The Illiterate

Glee Cast
“Like A Prayer”, #27
“Borderline/Open Your Heart”, #72
“Like A Virgin”. #87
“4 Minutes”, #89

Madonna has taken a lot of criticism for her voice over the years—lack of strength, lack of range, lack of flexibility, yada yada yada—but that doesn’t mean just anybody can sing her songs. Exactly the opposite, in fact; her songs are so carefully designed to take advantage of the strengths of her voice and hide its weaknesses that they’re nearly impossible for anyone else to bring off—especially non-singers like the Glee Cast. When I say non-singers I don’t mean that they don’t have decent voices, or aren’t capable of hitting the notes, I mean quite literally that they don’t sing—they act. There’s a huge difference between singing a song and acting a song. Acted songs tend to have less depth, fewer emotional shades, less, to put it simply, musicality. In theater, in movies, on television, acting a song is fine, because there are so many other things going on, but for listening in isolation, in the home, or even through earbuds on the bus, they’re mostly flat, one-dimensional, banal, and obvious in all the worst ways. The main reason Glee’s music is so bad, and why I find it so infuriating, is that for the most part they’re taking songs designed for singing and acting them and then releasing them as records as if they were actually in the business of making music rather than TV. I’m probably taking it much too seriously, but these records are consistently terrible, and I find it maddening. Hearing these folks sing is almost as painful as watching Madonna act.

B.o.B. featuring T.I. & Playboy Tre—”Bet I”
#72
B.o.B. has talent, but if he keeps releasing records where he’s outshown by his guests no one’s ever going to notice. T.I. may be B.o.B.’s mentor, but he sounds like he doesn’t even know, or care, whose record this is. He’s so happy to be out of jail and working again you could ask him to contribute a verse to a remix of the Glee Cast’s “Bust A Move” and he’d probably say yes.

Shontelle—”Impossible”
#88
I like the way the melody takes little twists and turns, adding a level of emotional vulnerability, but in the end those twists don’t take you anywhere and it turns into just another hip-hop ballad. Nice try, though.

Reba—”I Keep On Loving You”
#90
Classy as country gets, and the first verse is brilliant (even in country you don’t get too many references to Job these days). The second verse isn’t brilliant at all, though, and after that the chorus gets repeated a few too many times. Reba’s voice, thicker with age, and with more emotional depth as a result, almost carries it through, but by the end you’ve had more than enough.

Tim McGraw—”Still”
#91
McGraw’s latest sop to family, country, and god. I appreciate his experimentation in terms of instrumentation and arrangement, but the song itself is dull as dirt. And what’s with the last verse, where McGraw thanks God that his church is still there for him to go to? Did the Taliban threaten to blow it up? Did liberals threaten to close it down? Or did Tim’s own sinful ways keep him from its doors? Leaving a question like that hanging just isn’t fair.

Ciara featuring Ludacris—”Ride”
#93
The unfortunate truth about Ciara’s records, at least since she decided to become a “class” act, is that, well-crafted and carefully thought out as they may be, they’re also boring. This is the worst offender so far. As for Ludacris, though he’s still capable of being funny (check out the remix of The-Dream’s “Love King”), here he’s just crude.

Tags: B.O.B., Ciara, Glee Cast, Ludacris, Madonna, Playboy Tre, Reba, Shontelle, T.I., The-Dream, Tim McGraw

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 6th, 2010 at 10:17 am and is filed under Hot 100, new this week, singles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.