Altogether Too Many Notes
From "Christina Aguilera and the Hideous Cult of Oversouling"
This brief article has me thinking not about Soul, which overall I don't care for, but extremities in music. The image of the diva blazing up and down the scale without pause is too broad a target for parody. Indeed, on a different instrument or in a different genre, such gymnastics would be received differently. Jimi Hendrix Star-Spangled Banner could equally be described as histrionic.
However, the subtleties of Prez playing "Fine and Mellow" are not usually what makes listeners first take notice. Bill Monroe pushing tempos and rhythms ever faster, playing only downstrokes, seems to be the beginning music appreciation. It is these confections that at least first move the musical spirit.
To me, the horrific part of Christina Aguilera's rendition of the National Anthem -- and "rendition" is an apt term for it, because she kidnapped the song and shipped it out to be tortured -- was not her mangling of the words, but her mangling of the tune itself: to paraphrase the great Chuck Berry, she "lost the beauty (such as it is) of the melody until it sounds just like a (godawful) symphony."
This is the same grotesque style -- 17 different notes for every vocal syllable -- that has so dominated the pop and R&B charts for years. Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston are relatively minor offenders, but singers like Aguilera -- who admittedly possesses a great instrument -- just don't seem to know when to stop, turning each song into an Olympic sport as they drain it of its implicit soul, as if running through the entire scale on every single word was somehow a token of sincerity. ...
This brief article has me thinking not about Soul, which overall I don't care for, but extremities in music. The image of the diva blazing up and down the scale without pause is too broad a target for parody. Indeed, on a different instrument or in a different genre, such gymnastics would be received differently. Jimi Hendrix Star-Spangled Banner could equally be described as histrionic.
However, the subtleties of Prez playing "Fine and Mellow" are not usually what makes listeners first take notice. Bill Monroe pushing tempos and rhythms ever faster, playing only downstrokes, seems to be the beginning music appreciation. It is these confections that at least first move the musical spirit.
Comments
Admittedly, lyrics from that period of the Cocteau Twins' discography can be a little hard to understand...
Anyway, if I had to come up with the ideal female singer for "The Star-Spangled Banner" at future Super Bowls, I guess it would have to be Tricia Kanne of Minipop. To some extent Tricia Kanne might actually be my ideal female in general, of course - I'll freely admit that - but I'm trying to also be practical here, and the fact is, most of my favorite female singers are from Scotland, so they wouldn't be appropriate for the Super Bowl, unless of course the Super Bowl were being played in, say, Glasgow.
Also, Gemma Ray would probably be a good second choice.
-The Replacements
A more apt comparison would be the masturbatory "look at how many notes I can play really fast" playing of one Edward Lodewijk Van Halen. That man just about singlehandedly destroyed rock music for the better part of a decade. That's great, you just hit 20 notes in about 5 seconds, no would you care to play a song?
And it's a real shame with someone like Aguilera, who clearly does have an excellent voice, ruins her singing with "oversouling".
Read that Coda on that article - great summation of what discussion on the Internet looks like these days.
Yup...around here, that only gets sung in gay bars....