As I sat down and read my Journal Star this morning, I stumbled upon this line from an American Idol winner sidebar to a Ruben Studdard story:

“American Idol” has far from guaranteed superstardom for its winners.

While Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood have sustained success, Taylor Hicks and Jordin Sparks have nearly disappeared from the pop culture radar.

I thought, “What an odd characterization of Jordin’s career.” So I wrote a quick email to Jeff Korbelik.

I have to take exception with the assertion that Jordin Sparks has “nearly disappeared from the pop culture radar” to the degree of Taylor Hicks. Her album went platinum, two of its singles went platinum, and I can think of at least three of her songs that still get regular (if not too much) play on KFRX. Where did that idea that she has disappeared come from?

Jeff disagreed in his reply, saying “She’s been out of the limelight for sometime now,” which led to my latest response:

What is your definition of “sometime” — the past few weeks? She’s had singles charting as recently as February. She won a 2009 People’s Choice Award. She was a 2009 Grammy nominee. She sang the national anthem at the 2009 NFC Championship game and the 2009 NBA All-Star Game. She also sang at the Inaugural Ball.

In case you can’t tell, I was a big Jordin supporter. 😉

Jordin was my early Season Six favorite, and my support even got more intense as the judges couldn’t stop gushing over Melinda Doolittle. So I am quick to defend her awesomeness, as surprised as I am that she needs defending. And now, since I haven’t listened to it in a while, here she is nailing “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”

And here’s one of the most overplayed songs in recent memory. Maybe Korbelik doesn’t know this was Jordin Sparks? (I hope it’s clear I’m teasing. If not, I’m teasing.)

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 6:04 pm and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.