A new American spirit

WHIRLING through pop's history faster than a time-traveling phone booth, this year's "American Idol" finale was Blake & Jordin's Excellent Adventure. Tony Bennett actually sang, after pleading sick a few weeks ago -- awesome! Sanjaya rocked out with Joe Perry -- heinous! Doug E. Fresh gave Blake a beat-boxing lesson. Green Day showed him what good fake-punk hair looks like -- totally rad! And the suits at Apple Corps finally loosened up their grip on the Beatles catalog and let the Idols have a go. Dude, Simon must be so stoked!

The fresh-faced pair at the center of this maelstrom seemed to enjoy the ride, right up to the moment when Ryan announced Jordin's victory. No regrets; for these two, there's nowhere to go but up.

More than any other final "Idol" pair, Jordin Sparks, the ballad-hugging drama club kid, and Blake Lewis, the closest thing to a hipster that "Idol" has ever seen, present a vision of America's future. It's not just the oddly matronly ingenue's youth or the beat-boxer's embrace of a "contemporary" style that relies on hip-hop and new-wave moves dating from the 1980s. It's a matter of where they're from.

Tonight, the South lost its claim to the "Idol" crown. Given that a youthful generation of "Idol" voters put Jordin and Blake in the top spots, the triumph of the Sun Belt and, just behind it, the Pacific Northwest, speaks to realities beyond this competition.

Jordin, ascendant in every way, calls the Sun Belt home. Glendale, Ariz., a suburb of Phoenix, belongs to one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the nation. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, pundit Michael Barone noted that Phoenix will soon overtake Detroit in size, helping turn the region into the new American heartland. Full of young families, gleaming upscale malls and arena-sized mega-churches, such cities present a vision of wholesomeness unburdened by the sins of history.

Jordin herself worked at a mall -- the Westgate City Center -- and sang on the worship team at Calvary Community Church, one of the fastest-growing congregations in the country.

A grounding in contemporary Christian "praise and worship" music helped Jordin develop a vocal technique that's highly empathetic, tuneful and pleasant -- in a word, "inspirational" -- while still seeming mainstream. Free of the traditional-gospel trappings that made Melinda Doolittle and LaKisha Jones seem old to some, yet still full of the conviction of a true believer, Jordin's best performances were touched by the same nondenominational grace that Carrie Underwood delivered in "Jesus, Take the Wheel" and Fantasia Barrino found in "I Believe."