If you are alt-identified, yet want Kris Allen to beat Adam Lambert in this week’s American Idol finale, then you are complicit in your own oppression. Rebels who want Adam Lambert to lose must just hate themselves.

People like to fuss about sex and sexuality, but the place where Adam Lambert is actually unusual is that it is rare to see new musicians with serious larger-than-life star quality in the spotlight today. I just watched a top 20 video countdown and Eminem was just about the only one who would turn heads in a room he walked into, on force of presence alone. So it is exciting to see someone who has the right counterculture vibe with a mix of subcultures gothic, punk, hard rock, rockabilly, emo, scene and more blended together for something unique and compelling. To anyone who states people like Adam Lambert are a dime a dozen and FOX is just not in-the-know, I have to say there are a lot of people with some of that general sort of style, but not a lot with that vibe and that level of both charisma and musical talent.

To receive the same kudos as someone who comes across more normal and mainstream, I often feel like I have to work at least twice as hard and produce work which is twice as good. I would be fine with this, except for the part where the whole process plateaus early. Allow me to explain. In a way, simple badges of flamboyance and theoretical nonconformity, such as tattoos or unnatural hair color, have become fairly common by 2009. Someone who truly has an artistic and offbeat spirit is still likely to have to be better than the next guy to achieve the same recognition. Unfortunately, people, who identify as somehow alternative or creative or freaky, tend to want to root for the underdog. This means that, as soon as one of their compatriots is about to come over the top and succeed for real, they get an enormous backlash from former supporters. So I see all these people, who were super excited by Adam Lambert’s early successed on American Idol, who are now not into him because he is perceived as the obvious front-runner; they think maybe they like the other final two member Kris Allen because he is the underdog.

Kris Allen is an appealing enough performer. In particular, I liked his performances of “She Works Hard for the Money” and “Heartless”. I most likely would not flip the channel if a music video of his came on. I actually think American Idol fans got it exactly right for the AI8 final two to be Kris Allen and Adam Lambert. (Alison Iraheta might be more demographically similar to Adam Lambert, but Kris Allen is a more ready-for-primetime performer.) Kris Allen is not the underdog to win this contest because he is somehow disadvantaged and just needs a little love and support. Kris Allen is not some sort of stray spaniel puppy in need of a home. Kris Allen is the underdog to win the American Idol competition because Adam Lambert deserves it far far far more than he does. Some of the web chatter about the final American Idol vote suggests more that people want to vote against Adam Lambert for being successful more than they want to vote for Kris Allen for any positive reason.

Opinionated and forthright judge Simon Cowell has stated in interviews that he would like to see Adam Lambert win. Led Zeppelin does not normally permit American Idol to use their songs, but they gave permission for Adam Lambert to sing “Whole Lotta Love”. U2 does not normally permit American Idol to use their songs, but they gave permission for Adam Lambert to sing “One”. When Slash from GNR mentored the Idols, he posted to his Twitter that he was especially impressed by Adam Lambert. When Katy Perry performed on the show, the legend on the back of her Elvis cape read “Adam Lambert”.

It seems like if Simon Cowel, Paula Abdul, Robert Plant, Bono, Slash, Katy Perry, and a host of other notables all feel strongly that Adam Lambert should win American Idol, then he should be a shoo-in sure thing. But he is not. The reason he is not is that inexplicably hot people with smudgy eyeliner and leather jackets and big boots hate themselves. Now nonconformity does tend to get push-back from the overculture, so I understand why many bohemians do not necessarily expect to always get praise. Getting praise, however, does not mean that you lose your individuality merit badge. You should expect to be able to win people over, when they see what you are really like.

No disrespect at all to Kris Allen, but Adam Lambert deserves to win American Idol. Adam Lambert earned the win. I know, I know, rebels figured out that 19E and the powers-that-be want to have Adam Lambert win, so it would be (oi oi) rebellious to vote for Kris Allen instead. A good rebel is ready to take the power, not just cry like a baby over whoever seems to be an authority. Voting against Adam Lambert is not sticking it to the man; it is just building a glass ceiling for your tribe. Hopefully Wednesday night still ends up being a coronation for Adam Lambert.

During country week on American Idol, I expressed mild surprise that Adam Lambert had not gone for a more Elvis country vibe when he covered a song made famous by Johnny Cash, the original man in black, called “Ring of Fire“. Maybe someone should give me a music label or a reality show to produce because during the kickoff to Motown week today, Adam Lambert performed “Tracks of My Tears” in a sharp pale cool gray suit with a dark shirt and went for a less made-up look with just dark mascara and a rockabilly hairstyle with a clearly intentional Elvis circa 1957 vibe.

