(3 of 5)
Before appearing on American Idol, Aiken was a special-education teacher in Raleigh, N.C. He is a devout Baptist who does not smoke or drink, though he claims to have a temper that emerges when he sees "people with disabilities treated like they're 4 years old." In his piety, Aiken can make Billy Graham seem like a rogue. He listened to Davis' advice about edge and then respectfully asked that he not be required to sing any songs about sex. "Clive tried to tell me that saying certain words in a songor as he says, 'putting some balls into it'isn't bad, it's just strong emotion," says Aiken. "Well, there are certain words and emotions I don't want kids hearing, and I'm not changing because they think it's going to sell better. This is going to sound horrible, but I got 12 million votes doing what I did."
Davis counters that Aiken is no longer selling to a TV audience. "You can't worry about who bought the last single," says Davis from his seat in an office studded with platinum-record plaques. "You can't be paralyzed by what the public expects of you. We're now competing against Justin and Christina and Avril and Pink, and if you allow the television audience to program your music, you will not be on radio and you won't make MTV. And then where are you? We have to stay ahead of the curve."
Aiken had been forewarned by Clarkson and Guarini that if he was happy with 50% of his completed album, he'd be "doing real good." The problem, they told him, was that there were too many people wrestling for control of their music. "Simon Fuller did not create American Idol to be in the television business," says Tom Ennis of Fuller's production company, 19 Entertainment. "He created American Idol as a new way to find talent to manage and nurture." 19 is the idols' official record label--RCA is the American distributor--and Fuller, who managed Annie Lennox before inventing the Spice Girls, is Davis' contractual equal in choosing music for the Idol albums.
Here's where the American Idol business gets dicey. Davis would like RCA to curate the careers of artists; Fuller wants his idols to have long recording careers too, as long as they don't forsake the Idol audience. (Fuller was incensed that Davis spent eight months refining Clarkson's debut for radio rather than getting it to market as soon as possible.) "You have to serve many masters when you have that many people with a vested interest in you," says Ennis. "You can't skew yourself one way and not speak to the people who spent all that time watching you and voting for you."