It’s been two weeks since David Cook won American Idol. Articles about the win are beginning to be filed away now. The new talk is how fast his songs are climbing the charts, plus real important stuff like, you know, who he’s dating and will they go out again. But this talent show and recent Idol winner signify more than just the surface celebrity fluff, entertainment, money and ratings.

The night the two Davids went head to head, I was convinced (yet very frustrated) that David Archuleta would win. But Americans are smart after all! They recognized David Cook’s genuine talent, especially with his rock-edged anthem “The World I Know” originally by Collective Soul. He didn’t choose a hit song, as many expected, in order for him to win votes, yet his singing was star-making. The video for that performance has over a million hits on YouTube.

Meanwhile, David  A. will still surely sing and sell records, but I hope he would actually consider college now. He needs experience, savvy, maturity and artistry that can only be found while growing up in a world without lots of yes-men, paparazzi and performance per diems plus overbearing, fame-and-fortune hunter fathers. But I’m sure the promise of celebrity complete with fat checkbooks is too hard to pass up.

The real world spins by taking the easy way out. That’s the nice way of saying that most people sell out. It would be completely appropriate if an Idol contestant auditions with the song from Cabaret called “Money” (all together now—“Money makes the world go around, the world go around”). So it’s so refreshing to see that, once in a while, just sometimes, integrity prevails.

“If I had to choose between playing a song that not a whole lot of people know that I could get behind, or the opposite, I’ll choose the lesser-known every time,” said Cook to the press backstage right after the finale.

It takes a lot of strength to stick to one’s conviction, especially when one is a player on the stage of mass media. Give the people what they want—usually sugarcoated—and in return, the people will love you. Offer something harder to swallow, something challenging, formed and functioned differently, and you risk isolation.

David Cook’s song choice to finish his Idol run is not an easily played, listened-to, nor an easily sung song with pop-happy lyrics. But David Cook hit a musicality-engineered bull’s eye. By the time he sung the lyrics below, the harmony in the theater and through the airwaves was evident—this was an extraordinary performance.

I drink myself a newfound pity

sitting alone in New York City

and I don’t know why.

So I walk up on high

and I step to the edge

to see my world below.

And I laugh at myself

while the tears roll down.

‘Cause it’s the world I know.

Oh, it’s the world I know.

True artists have the gift of making inward conflict we all feel into something universal, elevating mundane sentimentality into something emotionally sublime. No doubt, the 50 million-plus voters for David Cook saw the worlds they knew, too, and connected.

Reality TV, in my opinion, has been one of the low points in the history of television. I chastise myself for watching even a few seconds of the Kardashians (Bruce Jenner, what did you do to your face? You are an Olympic champion for goodness’s sake!)

But even lows can produce highs. As Orson Welles said in the film The Third Man: “. . . in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love—they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Most significantly, this world we know gets totally redeemed when people actually recognize good rather than just good politicizing, pandering and purses full of pocket money.

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Professor Rene F. Concepcion is a full-time faculty member of De La Salle University-Manila Ramon V. del Rosario Graduate School of Business, teaching subjects on culture and arts management plus sports and recreation management. He is currently on his one-year faculty sabbatical. But he continues to be the coach of the DLSU varsity swimming team. Comments can be sent to concepcionr@dlsu.edu.ph

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