down, dude? …That song was almost unlistenable…weak!
Paula Abdul: You are the sweetest soul.
Simon Cowell: When you hear a wail in Beverly Hills that is where Diana Ross is watching this show! She’s gonna freak when she hears that.
Sanjaya barely flinched. His beatific, what-me-worry smile never left his face. “No offense Simon,” he said, “but your first comment, I had no idea what you’re talking about.” Then he gave a hand gesture, a sweep over the head, as if he thought Cowell’s words were so much indecipherable racket. As if he felt sorry for Simon in his cruel tight T-shirts.
A month later, Cowell shrugged off his authority and admitted that Sanjaya was a phenomenon he could not control or predict. On April 10, the week before he was eliminated, Sanjaya crooned “Bésame Mucho,” and in the midst of the after-screaming Cowell shrugged: “It wasn’t horrible.”
Published: December 2008
