Silhouette, I never stated she was the best singer of all time! That’s absurd!
My thread title meant to say she is current best singer. I understand the ambiguous of my thread title now. Apologies for that.
Yeah I don’t think I mentioned anything about being the best singer of all time, just in the world.
In fact, I think it was only you who brought up “of all time” in reference to Michael Jackson.
I did my best to stick to the title as “the best singer in the world”, and don’t think I implied more than that - though obviously Whitney and Amy both happen to be dead now I suppose. The only reason I brought them up specifically is because Angelina was covering songs by them, and she mimicked them incredibly, whereas Frank Sinatra, Elton John and Freddie Mercury she admittedly wasn’t mimicking quite so well because they’re males. And like Michael, they’re all dead too apart from Elton 
So if you’re looking into the fact that I was mentioning singers who are no longer current, that’s just coincidence because those were the artists that she was covering who people here happened to link…
For the best singer in the world who is still alive, I’d have to have a long think about that - I was just offering a critique, that may or may not make Angelina still the best singer in the world (at least for now), but probably makes her not the best singer in the world for the reasons I went into.
Eh, I dunno - just my two cents.
No, I appreciate that. Honestly though, would you rather go to an Adele concert or an Angelina concert?
As far as the best singer of all time, I don’t think that’s a possible question to answer… we have hundreds of one hit wonders who are the only person on earth who can sing that song better than anyone.
Angelina may never be a singer song writer. A singer songwriter really raises the bar for me.
At her age… Angelina really makes me think she is a prodigy of singing. Those don’t come around every day!
Angelina singing Adele performance in Norway:
To answer honestly? Neither. Unfortunately for me, I find mainstream music too frustrating and unstimulating - I usually have the patience to give some such songs a listen, and offer input that I try to make as impartial as possible, but naturally it won’t be completely devoid of my own subjectivity because it’s an artform. I find it difficult to pinpoint what exactly is going on, but to a certain extent I like music to be challenging (though not for its own sake) or at least thoughtfully/emotionally unique in a way that’s ear-catching beyond the base level e.g. because it has some catchy hook or an overly repeated simplistic theme (which is all pop is to me).
In short, I’m a music snob - though I dislike music snobs who not-so-secretly wallow in their “superior” discretion. I prefer to be self-effacing about it, because I begrudgingly appreciate that my views on music don’t have to be objective.
If I was to consider grounds for going to one of those concerts over the other, I’d be debating whether I wanted to appreciate a presentation of life experience, or to be impressed by something uncannily close to this despite an explicit lack of need for afore-mentioned life experience.
To be consistent with my above post on this thread, I’d rationally have to side with Adele, but going by feel (which I prefer to do when it comes to music) I can take or leave the overall result of either scenario.
This concords with a point I was trying to make about art “being special”.
I don’t mean a “specific person” being “special”, but an experience being special that just happens to involve some person rather than another. The “who’s who” specifics to me are largely irrelevant, it’s the generality of “specialness” that I think is so important (it’s the market technique of “branding” that so ingeniously inverts this in favour of abusing psychological loopholes for material profit).
Prodigies are special in that they are so rare. I honestly enjoy them in much the same way that I am impressed by all outstanding virtuosity from all ages - it’s a rare and welcome surprise. However the market for any old virtuoso has become somewhat saturated with easy global exposure enabled and facilitated by the internet through youtube etc. Nowadays virtuosity is less special, so it requires that extra competitive ingredient of “most efficiently achieved virtuosity” by younger and younger children.
I see this tendency as ill-fated, because I don’t want to feel like talented children are being more and more pressured too hard to become one of these 1-in-a-multimillion prodigies.
Instead I would prefer a much more healthy and sustainable competition to perform special experiences by virtue of working on a unique life that begs to be expressed in a special way. This is why I war against the tendency to fake virtuosity with too much production value eliminating the special in favour of more homogenous reliability to better suit a capitalist market for music that relies on uncertain debt and credit and therefore minimising risk. For the same reason I war against the showcasing of excessive warbling to compensate for artists being forced into the homogenous and reliable “well produced” limbo required of modern musical success. Even a naturally distinctive and imperfect, but honest rendition is preferable to my ears, even though I am particularly sensitive to pitch. It can really grate on my ears when notes are unintentionally missed.
I hope the irony of this performance is not only appreciated by me: a 13 year old laments with nostalgia, looking back through rose coloured glasses at the times “when we were young”.
Literally living the years of her life, or not yet even having lived the years of her own life that much older artists were fondly recalling from much further in the future…
Silhouette,
I’ll try to redeem angelina for you one last time.
She considers herself primarily a jazz singer, that was her influence as a child, and by child I mean 3 years old!
