Sometimes, it isn't an option not to want to pound and pound and pound someone in the face with a steel shovel and to keep it up until you've pounded them so hard and so repeatedly that the dents in the shovel resemble the person's original face more cloely than their face does once you finally stop swinging the thing.

"But why, specifically, do I want to do this?" you ask, as you imagine bits of flesh and blood and bone peppering the walls and ceiling around you.

This causes you to pause for a moment as you consider the question.

But you soon resume the fantasy. The Reason might be hazy, but the Rightness isn't.

Some of you are probably a step ahead of me at this point and imagine that I am about to talk about Justin, the non-winner of "American Idol." I'm so pleased to see that you've been paying attention all these years. Or maybe you've just seen an episode of "American Idol."

You think about his Sideshow Bob mop of hair, with each and every one of those golden curls positioned Just So. You think about his little peasant shirts and his flared velour pants and then you remember the hair again and you immediately picture him in a 1973 Coke commercial, wandering through a soft-focus meadow at sunset.

Powerful stuff. What makes you want to reach for the shovel, however, is every single one of those moments during a 115-second song in which he peers into the camera with disgusting deliberation and tilts his head and widens his eyes a bit as if to say "Yes, I'm Singing Right To You, My Extra-Super-Special Secret Girlfriend." If you're a sappy 11-year-old girl, of course, this goes over gangbusters. If you're not, you reach for the shovel. And incidentally, most 11-year-old girls are of the non-sappy variety; they're wondering aloud if a rake wouldn't be a better choice. Not one of those flexible leaf rakes either, they clarify, but a heavy steel rake used for grading asphalt.

So yes, I was hoping Kelly would indeed win. She's a better singer and her win means that I can avoid seeing and hearing Justin without having to dig a deep put and toss in anything I own that's capable of receiving radio signals. As-is, I can avoid him by just living my life and staying away from cruise ships and the PAX Network.

I actually only started watching "American Idol" a couple of weeks ago, when it became mandatory for all U.S. citizens. Which was a dashed shame because the only point of a show like this is to see the auditions of all those people who aren't really singers but Want To Be Famous. It's the same reason why I never failed to catch the first few episodes of [the name of that show where they tried to put together a "Spice Girls"-type group].

The hitch with a show like this is that if it's run properly at all, the finalists will all be ringers. They'll be people who work hard, take lessons, and routinely audition, not a Civilian. The world's full of people who Imagine That They Sing Better Than The Average Taxpayer. Most of them are also People Who've Been Told They Have A Good Voice. Neither is necessarily a Real Singer and they ought to get smoked when they compete with one head-to-head.

I mean, I have what might be termed a Pleasing Baritone. When everyone at the Sox game is singing along with the National Anthem, I throw my shoulders back and afterwards, I collect not a few compliments from the fellow residents of Section 24. While a guest in a woman's house, I ran through most of the highlights of "The Pirates Of Penzance" as I showered and when emerged I was startled to discover that the aforementioned lady had heard my performance as I began lathering and stood at the top of the stairs transfixed during the twenty-minute period of scrubbing, shampooing, rinsing, shampooing again, conditioning, towelling off, et cetera.

The point is, if you're looking for a slouch, keep on looking. But here's the critical bit: I claim to be a good singer, but only for someone who isn't a singer you know?

If I were a real singer, I'd have done something about it by now. Taken lessons. Started auditioning with local Gilbert & Sullivan Societies. Et cetera. The real singers are working for telemarketing firms, manning shake and frappe machines, telling Blockbuster customers that every copy of "Pearl Harbor" is out, sorry...but they're also working at their craft. They work in places where they can take a Tuesday off for a rehearsal or an audition, because they value the $2100 they made as a singer last year over the $32,200 job that pays their rent and their utilities.

You can joke about wedding singers and people who sing professionally wherever and whenever they can, even if it's through the neckhole of a giraffe costume at the mall, but these people impress me. There can be no more compelling argument that this person sings because it's what they're supposed to be doing, because they love it.

Yes, I've got a cold, black little heart...but truth be told, I would have enjoyed seeing and hearing the gymnastics of the Non-Singers who try to compete with that. Those are the folks who would like to be a singer, or an actor, or a comic, or a wrestler, anything to make them a superstar. After they lose this audition, they probably went to the studio next door to rub their faces with whale poop, in hopes of being cast in a new MTV game show. ("Think Jackass meets The Joker's Wild!" says the callsheet.

I missed all of those non-singers' auditions, but at least I got to see the Loser Montage in the last "American Idol" show. I kept hearing about how Simon was a great big meanie but man, I wanted to applaud him. Those people needed to be told that it simply never, ever, ever was going to work out for them. This was Reality. This wasn't Aunt Sadie's living room; no one was going to pat on the head and be told How Surprisingly Good The Were, Given Their Lack Of Training. They were at an audition. If you show up at a singing audition and seem to be plucking notes and tempo from a live simulcast from The Rainbow No-No Tree, well, you're not going to go home happy.

What surprised me the most was how bad the ten finalists were.

Not awful. Just desperately mediocre. Great wedding singers, definitely your first picks if you're putting together a No Doubt cover band, say. But standalone pop stars? Come on. Really?

Even the best one — can't remember her name, sorry, but she got eliminated halfway through — wasn't bringing anything new to the table. Even the superstar singers you can't freakin' stand have something unique going for them.

