If you like me, you can buy me and take me home
When you see me on your TV, I'm alone
You can call me, tell your story on the phone
You can hear me over blue seas, I'm alone...
- from "You can see me" by Supergrass (from the album In it for the money).

Yes, I watched a few episodes of American Idol, including some of the grand finale last night. I've dealt with the hurting brought on by the horrible, horrible single ("A moment like this") and the overwrought American patriotism, so now I have just one question for Ms. Kelly Clarkson: How in the world do you expect to maintain a career in music with such an auspicious start?

In a way, I feel sorry for Kelly. She seems like a genuinely nice woman with decent set of pipes, but gaining fame by winning a competition presented by Fox Television is pretty much the easiest way to ensure that you quickly become little more than has-been fodder for the biting commentary of late-night talk show hosts. Anyone wanna start a pool to see how long it'll take Kelly to be (warning: Seinfeld reference ahead) spit out the bottom of the porn industry? I give it eight months.

But while I think I can safely say that none of the influential musicians of the past 40 years came to prominence by winning some high-profile contest, there is some historical context that suggests Kelly might be just fine. In the classical and romantic compositional eras, awards were bestowed upon many now-revered musicians -- Hector Berlioz, Charles Gounod, Jules Massenet and Claude Debussy all won the Prix de Rome, for example.

Since the 1960s, though, things have been a little different. Can you possibly fathom what our musical climate would be like today if The Velvet Underground had been on Star Search? Contests reek of pre-fab, friend, and pre-fab is lame. But here's the thing: should we expect this perception to exist in 2102? Or will the ghosts of Kelly and her prize-winning cohorts outshine Lou Reed's legend once rock and pop music become nothing more than historical categories? Let's hope that current reports of that trend's death are not so highly exaggerated.