Here’s a song she sang that might make you think twice about what she’s about:
A long long time ago I proved through a masterful display of sophistry and well crafted argument that music could be objectively good or bad… in the same way an answer to a mathematical problem would be true or false. Forget how I did it but it was good man and probably right (I’m very often right).
I think a bit of superior discretion is called for if you are, indeed, a genuine music-snob. I am. I will not only tell you what you’re listening to sucks, but how and why it sucks. And if you do not understand, it’s not because there isn’t objectively good and bad music, but because you hath not ears and such things are inaccessible to you.
She’s singing someone else’s arrangement again?
Honestly don’t worry about trying to “redeem” her - I am conclusively impressed by her talents. My points are independent of her influences though, which I am sure vary far from mainstream pop. I’d still argue that this song lends itself to mainstream sensibilities with its consonant cadences and repetitious banalities about barley, but that’s Nico’s fault, not hers.
The performance is second to none, but allow me to temporarily debase this thread about the “best singer in the world” by offering an almost exactly contrasting piece of music that I was literally just listening to, which will no doubt simultaneously disgust and bore you: youtube.com/watch?v=5fIZ_T178ag - to give you an idea of the degree to which music can (and I think should) vary.
Obviously I am straying far from the topic of “best singer in the world” here, but to the ends of arguing my wider point about art.
The piece I linked is almost unbearably oppressive with its slow, heavy monotany, decorated only with “appropriately” almost indiscernable growls for vocals, which together with their “musical” backing nonetheless evoke a bleak, futile and unpleasant burden to consciously exist at all. The piece is broadly divided into 3 stages. The first third (twice as long in itself than a contemporary pop song) sets this scene, the second third raises the consequences of the first to thoughts of a resolution to finally act upon such a consumed existence, opening with an elongated wail of distress (expertly depicted by guitar slides with huge echo and delay effects with a volume shifter, I think?) that has surpassed all reason and the piece comes to a kind of “life” bathed in all the pain and unresolved negative emotions of the the first third. The final third is the fulfilment of all that came before it, closing the song in an extended simulation of physically as well as metaphorically drowning, and a kind of simple peace and resolution, absolution and maybe even revenge against life itself.
Whether you were able to sit through the entire 17 minute piece or not - why do I bring this up at all?
Instead of light, we have pure darkness - but if you dare to listen, we are unavoidably plummeted into the entire world of the composer(s) whether we like it or not, and there is a depth of connection experienced here that cannot be compared to things like the sunny recollections of parting with a lover (your second link).
Through some combination of seemingly endlessly repeated themes and a lack of melodic colour that would otherwise brighten the incessant dissonance, we gain a hugely more powerful insight to one of the more extreme extents of the human condition than an Angelina song could ever offer us.
The exact opposite of all her talent resulted in a far more meaningful artistic piece? Well, I’ve listened to this piece on and off many many times in my life, and I’ll probably never listen to Angelina again by my own accord.
Again, it’s all subjective, but my point is that the depth I’m seeking doesn’t lie in a nice voice. Art goes deeper.
Before I listen to your song,
It sounds like a 3 movement sonata from Beethoven… who invented that shit in the first place.
As far as classical music is concerned (and I’m sure you’ll love this tidbit). The most beautiful songs are not songs for god, but songs for funeral marches, songs to death and songs to the devil! Pretty ironic eh?
So… I listened to your song. It sounds like background music to me. You know, back before recordings occurred, if your song didn’t grab attention on first hearing … your career tanked instantly.
The selective pressure was so much higher back then!
Now, anyone can get away with anything!
Let me show you an example from Liszt…
Also, what I mean to say is that from selective pressure, all the old music used to be “foreground music”. That’s why you don’t play it at parties; it distracts! I could play your song at a party and have no problem.
Let me show you a little more liberty here from Liszt So that you can know the difference here between foreground music (Liszt and other classical composers) and the background music you submitted:
Liszt, Mephistopheles waltz (waltzing with the devil):
Again Liszt: totentanz (dance of death)
And of course Beethoven has the best funeral march ever!
Again, with these musicians, you didn’t hear the song 100 times on the radio and finally you liked it, it was do or die back then, one fucking concert, and you were shit if people didn’t like you on one hearing!
I’m going to be a pedant and say something completely off-topic: Liszt isn’t a classical composer but a romantic one. My impression is that, on average, romantic music tends to be better than both classical and baroque. The reason being that romantic music is much more melodic (even though emotionally over the top.) Baroque is probably the worst in this regard.
Beethoven was considered the bridge between baroque and romantic. It’s all considered classical music. Beethoven was super awesome because he was the first composer to say “fuck the Catholic Church, I’m going to write whatever I want to write!”’
His music was so good that the Catholic Church relented. He was the birth of modern music in the west! He started it all!
Liszt started Jazz (which black people take credit for)
Alkan started 20th and 21st century music (a contemporary of Chopin and Liszt).
