Day #35 of my Temporarily Suspended Search for a Soulmate

Just finished the three Swedish Millenium films:  Dragon Tattoo, Fire and Hornet’s Nest.  Was just sitting here wondering why on earth Hollywood would have decided to take an absolutely perfect film with Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Rapace (Nyqvist spent an entire year in Omaha as an exchange student – trust me, his English is just fine!) and make an American version with James Bond and a coarser version of Rapace – Mara Rooney is it, or do I have the names reversed?  Rooney Mara?  After falling in love with the Swedish films, I definitely don’t want to see the American one.  I mean, I’m sure the non-Swedish actors tried their best, but the American version of a perfect Swedish film should never have been made in the first place.

My latest obsession?  Il Volo.  I seem to go through two or three major obsessions a year, most of which conform to neither rhyme or reason, logic, sensibility … or anything else.  In this contrary case, the obsession seems to follow a set pattern of discovering a new classical crossover artist or group, and tacking them on to the list of other classical crossover artists or groups I’ve previously discovered and were previously obsessed with.  Over.  At.  Whatever.  I’ll give these astonishing teenagers (aged 16 and 17 when they appeared as guests on "American Idol") credit for one thing – they seem to have broken my thoroughly pissed off mood.

What amuses me about the young girls who are completely besotted are the overwhelming number of them who think they’re the first listeners EVER to get thoroughly fed up with rap and bimbo pop.  As always, they’d be wrong.  From my own journal, two years ago: 

Jan. 24th, 2010 at 5:24 AM

I was following Stephen Bowman’s tweets about the “Pop Star to Opera Star” program in the UK – I'd never heard of it. But it sounded at first tweet very classical crossover-ish, and as I’m a passionate fan of the genre (and he’s one of the genre’s success stories, being a member of the Blake Group, who I absolutely adore), I went over to You-Tube and watched some of the episodes.   Basically, the premise is: you take a well-known pop star, teach him or her to belt out an operatic aria, and the audience either approves or disapproves, and phones in their opinions, much like American Idol  here in the States.

The performances I watched (Jimmy Osmond of the Osmond Brothers and Danny Jones of McFly) had some definitely eyebrow raising judges: among them, Meatloaf … who always struck me as more rock than pop and definitely not the first name that crops up when I think of opera, and Todd Rundgren – a brilliant producer, but again, not the first name I think of in an opera setting. The other two (operatic voice specialists) I wouldn’t recognize if they walked up and kicked me in the shins.

In my mind, the American music industry has always been summed up with the image of a German military general slapping a riding crop against his palm and shouting, “You vill LISTEN and you vill LIKE it!” There were really only three possible responses to this: (1) you listened and liked it because you were too brainwashed to know there was anything better out there, (2) you listened and hated it but were too cowed or depressed to object, or (3) you snuck out of the country when the border police weren’t looking. Not all that long ago, the US was at the point where your choices of contemporary things to listen to on the radio were severely limited: you listened to rap or you listened to bimbo pop.

“Bimbo pop” was the generic term for the years when record producers grabbed any anorexic who could vaguely carry a tune, slapped a blonde wig on her head and hired a choreographer to teach her that braying like a nasally challenged donkey was “singing” and jerking her pelvis back and forth onstage was “dancing”. There were too many “bimbo pop” singers and groups to count, and some of them are still annoyingly hanging around, pretending to be Marilyn Monroe, publicly losing their marbles and visitation rights to their kids, or marrying handsome British football (soccer to the Yanks) stars. They seemed to breed like cockroaches and were so interchangeable that when a human trainwreck like Amy Winehouse came out with something even slightly off center, she became an instant celebrity. (Well, that, and probably the fact that she really was a human trainwreck).

Given the options, I did the only thing I could do: I snuck out of the country (or onto reservations) when the border police weren’t looking.

For quite a number of years, I listened exclusively to jazz, classical music, or to Europeans and  South Americans or tribal music for anything else. Became a passionate fan of native drum groups (and still am – Stoney Creek a particular favorite) – and bought every cd Bill Miller put out – dragged one them (Raven in the Snow as I recall) into a required creative writing course at the University of Michigan and surprised a class of students whose only exposure to Native American music was Cher singing “Half Breed”… would mine the San Remo festival every year for things to buy, or – heading south – Ivan Lins was a particular favorite and still is. Still adore Gianni Morandi from those years and Renato Zero.  Nek. Lucio Dalla. Pino Daniele. A lot more I can’t remember, off hand. I may have bought a Basia cd in there somewhere. If I bought anything even remotely “American”, it came from the Big Band era – another great era for singers:  Rosemary Clooney, Jo Stafford, Glenn Miller, and Tex Beneke… or I went back to Smokey Robinson – who I still think is one of the best musicians America ever produced. There were a few exceptions to this general rule during those years – but not many.

