The saga continues... and the audience shrinks (Monday's half-hour snoozer brought in just over 3 million souls. Next week... no Monday teaser.) And it isn't so much that INXS is allowing television cameras to tag along as they search for a new lead vocalist, the rub is that they have bowed-down to Mark Burnett's heavy-handed marketing machine and have become tools of his often stilted production yarn.

by David W. Taylor (Email Me)
Reality Reel Media
08.04.05

Rock 'N' Roll, when addressed at its core — for good or bad — is all about primal urgency; emotional release from a frothing, molten pit. Mayhem, bliss. Sloshing with our INXS sycophants through American Idol-like vocal clinics, tongue-in-cheek stagecraft seminars and staged reunions with weepy family members — not to mention the ingratiating, lackluster judging — blankets a universe completely alien to Rock. With this bunch I half expect Steven Tyler to show up, with toothed grin, and conduct a symposium on how to say NO! to heroin. On Power Point.

What we are witnessing is a supposedly once proud Rock Band make its way in a trumped-up uber-Pop bastardization. Rock has always spun from The Street. Rock is not Soap Opera. And Rock Star INXS is many times utterly that. It is Rock 'N' Roll eating itself in a Pop sideshow for the sake of padding future concert ticket and CD sales.

A while back VH1 (who will now, sadly, spin a segment of Rock Star INXS on Sundays) broadcast an interesting documentary (documentary: a "reality" medium way before "reality television") which followed the band Velvet Revolver while they also searched in vain for a new lead singer. The film spanned many, many months of fruitless auditions, dreary personalities, banged-up egos, and dashed hopes until the band finally chose to move upon the squirrely ex-vocalist of Stone Temple Pilots, Scott Weiland. Their shotgun marriage, and subsequent trial divorces, wasn't pretty but it was pure Rock.

This bare-bones production filmed by, it seemed, a single hand-held camera and without the slightest hint of corporate marketing schmaltz was the perfect window into the mangy Rock diorama and Velvet Revolver's kinetic musical soul. It was all amps, cords, puffy eyes and loud reverb. Its gritty undercurrent makes Dave Navarro and INXS look like stodgy altar boys in comparison... like Rock Star's every ubiquitous counter-culture tattoo and "devil's horn" heavy-metal hand salute and audience directed groin thrust is a mere flourish in Burnett's ploy to bludgeon the mostly forgotten INXS back into our gray matter and onto the world stage.