My mother was watching American Idol on Wednesday, and I noticed that it was particularly cruel to the eliminated contestants.

I already commented that American Idol uses Auto-Tune. I’m able to hear the difference now. I noticed it when I thought that the rejected contestants sounded better than the accepted ones.

Most current pop songs on the radio are auto-tuned, so audiences are conditioned to believe that an auto-tuned voice is good and a regular voice is bad. So, when American Idol’s producers favor a contestant, they auto-tune them, and when they disfavor a contestant they don’t auto-tune them. It’s reinforced when the judges sharply criticize the non-auto-tuned performance.

Without auto-tune, the people who are the best singers are overweight, like Pavarotti. With Auto-Tune, singing ability is irrelevant and stars can be picked solely based on appearance. Also, since the star has no real talent other than the marketing hype, they can be discarded and replaced in every few years when they realize they’re being exploited.

There are several places where American Idol is cruel to contestants. The audition phase is cruel to some of the non-picked contestants that the judges ridicule. Why would someone who’s such a bad singer audition for American Idol? The answer is that many of them are decent signers, but they look bad when they’re not auto-tuned and the judges ridicule them.

On Wednesday’s show they did something particularly cruel. They had 20 contestants waiting, only 15 of which would get a chance to sing. The other 5 were already eliminated, but the judges made them sit there and wait.

That was cruel. The audience gets to see the people excited when they’re picked to sing. However, it’s really cruel to the people who were stuck sitting there waiting all night, when the judges had already decided they were eliminated.