The judges seemed surprised that he cleaned up so well. Judge performer Paula Abdul went so far as to call his look for the evening “classy“. Did she really not notice that there was a hot man under the guyliner there before? Elvis dyed his hair black too. Most people who can do one flamboyant look fabulously can also do another. I am a fan of eyeliner on guys and a rocker look, but everybody likes Elvis Presley and any rock guy who can do an Elvis look is going to do so some time. It’s like a rule. I was more impressed by the emotional range Adam Lambert’s performance showed.

“Tracks of My Tears” is a song about putting a happy face on and showing everyone else a good time, while you ache inside. I know it is a song which really speaks to me personally. “Tracks of My Tears” was first performed by Smokey Robinson and The Miracles in 1965. Smokey Robinson was on hand tonight to check out this season’s American Idol contestants. “Tracks of My Tears” was written by Smokey Robinson, Miracles guitarist and fellow founding member Marv Tarplin, and bass singer and fellow founding member Pete Moore. In addition to having a long and storied, wildly successful, and industry-changing career with 4,000 songs to his credit, Smokey Robinson must have an excellent pact with the devil because he is sixty-nine-years-old and he looked fantastic on American Idol tonight. Although he got to listen to young performers doing renditions of his songs for most of the night, Smokey Robinson gave Adam Lambert’s tender soulful rendition of “Tracks of My Tears” a standing ovation. Can’t really ask for better than that.

Tracks of My Tears Lyrics:

People say I’m the life of the party
‘Cause I tell a joke or two
Although I might be laughing loud and hearty
Deep inside I’m blue

So take a good look at my face
You know my smile looks out of place
If you look closer it’s easy to trace
The tracks of my tears

I need you…
Need you

Since you left me if you see me with another girl
Looking like I’m having fun
Although she may be cute, she’s just a substitute
‘Cause you’re the permanent one

So take a good look at my face
You know my smile looks out of place
If you look closer it’s easy to trace
The tracks of my tears

Outside I’m masquerading
Inside my hope is fading
I’m just a clown since you put me down
My smile is my make up
I wear since my break-up with you

Baby, take a good look at my face
You know my smile looks out of place
If you look closer it’s easy to trace
The tracks of my tears

Yesterday, R. Kelly was acquitted of charges for child pornography which have been pending for nearly six years now. If I believed he were innocent, I would think it was a real travesty to have such horrible accusations hanging over his head for so long. Now, the extremely witty Josh Levin over at Slate and the highly respected Bill Wyman over at Hitsville have both been covering the R. Kelly trial and associated tribulations with exceptional thoroughness and panache. If you want to know way too much about R&B singer and producer R. Kelly and his penchant for underage girls, I definitely recommend the work of both of these writers. I’m going to try to break it down for y’all here though.

First of all, I think the irony police need to be called. This week Max Hardcore was handed a criminal conviction for making videos of adult women dressed youthfully and engaging in consensual extreme sex acts, most likely including watersports (not the jet-ski kind), videos for which Max Hardcore had full documentation that the women were legally adult and consented to appearing on video and having said video distributed. The same week R. Kelly got excused for making videos of allegedly underage women engaging in arguably consensual extreme acts, definitely including watersports (not the jet-ski kind), videos for which R. Kelly could produce no documentation that the women were not underage or had consented to have their image recorded and shared in this way.

I feel sorry for R. Kelly. I truly do. I suspect he is not competent to handle his own affairs, yet, being rich, he is surrounded by people who apparently regularly take him for as much money as they can carry away. Even the star witness for the prosecution stated that R. Kelly would not continue with making a sex video if she was visibly upset and she admitted to taking advantage of him financially over and over. The testimonies in his recent trial are, in fact, rife with descriptions about how various people in positions of trust did everything from extort payments from him to stealing jewelry and, yes, homemade videos. According to GQ magazine, R. Kelly was sexually abused by an adult male neighbor as a child. Given that R. Kelly’s brother told Vibe that the singer never gave their mother a dime because she refused to divorce his stepfather, I would hazard a guess that the man was probably abused by his stepfather as well. R. Kelly also personally told Vibe that he is functionally illiterate. Members of his entourage further assert that R. Kelly is unable to do basic addition and subtraction. I’m guessing that someone with a bunch of multi-platinum albums could afford a reading and mathematics tutor, so it’s fairly likely that this means R. Kelly is deficient in the brain department. He probably is not mentally on a level above his young sex partners.