And then … an astonishing thing happened.

There is a scene in The Matrix Trilogy where Neo instructs Trinity to fly up and over a swarm of flying machines and the two of them break free of the dark cloud cover – Trinity sees the real sun and the blue sky above the black clouds for the first time in her entire life, and the expression on her face as she experiences real sunlight for the first time is one of the most memorable moments in the series. All she manages to get out is an awed, “Beautiful …”, but she gets her point across.

That is as close an analogy as I can get to the re-arrival into the music scene of men who could actually SING. As I recall, Andrea Bocelli was the first to elicit an awed “Oh my god, how beautiful!” out of me –  somewhere in the late 1990’s; Josh Groban came next, I think in the early 2000-2001 time frame.

Opera nuts got their panties into a major twist over the two of them, but they failed to grasp the more important point: Andrea and Josh were not singing for opera fans … what an arrogant assumption on their part! – they were singing for the huge disenfranchised group coming out of the popular music world who’d been completely abandoned for decades by music producers cramming rap and bimbo pop down everybody’s throats. If opera fans wanted to listen to opera – let them listen to opera! Nobody was stopping them; opera hadn’t gone anywhere.

There was a reason why classical crossover – sometimes called “popera” (which always makes me think of those airy little things you bake along with your roast beef  to mop up the au jus) took off the way it did. Because, once again, after years of wandering a surreal and stark musical wasteland in the US, we were once again listening to performers who could actually SING. After decades of illiterate and slurred rap insults and bimbos screeching the contents of their girly teenage diaries and calling it “poetry” being the sum total of American music – it was like coming out into the sunlight after decades of darkness. All you could utter was an awed, “Beautiful” – because it was.

I went and listened to Il Divo the first time because Simon Cowell of “American Idol” was raving about them … and as he hated practically everything else, I was mostly curious as to what he considered magnificent.  I wasn’t expecting much more than a bad case of overhype. And then I remember seeing (and hearing) THEM for the first time and (again) having my jaw hit the floor. I’m sorry, I don’t care what operatic consensus about them was, I thought they were glorious to listen to.

From there, everything exploded and I went after everyone else I could find, in my own personal starvation feeding frenzy (lest they all suddenly disappear on me): Russell Watson. Vittorio Grigolo. Blake. Mario Frangoulis. Amici. Teatro. Thomas Hampton, Juan Diego Florez. G4. Rhydian Roberts. Etcetera. Tenors in particular – give or take an awesome baritone or two – seemed to propel the entire genre, and I couldn’t get enough of listening to them. Women would get into these stupid online cat fights about who was better than who, and I wanted to slap them all silly. (“Are you INSANE? They’re all wonderful!! This is heaven!!”)  And after decades of hell, it really was.

Of course I can hear the difference between a Luciano Pavarotti and a classical crossover artist – they’re neither better or worse – just another style of wonderful singing. If we don’t have room in the musical universe for both, we surely are short-changing our idea of what a “musical universe” is. I can listen to Pavarotti sing those glorious final bars of “Nessun Dorma” and burst into tears; but I can also listen to Smokey Robinson sing something else and have the same reaction – both are fully capable of touching my heart.

Women in Classical Crossover? Eh, not so much. Charlotte Church managed to tick off the entire country after 9/11 and she’s fortunate she’s even allowed to pass through customs; watching Hayley Westenra trying to pass herself off as a hopelessly miscast Puerto Rican in the remake of the distinctly American West Side Story was downright painful. Now “All Angels” I love – and the fact that Daisy is a relative and our entire extended family thinks she’s the greatest singer to have ever existed since the dawn of time surely doesn’t influence my opinion in any way :p (That was a lie. Of course it does. And I’m okay with that.)

So, Pop Star to Opera Star. I will say this: after reading some of the ridiculous comments posted by operatic diehards on You-Tube, I have no idea why they are loudly bitching about the obvious lack of life-long preparation by these contestants – the two or three contestants I’ve seen have said the exact same thing. None of them said, “Wow, this is really easy!” They all have expressed their utmost respect for the work professional opera singers do to prepare for a life on the operatic stage.

You can take the producers, and not the contestants, to task for the show’s title – “Pop Star to Opera Wannabe”, maybe – as I don’t think any of them will be mistaken for “Opera Stars” at the series’ conclusion. (That said, I’ve also seen some genuine opera ‘stars’ who don’t appear to fully understand the meaning of the words they’re singing, either. Not very often. But it happens).

But if it teaches a pop star how to improve their singing? I’m all for it. I’m not planning to run out and buy McFly because of Danny Jones – unless Danny Jones learns something useful and McFly becomes as awesome as … Blake, for example. It’s really too bad that television isn’t global … there are many of us here in the Americas who would enjoy watching this, I think – as much as they’re enjoying it in Britain.