Bless their hearts

The music industry is so strange to me.

I'm listening, as some of you know, to the greats: Frank Sinatra, Etta James, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, and Billie Holliday. There's some Robbie Williams, Emmy Rossum, and the Puppini Sisters thrown in for good measure.

It got me thinking: I miss the days when it wasn't just about singing well, it was about emoting. You've got fantastic singers like Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Janis Joplin. Great singers, right? But they don't have what you'd think of as Beautiful Voices. I miss the days when it was more important to convey the feeling rather than sounding pretty. The exception, I say as you may groan, is Christina Aguilera, because I think her voice expresses pain, longing, and all that while she sounds fabulous doing it.

I guess we're kinda getting back to that, because people like Amy Winehouse, Duffy, and Nelly Furtado don't have well-trained voices, but you don't care because it sounds good anyway. But there again is another problem with the music industry, because Amy Winehouse came "first," and Duffy has a similar sound. I guess it's all a game of copying until someone comes along and shakes things up by doing something old again in a new way.

I don't know how to fix it, I certainly have no inside connections, and I don't even think the system is all that broken, but I'm free to comment on my blog, right?