This still does not excuse competent adults for leaving their children with a grown man of R. Kelly’s well-documented predilections. He has settled multiple cases with families of allegedly underage girls he allegedly had inappropriate sexual relationships with. He has been caught with videos and pictures of his misdeeds over and over and is apparently not savvy enough to stop creating new evidence against himself. He married his protege Aaliyah when she was fifteen-years-old. This is not someone who is smart enough to cover his tracks. Apparently, her family was sufficiently on-top-of-things to get the marriage annulled and prevent Aaliyah from ever seeing R. Kelly again. Somehow, during the preceding three years it took for R. Kelly to work on Aaliyah’s multiplatinum debut Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number, it never occurred to her family that leaving her alone with a guy who likes young girls was not necessarily the best idea. The name of the album didn’t give anybody pause? Given that he actually tried to marry the girl, I’d view him more as retarded than ill-intentioned. I don’t mean retarded in the sense of schoolyard taunts, but, in the literal sense, R. Kelly may be a musical savant, but, he appears to be extremely developmentally delayed and not at all bright. Multiple sources report that the man even has trouble remembering to bathe himself.

I started off laughing out loud at the coverage of the R. Kelly trial. I mean, dude, if you are going to have an inappropriate and totally illegal sexual relationship with a teenage girl, maybe you shouldn’t, ya know, videotape it. Especially, if you’ve been busted out and/or had to make blackmail payments/legal settlements for this sort of thing in the past. And R. Kelly’s defense team’s arguments seemed so ridiculous when they claimed that it wasn’t R. Kelly on the videotape in question and it didn’t even look like him and, if it did look like him, then that was because of special effects, and, if it was not special effects and it was R. Kelly on the tape, then the girl must be eighteen. As R. Kelly hands the girl in the video money on camera at the beginning of the tape, the defense attorneys even argued that it would be mean to find R. Kelly guilty because that would be tantamount to calling the girl in the vid a whore. Funny stuff.

Now, to be totally frank, I don’t really think it is generally appropriate for a forty-year-old to have an ongoing sexual relationship with a teenager of legal age either. There are, of course, exceptions where people with a huge age difference can have a great relationship, but I’d say that, on average, that’s not ideal. I think the older the people involved are, the less an age difference matters. Is a fourteen-year-old mature enough to know she is participating in an extortion plot against her inappropriately aged lover? Probably depends on the fourteen-year-old, but everything about that is certainly illegal in every respect in the State of Illinois.

Aaliyah’s uncle Barry Hankerson was R. Kelly’s manager for many years. In point of fact, he remained R. Kelly’s manager for many years after Aaliyah’s recording with R. Kelly, marrying him, and subsequently getting that marriage annulled. When R. Kelly and Barry Hankerson parted ways professionally, Barry Hankerson wrote a letter to the record label saying that he felt R. Kelly needed psychiatric help for his compulsive pursuit of young girls. Well, yeah. The guy is obviously psychologically off. But, what I want to know is, when exactly did his manager figure out that R. Kelly had a problem there? How many settlements with the families of teenage girls did it take? How many incidents did he personally witness working closely with the singer/producer? How many years of thinking about it, after his own fifteen-year-old niece Aaliyah married R. Kelly, did it take for it to occur to him that maybe teenage girls should not be left alone with R. Kelly?

Reading about this case, it appears that, over and over again, people with a professional or otherwise fiscal interest in R. Kelly put junior high school-aged girls in his presence, knowing full well what R. Kelly was like. The more I read, the more it looked like a bunch of criminal opportunists basically taking advantage of the mentally handicapped.

Now one could argue that rock and roll has a long history, stretching from Elvis Presley to Tripp Eisen, of musicians dating young girls. But that is one for the philosophers or at least another article. In the here and now, we have decided, as a society, that it is against the law for grown men to have sexual relationships with fourteen-year-old girls. Whether or not they pee on them. So long as that is the rule, I think we also ought to have a law against profiteering friends and family who put young girls in harm’s way by leaving them alone with men like R. Kelly. Adults are supposed to protect their young, not cash in on their suffering.

On the plus side, I learned a new vocabulary word. According to Slate freelancer David Tuller, ephebophilia is the word for guys who do not like actual children but who have a more R. Kelly post-puberty pre-legality taste. So everyone go forth and try to use your new vocab work ephebophilia in a sentence some time this week.

