'American Idol' needs to open the closet door

This week, the lucky 13 contestants in the latest top tier of "American Idol" begin the serious phase of competition with a dip into Michael Jackson's songbook. Jackson, who just has returned from isolation to announce a series of comeback shows, is the single biggest influence on the young R&B stars that many "Idol" strivers emulate, but he's also the ideal subject for what's turning out to be a rather strange season.

At the heart of his troubled legacy are the anxieties "Idol" also confronts, however mildly -- America's troubling history of racial divides and assimilation, and the sexual repression and need for release that is a basic subject of pop music itself.

There's been some joking on various websites that this year's most flamboyant front-runner, Adam Lambert, will perform Jackson's early '90s hit "In the Closet" as a response to recently leaked photographs of him kissing a man and dressed in glamour-queen drag. Jackson released the song just when his astounding musical charisma began to strain under the weight of his eccentricities.

It is one of many attempts Jackson has made to give voice to the demons that eventually dragged him down.

A tight, New Jack Swing track co-produced by Teddy Riley, the song expresses bald lust in the face of a lover's wish to retreat. The music, full of bullet-like synthesizer pings and Jackson's trademark percussive panting, was complemented by a video that showed the lithe, light-skinned dancer and voluptuous, dark-skinned model Naomi Campbell facing off with dance moves in the desert: a signature Jackson expression of repressed yet uncontainable sexual hunger as a form of violence.

"In the Closet" could be the theme of this year's whole season, really. Lambert is not the only resident in this year's "Idol" house to have an uncommon identity or a bothersome back story. Reality -- and not the usual well-managed kind the show embraces -- is breaking through as "Idol's" producers strive to further the contest's popularity among a diverse array of viewers without giving up the fiction of a unified mainstream.

Beyond sexuality

The closet metaphor most often applies to hidden homosexual identities, and that's certainly a hot button issue for "Idol." The show has drawn its own curtain around apparently gay contestants over the years. So far, Lambert has been as matter-of-fact about his orientation as possible without actually uttering the word "gay" on camera. He's poised, doing his little dance around a major aspect of his private life; he's not the first to have to do so.