I’ll save you some research on alkan!
Couldn’t find lewenthal for the last one (damn YouTube!) sorry! “Le vent” translates as “the wind”
So… alkan was an eccentric recluse who Liszt himself called “the greatest pianist and composer I’ve ever known”.
Alkan wrote most of his songs for a 4 pedaled organ! Which incidentally, almost nobody plays! He does have surviving piano works though.
Liszt thought so highly of alkan that when he stepped down as the dean of music at Weimar, he offered the job to alkan, which alkan refused.
Anyways, why did we get into this…??
Silhouette sent me elevator music! Background music!
It has its place to be sure.
All my favorite music is foreground music.
I like the adventure not only of the foreground music itself, but also the stories behind it.
Anything that doesn’t capture your attention is background / elevator music. A great deal of baroque (and also romantic) music doesn’t capture my attention, so I consider it to be background music (e.g. Bach and Wagner.)
I think Silhouette’s point was that vocals aren’t really (that) important when it comes to great music. Personally, I don’t agree. (I do, however, think one can make a great instrumental without vocals. I’m actually one of those people who start with the music and then move towards the lyrics i.e. it doesn’t matter to me how great the lyrics are if the music is bad.)
On the other hand, I probably have lower standards than you do. All I expect from my vocals is for them to be pleasant and natural. (A lot of vocals aren’t, for some reason.)
Angelina might be a great singer (the greatest living today, in fact) but I can’t help but dislike the way she’s singing in this video:
youtube.com/watch?v=jnnzbdt4_RE
Frank Sinatra sounds much more natural.
And the same goes for Michael Jakson. He might be a great singer but the way sings puts me off.
Black - Wonderful Life
youtube.com/watch?v=u1ZoHfJZACA
A normal guy with a normal masculine voice singing in a normal way.
Bad stuff:
Alice Cooper - Poison
youtube.com/watch?v=Qq4j1LtCdww
Bee Gees - Staying Alive
youtube.com/watch?v=fNFzfwLM72c
(Men shouldn’t be singing in high pitched voice.)
Empire of the Sun - We Are the People
youtube.com/watch?v=a47Y1lCRHlM
(Very unnatural + falsetto.)
Louis Armstrong - Wonderful Life
youtube.com/watch?v=A3yCcXgbKrE
(Bad voice.)
AC/DC - Thunderstruck
youtube.com/watch?v=v2AC41dglnM
I guess I’m less of a critic of one’s ability than one’s decisions.
Incidentally, I’m not a fan of Liszt.
He strikes me as another one of those virtuosos showcasing their dexterity rather than writing anything that’d move someone like me. Perhaps others would disagree - again I emphasise the subjectivity of artistic creation/reception.
The same goes for this comment:
I know so few people who appreciate the kind of music that I linked - I shared the track partly just to see what would happen, but even with regards to my main intention to demonstrate a wider point about art, I probably ended up failing if all you hear is elevator music. To me it’s an abyss of emotional turmoil that can could hardly be better expressed, and which certainly communicates far more depths of humanity than an Angelina cover song. But, once more: subjectivity.
Magnus is probably right to sum it up as “Anything that doesn’t capture your attention is background / elevator music.”
I also hear that musical appreciation is largely a function of familiarity.
So the less familiar a style of music, the less likely you are to respond positively to it. This is another tragedy for all artforms when it is distilled into something like contemporary pop music, which is all so homogenous and explicitly formulaic - just to tap into the lucrative market of human mediocrity and closedness to experience.
That’s not to say that music ought to broaden itself to absurd limits for its own sake, which is something I usually find pretentious, but I often find it difficult to respect those who don’t explore beyond the pop music that I subjectively find to be background / elevator music, to discover and be inspired by alternative music that is doing something a little more different and brave. In this sense - I too would say that my favourite music is foreground music, and that I don’t find the music linked to be background / elevator music in the slightest. I find that it intensely steals my attention.
To bring this all back to Angelina, or the notion of “best singer”, she certainly does steal my attention as well - but as I said, only because of her surprising and impressive mastery of the human voice at such a young age, even when it comes to emulating singers with far more maturity and life experience than she’d have even come close to experiencing personally.
The reason I brought up the song I linked was to completely invert everything that Angelina does, to achieve something that (to me) is far more meaningful.
You don’t have to like the song I linked to get my point, I suppose - perhaps you can think of your own examples of a far better musical experience than being impressed and surprised by Angelina Jordan?
To reiterate, it’s just to make a broader point about what “best singer” could incorporate beyond what Angelina can offer.
Silhouette, now I have to redeem Liszt for you (hopefully)
You think he’s showboating. He has a lot of stuff besides the pyrotechnics! Maybe this doesn’t do it for you either. It’s pretty hard to not like SOMETHING from Liszt!