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!
i very much dislike this trend to oversing the fuck out of everything
I agree. Not even my favorite songs of all time can fight against eventual tedium. It goes with the territory.
This my favorite song from the 21st century:
Damn it’s been overplayed!
The beegees were it during the late 70’s, they were so overplayed that a selling point for radio stations became “we’re a beegee free zone!”
Over saturation is inevitable with music
Oh shit! Phoneutria! I thought you said “overusing” instead of “oversinging”
Yeah, oversinging is a problem as well.
This was my explanation for this trend:
I’d even go as far as linking it to a market economy where the loudest and most elaborate displays of sounds (and visuals) simply drown out the competition.
For visuals, MTV is infamous for marking the beginning of a downward trend of taking the emphasis away from the whole “in it for the music, man” thing and towards looking good while you do it - the more base appeal of sexiness sold more copies more easily, even at the cost of the music itself. Better looking musicians did better, and these days musical talent is almost irrelevant as long as you put on the biggest show with the hottest figurehead(s).
For sounds, the shift was toward perceived virtuosity through showcases of vocal dexterity, which became even more accessible for more attractive singers through technological advances in auto-tuning and/or post-production. One thing that frustrates me about the average person is their inability to tell if someone is actually in tune, allowing even painful warbling to shine through without them noticing (I physically cannot watch any of these new “talent” shows). Nowadays if you don’t attempt it, you’re not associated with today’s “good singers”, and you lose out just from that.
I’d argue that the same goes for other artforms as well, particularly film. The most money is in the mediocre and the most superficially appealing marketing. A market economy is great for flashy technologies appealing to more people but it’s the death of art.
Silhouette,
Singing competitions are the modern form of “casting calls”. Welcome to a new era! If anyone is going to be the best eventually, they all use this format now!
Your bias against singing competitions is irrational.
Irrational on the grounds that my bias is counter to what is to become of this new era?
I don’t choose paths that comply with whatever I’m offered by emergent prevailing tendencies, I fight for what I think is best. It certainly feels futile and impractical sometimes, and perhaps that seems irrational to you? Irrationality simply depends on what your premises are, and they don’t have to be winning ones for one to be rational in staying true to them. I know you relate - you don’t even seem to feel like your life’s purpose to eradicate all consent violation is anywhere near close, so I know you understand this type of rationality.
Unless of course you think some line of logic that I’ve used is illogical in some way? In which case, do elaborate 
If you simply mean to state that there’s a subjective element to my preferences when it comes to art, then I’ll only repeat that of course there is since art has an inextricable subjective element. All anyone can do with regard to artistic matters is accept subjective tastes as a premise, and then argue logically given such premises - which I believe I am doing. Let me know if you disagree.
I don’t think you’re doing justice to Liszt. He is at the very least melodic. Both La Campanella and Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 are to an extent melodic. That’s probably more melody than there’s in both Paganini and Wagner. And it most certainly has more melody and rhythm than doom metal.
Still, I’m not impressed by Liszt. I’d rather listen to Bach’s Badinerie or Bach’s BVW 1052 or Bach’s BVW 1044 or Vivaldi’s RV 580 or Vivaldi’s Winter of Vivaldi’s Autumn.
Magnus! Dude! Vivaldi is awesome.
As if people care… I have two favorite love songs (I hate love songs!). One of my criteria is that the song is gender neutral.
I also like this song because of the line: “we’re searching for some perfect world we’ll never find”
I like this song because of the subtle reference to suicide. “People ask me how, how I’ve lived ‘til now, I tell them I don’t know”
I like this song because I really like pink, she is awwwww-some.
I find this song disturbing and exhilarating for it shadows some inner metaphysically lost role, and speaks volumes for the expanding role of the alienated martyr in today’s socially
normative image of God in man.
It really speaks for the haunted spirit, of the child within.
I concur.
By the way, I didn’t know that La Campanella is actually by Paganini. The original actually sounds much better.
