[Sleeping in EQ]

or so I said to my niece.

There are at least four reasons for this:

1. More than a few pop singers today have marginal musical talent. Pop music does not demand Mozart like abilities, but at least people like Sheena Easton, Huey Lewis, and Belinda Carlisle could sing their songs. If you go back another generation, the music of the Mamas and the Papas, the Carpenters, and yes, Stevie Wonder is even better. Looking what passes for sexy (and I don't think it is. It seems plastic and pretentious) seems to cut it for most pop fans now days. Which leads to...

2. The pop stars are younger and this screws up the aesthetic. When Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes sing "Up Where We Belong" it's sexy because their age and experience comes through in their voices. When Carrie Underwood and Bo Bice sing it, you want to shoot yourself because they sound like two young people trying to sing like older people (with Bice sounding a little better than Underwood). This is part of the reason why the Bangle's "Eternal Flame" is a beautiful, sexy lullaby and Atomic Kitten's version of the song is unremarkable (another part is in #3). Pat Benetar singing "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" sounds fierce and hot. Some young pop tart singing it sounds sophmoric. The general principle also explains why Han Solo-Princess Leia works and Amidala-Anakin doesn't. Young people can pull off lust songs, but romantic love songs? Not very often.

3. The pop stars who actually can sing today don't understand what songs are. Maybe Whitney Houston is to blame for this, but when you're putting all of your technique into one song, most of the time you're messing it up. That awful song for the Kevin Costner movie is a perfect example of this. You don't so much have a song there as you have Houston showing off her range. "Yea, we've got it. You can sing high, Whitney. But the purpose of it was...?" When you understand what you're trying to convey in a song, you know which tools to take out of the box. If the song needs range, you use it. If it needs breathiness, you use it. If it needs vibrato--go for it. If it needs a glottal stop--by all means. But when you throw everything and the kitchen sink into a song, most of the time it stinks (Hair metal didn't understand this either. Singers singing higher and higher and guitar solos getting faster and faster was only going to cut it for so long).

4. Technology has destroyed the importance of the album (and even the coherent CD) as a mode of communication. The way an album like Pet Sounds or even a Cars' record takes you on a journey has been lost in all of the digital downloading and CD song selecting and random playing. Part of the meaning of songs--even pop songs--can emerge in their proximity to other songs in the recording. I realize that some people are doing this very thing with their downloads, with creating their own proximities, but it's helped turn most collections of songs into collections of singles. I guess I'm lamenting the demise of the album track, the B-side, the song the band loves even if the marketing guys hate it.

If you've deduced that this all boils down to me liking the voices of sexy, older, smokey-voiced altos you're not wrong, but it's more than that. My bad pop music really is better than my niece's.