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 A VERY, VERY IMPORTANT Q&A WITH AMERICAN IDOL JUDGE KARA DIOGUARDI, CONDUCTED WITH THE HELP OF 50 CLOSE COLLEAGUES (AND ALSO AN INTRODUCTION TO THIS ISSUE)
The state of the journalistic interview today has been reduced to these weird cattle-call things where they stick 50 writers from 50 competing publications on a conference call with some shitty noncelebrity such as, say, a nobody who is going to be a new judge on American Idol. Everyone waits their turn, listening to everyone else ask their stupid, pointless questions of a stupid, pointless person for a stupid, pointless magazine. For some reason, we get press releases inviting us onto these calls all the time, which points out another problem with the media now: PR people don’t even bother to research the publications they are pitching their clients to. We get at least one email a week from this one lady, a professional publicist, who pitches us stories about new products for babies and trends in parenting. To Vice. What the fuck, lady? Do you just have to meet a quota of this-many calls to this-many places a month? Who else do you pitch your baby stories to? Juggs? Anyway, we threw the best prank caller in the world on this fucking American Idol call. He only got one question in among the robots and shit stains, but it’s a funny one. Here, we’ll let him tell it… Andrew Earles: On a recent Monday afternoon, I called an 800 number to speak with Kara DioGuardi, a woman you’ve never heard of who was announced earlier that morning as the new fourth American Idol judge. An estimated 50 other invited journalists did the same thing. It was incredibly depressing. This is how it went down: Monotone, Suicidal Moderator: Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the American Idol interview call with Kara DioGuardi. You may place yourself in queue for questions by pressing *1, and due to the large volume of callers, we ask that you do limit yourself to one question. You may then requeue yourself for additional questions. Kara DioGuardi: Hi guys, thanks for taking the time to speak with me, I’m really excited about joining the American Idol panel. Thirty minutes and 20 interviewers later... Moderator: Next we go to [Mediocre Waste of Flesh] from [Mediocre Waste of Paper]... Mediocre Waste of Flesh: Hey Kara, congratulations! Kara: Thank you so much. Mediocre Waste of Flesh: You touched on this before, but I guess, would you say, you know, you have Simon on one end as kind of being the most nasty when he wants to be, then Paula on the other end of the spectrum as kind of being the nicest, so where would you say you fall between them? Kara: You know, I’m a person who’s really honest and gives my opinion, and if I feel I need to be hard with someone in order to get that across, I will be, and if I feel I need to be more nurturing, I will be that, it really depends on the situation. Mediocre Waste of Flesh: OK, great. Moderator: And now we’ll go to Andrew Earles from Vice magazine... Andrew: Hi Kara, congratulations. Kara: Thank you! Andrew: I wanted to touch on the panel’s newfound gender equality, which was touched on earlier. In regard to the weekly themes, can you confirm or deny that the Riot Grrl movement of the early 90s will be a theme? Can you confirm that rumor? Kara: If the what? Andrew: The Riot Grrl movement of the early 90s... if it’s going to be a theme or not. Kara: I’ve never, I don’t, I’m really not the person to talk about that. I have no idea. I don’t know— Moderator: Next we have [Some Fucking Guy] from [Some Fucking Magazine]… Some Fucking Guy: You’ve worked with some great people and obviously you’re heavy duty into songwriting, would you want to write some songs for any of these contestants if they knock your socks off? See how sad and shitty that is? If we had the choice between working at the kind of magazine that has to do these calls every day and, say, testing the strength of condom prototypes by getting ass-raped without lube by AIDS-infected murdering pedophiles, we’d be bending over immediately. It’s enough to make us want to do a bunch of good, random interviews with interesting people. And they wouldn’t even have to be famous. Some of them might happen to be, but other ones could just be like, whoever we feel like talking to. You know what? Let’s do more interviews. Let’s do them right now! INTERVIEW BY ANDREW EARLES
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