Taylor not exactly ‘TRL’ material

So why is it so hard to imagine Taylor’s CD? His singles, his appearances on MTV, his role as a guidance counselor in the movie “From Mr. Hicks To Katharine”? He is not an intuitively easy marketing task. It is one of the dirty little secrets of “American Idol” that while it markets itself like a teen show, much of its audience is made up of adults. Given its affinity for Barry Manilow, Burt Bacharach, and other icons of the 1970s, it’s not surprising. In the past, though, it hasn’t been quite so obvious that it was those adults who would need to buy the CDs if anyone was going to.

Who does fit the mold of exactly what this show loves to promote? Runner-up Katharine McPhee. Giggling, coy, pretty, melisma-addicted, and at her best, singing songs that don’t suffer from being delivered with a blank smile. Katharine is Simon Cowell’s dream contestant. She is, in many ways, an older Diana DeGarmo or a female Clay Aiken: she can sing, and although she doesn’t seem to really understand much about what she’s singing, she is unfailingly sunny, if something of a poor sport when criticized. (If she does look to Clay for guidance, however, she should ignore the horrific faux-Beatle shag haircut he was sporting on last night’s show.)

The odds are at least 50-50 that Katharine will outsell and outshine Taylor, much as Clay did with Ruben. She isn’t more talented than Taylor (interestingly, Elliott Yamin made a decent case during the finale that he’s a better musician than either of the finalists), but she’s an easier sell. She doesn’t have all those funny “Woo!” issues and bad dance moves, and she’s got the weepy parents who you can just tell will hunt down her detractors and make them eat dirt. She’s much more ready for “TRL” than Taylor is, and if you want to sell a lot of records, that — and not Taylor-friendly venues where you can play the harmonica and talk about your love of the blues — is where you go.

Besides, “American Idol” sold Katharine as the performer she actually is, while it had to push Taylor as a non-instrument-playing solo singer, which he typically is not. Taylor’s natural habitat, performance-wise, is a bar. Katharine’s is a mall rotunda. She hasn’t ever left her comfort zone to begin with, because she does nothing quite as well as she sings about how happy she is. She has no transition to make; the Katharine of the “American Idol” finale is what Katharine will be in five years, no matter what she’s doing. It’s who she genuinely is. This means that she’s far better equipped to survive “My Destiny” than Taylor is to survive “Do I Make You Proud?”, despite the fact that the latter is less intrinsically awful.

Taylor Hicks would have a hard time being Kelly Clarkson. What will be interesting is whether he can manage to be successful as a more adult, more acoustic “Idol” winner. Don’t be surprised if he finds himself upstaged, at least in the early going, by the very woman he has supposedly just bested.

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