American Idol Season 7 Kicks Off

The seventh season of "American Idol" kicks off Tuesday night (January 15) with a two-hour extravaganza sure to feature plenty of tears, shattered dreams and epic, bleep-laden meltdowns — not to mention some legitimate talent, a whole lot of WTF?-worthy warblers and, of course, gratuitous Seacrest.

The controversy started in December, when someone with the online handle "JoesPlace" began posting a list of names and MySpace pages on the fan site IdolForums.com, claiming that they were revealing the top 50 contestants who had survived the "Idol" preliminary rounds (like the kind that will air in the premiere) and made it to Hollywood. That list began to be dissected by the folks at VoteForTheWorst.com, the site launched in 2004 to subvert the "Idol" process by urging fans to vote for, well, the most supremely untalented of each season's contestants. What the site discovered seems to fly in the face of everything "American Idol" is supposed to represent: namely, discovering the undiscovered.

As proof of this, the site points to several alleged season-seven contestants, including Carly Hennessy, an Irish singer who was signed to MCA Records and released a solo record, Ultimate High, which sold just slightly more than 300 copies, despite a multimillion-dollar push by her label, according to The Wall Street Journal. Or Kristy Lee Cook, a country artist once signed to Arista Nashville and managed by Marty Rendleman, who previously helmed LeAnn Rimes' career.Kristy said that she sold her horse so she could travel to Philly from Oregon (even if she had already moved to Texas “several years ago” according to her own website). The list goes on and on and includes contestants who worked as a songwriter for Sony and Universal artists (Shaun Barrowes), sang with Patti LaBelle (Joanne Borgella), were nominated for a Grammy (Jermaine Paul), and even dated Britney Spears (Robbie Carrico).