Dear God

Okay, some of the comments are very funny. The top one, just now at least, was chastising people and saying it wasn't any worse than an undergrad soprano. Which is sort of true (depends on the undergrad and the school, clearly!), but the difference is that said mythical undergrad isn't raking in piles of money for having bastardised Monteverdi in public.

There is a reason why we train. You can say what you want about pop requiring just as much training as classical singing, but the pop industry doesn't require it of its singers. Pop requires pretty faces and (more importantly) good bodies, and a voice passable enough to be electronically modified into something worth listening to. I like Jewel's music. I'm not saying I think she (or any other pop singer, for that matter) is wholly lacking in talent. (I take that back: Ashlee Simpson.) I'm just saying that what we do takes training in phonation and a certain level of stylistic knowledge, both of which are notably lacking in this. It makes me so angry when people like Michael Bolton come up in google searches for "opera singer". Maybe there's a place for poppier renditions of classical music (though I'm not going to buy those recordings), but what bothers me is that, quite likely, the ilk of performer singing this kind of aria this way doesn't know what they're even doing it wrong in the first place. And if they're that ignorant, I want them to stay away from our repertoire.

Ooh, I'm ranting. Time to end comment, lol.