Back to Justin. He was just plain hopeless. Not at all in command of his instrument. I'm a huge fan of vocalists and he was frustrating to listen to. Every phrase he sang was a cop-out. There's a spot where he should have gone with a clearer, fuller tone, but clearly couldn't; further along, a better singer would have taken a breath earlier so he could continue the note, but no, he had to cut this phrase in half; traditionally, this is the spot in the classic Wilson Pickett tune where you just light the damned fuse and let everything build...whoops, he chose instead to just whisper it out. Where real singers step up and ring the bell, Justin smiles and tilts his head and looks in the camera. Uggh.

You can't fool people. The more I sing in public with a band behind me (it's rare, but it does happen), the more I appreciate the difference between my sort of singing and Real Singing. I've performed often enough that I have some standard Tricks. In one of my favorite songs to perform, you need to rack your voice UP an octave for a single note and then slam it back DOWN again for the next. I have to sort of do this trilly thing where I bend the notes before and after it and if you're not paying a lot of attention to me (likely, given my usual venues) you won't notice that I never sang that high note at all.

Real singers just sing the damned note.

The biggest way for a singer to disappoint me is when it's clear that they can't make their voice do what they want it to do. Some such singers will bulldog their way through regardless. A lot of "Idol" auditioners did this -- finalists, too -- usually when trying to sound like Mariah Carey singing the National Anthem. Others will just fake it. I don't know which ones are worse.

Eventually, "American Idol" named their "Pop Superstar," and gave her a "million-dollar contract."

Good for her...but naturally we all know that's nonsense. The Show Album will do pretty well because that's the way things work in this day and age, when the TV network is owned by the same company that owns the radio network and the distribution network. I've no doubt that five years from now, there'll be a legitimate pop superstar with a grainy "American Idol" audition clip in their "Behind The Music" profile, a la Britney Spears' "Star Search" clip. But of course it won't be any of the "Idol" finalists.

See, the problem is, the big idol-making machines like to build their own product. They like to pull the ore straight from the mines and haul it to the refinery and load the ingots on a flatbed to the plant where they're shaped into something that'll go over well at Wal*Mart. They resent Found Goods like the "American Idol" winner.

"American Idol" made me think of "Bands On The Run." To my mind, this is the only Reality Show that was actually worth a damn. "Survivor" tainted the whole process, you see.

Actually, the third season of "The Real World" tainted it — this was the season that introduced David "Puck" "Wiping A Booger On The Wall Makes Me More Interesting" Rainey. But MTV is basic cable. "Survivor" was CBS and it still holds the record for the highest-rated summer show ever. It just accellerated what Rainey started: Holy Mother of God, all of a sudden people wanted to get on reality shows to Get Famous.

It's an awful pre-filter. "Survivor" (and hell, even "Real World") were interesting proposals before a single episode had been produced. "We'll drop you off on a tropical island with a dozen other people and leave you all there for a month, with minimal support," the producer explains to you. "You'll have to figure out how to keep yourselves going. If you're still around at the end, we give you a million bucks."

Not a bad pitch. Not so silly in the abstract. Do consider that triathaloning is considered a legitimate sport. It even has its own magazine and everything. "Well, first you're going to have to swim two miles across the ocean; you run straight out of the surf and onto a bike, which you ride for over a hundred miles. Then you ditch the bike and start running, and just 26.2 short miles later, you're all done." Me, I'd rather spend 30 days resting on an island.

The first season thus attracted a lot of people who were adventurous and could be described as Up For Anything. That describes someone I'd like to meet. After "Survivor" became a hit, the people who auditioned for reality shows became people who Would Do Anything To Get Famous. That's someone I would not like to meet. It's certainly not someone I would find fascinating on a week-to-week basis.

"Bands On The Run" couldn't fall victim to that. The competition involved four unsigned bands. VH1 put them on tour, where they played separate venues in the same city each week. Every few weeks, the band with the lowest tour earnings (gate money plus CD and merchandise sales) got cut. But! Before each elimination, they'd all play together at a Battle Of The Bands and the winner of the crowd's popular vote would be safe from elimination.

Here's what made the show work for me:

1) These bands were bands before the show began shooting.

2) The show required that they go off and perform as bands.

3) When the show ended, they continued to perform as bands.

You can't say "Reality Television" without making air-quotes around the first word o'course, but VH1 essentially just filmed these four groups doing what they were going to be doing anyway. On the whole this was a show free from most of Reality TV's phoney-baloneyism. VH1 set them up in small, divey clubs on off-nights and gave them no promotional help. Most of the groups spent their time scrambling to pick up additional gigs on their own, selling CDs and band merchandise as they went along. Working extremely hard and making money was a winning strategy. One band had little interest in that and just focused on putting as much energy as possible into their live shows, hoping to win the crowds in all of the Battle Of The Bands.

Given that a successful band has to work extremely hard and play extremely well — ok, ok, but humor me here, all right? — "Bands On The Run" had a certain credibility. The music was pretty good, too. One band's CD is in pretty heavy rotation on my iPod.

The winners got things that an unsigned band would find useful: tens of thousands of dollars in new equipment and the underwriting of both a music video and an A&R showcase. No promises of a phoney-baloney Million-Dollar Contract. The losing bands got their music played on a leading music channel on a weekly basis. Which is also something an unsigned band would find useful.

Compare and contrast with other reality game shows, in which the Winners wind up eating raw brains in front of an audience of millions. One comes off thinking that the lingering impact of Reality Television will be a massive recalibration of the terms "Winners" and "Losers."

(I'll end this here. Firstly, because I sat down intending only to slap down a couple hundred innocent words explaining that I'd like to mercilessly bludgeon a total stranger, and not to create a 2500-word massacree on reality television. And secondly, because if I continue to talk about "Bands On The Run" I'd feel obligated to mention that one of the three non-winning bands more or less disbanded after the show and the other two suffered major personnel dropouts. Well, that's rock and roll.)