Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly.” To Idol’s resident British hardass, Simon Cowell, this stunt was the only memorable thing about her he initially wrote Clarkson off as “just a girl with a good voice.” But she kept progressing, round after round, and by the time 10,000 hopefuls had winnowed down to one, Cowell had come to appreciate her “normality.” Quipping with the judges, she switched places with Randy Jackson, who for his “audition” got onto one knee and sang R. Whatever she lacked in glamor, she made up with her poised, masterful renditions of Etta James’ “At Last” and Madonna’s “Express Yourself” and her easygoing humor. “I went into it thinking it might pay my electric bill.”Ĭlarkson showed up to Idol auditions in muted make-up and a kitschy denim dress that she’d made by stitching together old blue jeans. “I just auditioned for this thing that said they’d pay you, and it happened to be American Idol,” she recalled. A friend told her about what was then just a novelty singing show. Drained of hope, she returned to Texas and took a day job distributing Red Bull samples. Then, in the ultimate stroke of misfortune, her apartment burned down in a fire-right after she had earned enough money to afford a bigger place. Other producers dismissed her as too heavy, “ too Black”-sounding, too whatever. Carole King’s longtime songwriting partner, Gerry Goffin, was maybe interested in using her as a backup singer, but it didn’t pan out. with a woman she met performing at Six Flags. After high school, she recorded a demo, eventually saving enough money through odd jobs to move to L.A. Raised by a schoolteacher and a contractor in Burleson, Texas, Clarkson was a devout Christian who performed in the choir, played sports, and starred in theater productions. Pushing against the sanctimony, Clarkson told a reporter, “I love Britney Spears… People always say, ‘Oh, I’m sick because it’s not about voices, it’s about body and everything.’ Well, that’s what people are buying.” Still, by 2004, Clarkson had charted a very different path for women in pop. Like Avril Lavigne, Clarkson was seen as a corrective to the “midriff-baring aristocracy”-because of her wholesomeness and relatability, not any mutinous attitude. The result was boy bands like the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC, bubbly ingenues trained in Disney’s sunshine factory. A few years earlier, teen pop had replaced grunge in the monoculture: “It’s as if a legion of music fans and bizzers, stunned by the grim finality of Cobain’s act, collectively decided… give us artifice and showbiz,” an Entertainment Weekly writer remarked. In other words, she was not Britney or Christina-stars whose promiscuous image and mass-market gloss in the public’s perception had made them the subject of a ceaseless media swarm in the early 2000s. She still very earnestly said “cool beans.” She went to Chili’s, not wild bashes thrown by Justin Timberlake. “It is hard to spend time with Clarkson without wondering if she even realizes she has moved to Los Angeles,” a writer remarked in a 2005 profile of the singer, quipping that the only place you’d spot her in US Weekly was in a “Got Milk?” ad. She was the quintessential girl-next-door, “ warm-as-a-popover” and “safe-as-milk.” Sure, she had a protean, phenomenal voice-one that made you happy she covered Aretha or Whitney, instead of feeling mortified that she had tried-but she was not overtly sexy, ostentatious, or hip. Even as she became the inaugural winner of American Idol and released Breakaway-one of the best-selling albums of the 21st century-journalists regularly marveled at the unpretentiousness of the former cocktail waitress from Texas. The most interesting thing about Kelly Clarkson seemed to be that she was not interesting at all.
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