Yeah… Liszt was obsessed with the devil. Paganini was considered (by lore) to be the first musician to sell his soul to the devil to be the best violinist of all time. Cool story.
Liszt was probably the most adept to deal with his guilt, the technique was extremely difficult to pull off , peter lorre with faust on the beach.
Oh, this song - I remember it being in one of my piano books but I never felt like I responded to it enough to want to learn it properly. I preferred playing pieces by Beethoven and Chopin in particular, there were countless others but those two seemed to stick out for me. I dunno man, I just feel like Liszt wanted to write some pretty notes with that piece - I don’t feel the sincere expression of an inspired artist like I do with B and C. Something like Erik Satie’s simplistic Gnossiennes and Gymnopedies are by contrast so mesmerisingly more absorbing. Maybe I just don’t relate, but I’ve always had a strong sense of certain pieces of music really resonating with me, and many just not doing that. Subjective, right?
Oh for sure Liszt is melodic, but how you’re melodic really makes a difference for me. And being particularly melodic isn’t even a necessary requirement - and it’s easy to be overly melodic. I don’t know if you’re a jazz fan, but that stuff can get just about as melodic as is possible and to me it usually just sounds like a frenzy of notes. Harmony has always been more important for me, and imo jazz too often overdoes that as well. I almost don’t care at all about rhythm or lyrics - hence my attraction to Doom Metal I guess. There’s even a genre that mixes doom with jazz influences, and the result can be something like this band here: youtube.com/watch?v=EMCvSUndy3g - not their best song to illustrate my point, but they’re one of my favourite bands and this is one of my favourite songs by them. Basically just really slow lounge music - which actually illustrates really well an even better point to make about music, which is too often neglected by musicians like Liszt. It’s the space between the notes that counts, the silence and all the notes you don’t play - ironically a sentiment commonly attributed to the famous jazz artist Miles Davis.
So now I’ve muddied the waters sufficiently, some points about my personal musical preferences still rise to the surface - and I can apply these emergent points to Angelina.
It’s better when she’s not oversinging too many notes to showcase herself and to artificially embellish the melody. It’s better when she instead lingers on notes and leaves pauses, to allow us to appreciate the notes she’s singing and the chords she’s colouring. The common modern emphasis is on showing off how many notes you can sing “around” a cadence and to over-emphasise every climax like you’re melodramatically trying to get an Oscar nomination, because then talent show audiences cheer harder with how impressed they are. Even Celine Dion holds back on these things relatively more tastefully - and since she’s still alive, I think even she outclasses Angelina Jordan simply based on that fact alone, along with her relative maturity allowing her to project sincerity rather than precociousness. She’s also able to better produce that kind of “resonating” effect when she “belts out” the climaxes to her songs, which really hits home to me. It’s why Nessun Dorma sung by the late Pavarotti is so impactful - it requires the full body to pull off. I’ve even heard Sia do this to great effect e.g. in the chorus to “Chandelier” (particularly in the last line before it levels out in the second section of the chorus), but she’s another victim to the contemporary trend of artificially emphasising vocal “imperfections” to make herself “distinctive” to stand out in a saturated Capitalist marketplace. Celine was perhaps born just enough years before her to have been able to succeed without having to resort to that. It’s still there to an extent, but it teeters more to the side of operatic training than pop sensation. I’m not even a fan of opera singing, but I far prefer it to today’s pop sensations.
I feel like there’s so much homogenous pop that a demand for some kind of objective metric has become necessary to distinguish between it all, quantified by vocal range and dexterity, versatility, and youth.
I could say the same about Liszt about what I’ve heard by Paganini, though I’m not knowingly as familiar with his works.
Compare the above linked piece with this one.
What Jacqueline Du Pre is playing is at times extremely technical and her use of vibrato pushes the limits, but it’s always tasteful to a fault. Paganini by contrast may as well be a dancing pixie imposing his personality on the entire audience almost oppressively. Jacqueline basically exudes the piece as part of her own soul, whereas the piece Vanessa Mae learned is outside of her and in your face.
Best when your sober
Sober is bestest.