Cookie Monster was the first bad boy I ever loved. I adored his unfettered capacity for pleasure. He was deeply into consuming cookies and he didn’t care who knew it. If there were no cookies available, he would eat a cardboard circle if he had to. He would eat that cardboard circle with no shame. He was so ready for anything, he would eat the moon, if he could get to it. The scope of his desire was infinite and proud. He could see no 12 steps coming. He was Cookie Monster and he was prepared to shout his joyous desire aloud. If you baked him a flat crisp cake of sweetened dough, he would let you know how much he enjoyed it. You wouldn’t have to wonder whether he was experiencing pleasure because he would let you know about it and he didn’t care who was watching. Cookie was the kind of Monster where you had to understand he might take just as much joy from someone else’s baking. He wanted cookies and he wanted them from everyone he met. But, if you didn’t require monogamy of him, there was no one else with such contagious happy hedonism. CM’s turn as Alistair Cookie on the intellectual Monsterpiece Theater showed his smart side, but it was still his intense googley-eyed passion which inspired us all. Cookie just knew how to make people feel good. He embodied unrestrained id in its most beautiful and fulfilling form.

Sure I enjoyed the curmudgeonly insight and willingness to speak his mind exhibited by Oscar the Grouch, but it was Cookie Monster I dreamed about. It didn’t matter if he was a little heavy around the waistline. His charisma overrode all that. He made everyone around him share his sense of satiation as they marveled at the magnitude of his consumption. This was why all the girls and, let’s face it, the boys loved Cookie Monster. As time went on, he was even idolized by a new generation of entertainers such as Bart Simpson whose cowabunga catchphrase is an homage to his blue predecessor. Despite his lifestyle, or perhaps because of it, Cookie has been beloved enough to be welcome everywhere from celeb galas to the White House. He campaigned for milk, but only as something to wash cookies down with.

Somewhere there is a photo of my father in a hallway at our home in Scarsdale, New York posing like Cookie Monster to entertain me. His musician’s ear gave him the ability to do the Cookie Monster voice so well, although he wasn’t down with pigging out or the whole making crumbs thing. I have so many happy memories associated with Cookie Monster. I don’t see him as much as I used to, but TiVo lets me slip off to visit him at Sesame Street from time to time, no matter what is going on in my regular day-to-day life. He is always the same and he always makes me smile. If it is his fault that I overeat as an adult, I love him too much to care.

Some time ago, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart ran a special report about whether Cookie Monster was a bad role model for children. The show suggested that maybe children were overeating sweets because they saw their fuzzy blue hero do it. They interviewed a child chomping a large cookie. They showed one of the show’s reporters, Steven Colbert or Ed Helms I think, chasing after a Lincoln Town Car trying to get a comment from a blue figure in the back who never makes eye contact. I laughed out loud. I might have moved on to more mature relationships myself, but Cookie Monster was still a rock star, still doing it his way. No one was going to tame my Cookie or tell him what to do.

So you can well imagine my horror when I saw the recent press info. They make no mention of the Daily Show segment, but they make it clear that Cookie Monster is now being forced to promote vegetables and sing a new song called “A Cookie Is a Sometimes Food” to teach healthier living to a new set of fans. Maybe he is bowing to media scrutiny. Did he sell out because of Sesame Street’s new business partnership with Earth’s Best health foods? I like to think he wouldn’t do that, but maybe he blew all his early paychecks on baked goods and really needs the money. Maybe he got busted boosting something tasty fresh out of the oven and this is part of his community service. I just can’t see my beloved Cookie doing this willingly. McDonald’s is one of the underwriters of Sesame Street, so I feel like there is something truly insidious about curtailing Cookie Monster’s one true pleasure. How much do they really care about health if they are taking money from Mickey D’s? Something just does not add up. The Sesame Street site now showcases a game, sponsored by the letter G, which is called “Toss a Salad with Cookie Monster.”

Maybe Cookie Monster is just getting old. I guess we all age faster than we want to. As the years go by, the cookies take a greater toll. The big CM is turning 36 now. DJ Larry Levan of New York’s legendary Paradise Garage, who mixed the smash hit Cookie Monster and the Girls LP, died when he was only 38. Rock stars usually have to die at 27 if they want to be remembered at their best, but Elvis still gets painted as he was young and beautiful, snarling and full of life, ready to take on the world. I will choose to remember Cookie Monster at the height of his fame and success, as my blue hero who belted out “C is for Cookie” for the whole world to hear.