Another X Factor results show, another Thursday night with the unsettling sound of a child crying coming from my television. If you've looked at the Internet at all since tonight's show aired, you already know how this ends: After a sing-off against longtime bottom-two veteran Marcus Canty, Rachel Crow was sent home after a deadlock spurred by Nicole Scherzinger's refusal to take responsibility for tonight's outcome. As it turns out, that didn't work quite as planned, and now Nicole has effectively robbed Rachel of her bathroom and earned America's hatred. Do we really need to rehash the absolutely un-noteworthy 55 minutes that led up to that moment? No. So let's just take a moment to reflect on the giant failure that has been Nicole Scherzinger, X Factor judge, and why, specifically, she is a failure.
There is nothing wrong with bringing on a pop star to host a pop performance competition (and even though Astro is gone, I maintain that The X Factor is exactly that, and not a singing competition). The idea is presumably to have someone with actual performance experience on board, as well as a likeable, familiar face, one we associate with music and emotion and glamour, rather than the hard, cold realities of the entertainment industry. (The female pop star judge is always the first to cry.) We tend to let these artists-as-judges off the hook more easily when they just blubber and tell the contestant how beautiful they are in lieu of an actual critique; that's what the industry experts are there for. It's a stupid double standard, but it's the way the genre has evolved, and complaining about it at this point is like complaining that Megan Fox's character wasn't more fully developed in the Transformers movies. (It should be noted that The X Factor and American Idol are actually two of the last reality talent competitions to have any industry experts on their judging panels; both The Sing-Off and The Voice filled their chairs solely with performers, and therefore, those judges tend to hold themselves to slightly higher standards as far as substantial critiques go.)
Okay. So we've established that a pop star judge is generally brought onto a show for their 1) familiarity, 2) authority as a successful performer, and 3) likeability. By all three of those counts, then, Nicole Scherzinger, at least in the United States, is not a pop star. Nicole Scherzinger is not a household name. Nicole Scherzinger is best known for singing in a pop ensemble that hasn't had a song chart since 2008. Nobody cares what Nicole Scherzinger wore to the VMAs. But why? Nicole Scherzinger has been a glorified footnote of popular music for more than a decade, why has she never been permitted to graduate to the level of a Britney or Katy or Beyonce? The answer lies in point number three: There is nothing likeable about Nicole Scherzinger. And this is not an opinion, it is an objective truth.
See, one of the things that makes America so gosh darn great is that we still prize some modicum of identifiable humanity in our idols. That bonkers Hatsune Miku shit that's taking Japan by storm? That would never fly over here, and neither will Nicole Scherzinger. Our pop stars have to be viable extensions of ourselves, or at least someone we can imagine being our best friend. (And before you bring up Lady Gaga as a counterargument, watch a few YouTube videos of pimply teens replicating her dance moves and tell me that they haven't found something in her music and aesthetic that resonates with them in a profound, personal way.) For some reason, this personal, emotional expectation for pop music is lower overseas; the United States also remains one of the least secular first world countries, and I'm sure there's a correlation here, but that's a conversation for another day.