Oh Lord! What an atrocious outfit!

Wow. Well I typically turn the sound down for the anthem -- I don't really see why it needs to be sung before a football game anyway -- but recently I left it on by accident...I think it was for one of the NFL divisional finals, probably Seattle vs. Chicago. They had a classical tenor doing it, and wow, he just completely nailed it. Best national anthem performance ever. Simple, technically perfect, and very stirring. Awesome.

But yeah...part of the reason for avoiding it is to avoid performances like this one. Then again, at least it's not Rosanne Barr.

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1889754_1889752_1889689,00.html

Pop stars seem unable to resist the urge to embroider the song with a lot of cringe-making ornamentation.

So true.

I was asking myself after I posted that why it is that although I love so much pop music, I find so many mainstream pop stars (and their music) so irritating.

Is it that much pop music is just mass-produced crap? Whereas some is more like something that's been hand-crafted?

Your cricket cheerleaders sound like our professional football & basketball cheerleaders. I presume no one needs me to supply a link to pictures or video of them..."erotic dancing" is not an unfair description.

Cheerleading ain't what it used to be. It has almost nothing to do with leading cheers anymore, it's a performance in its own right. Going to Clare's high school football games, I was always griping about the fact that what the cheerleaders were doing had nothing to do with the game at all, it was just a sequence of dance and acrobatic routines. This is one of the gripes that, when I engage in it, really gives me the feeling of being a grumpy old man. "When I was a boy, the cheerleaders led cheers, by golly."

Aguilera, unlike a lot of pop stars, actually has a very good voice. She seems addicted to the current popular melismatic wailing, however, so you don't get to hear it very often.

I have a background in choral singing (strictly amateur) and I vastly prefer straight singing with very little ornamentation (especially to pop variety). Although, ornamentation features in Gregorian Chant, which I love, but there's still something properly musical about it, which often isn't the case in pop.

Well, it's a real risk. Look what's happened to Auburn.:-)

So, I guess that means that this year has been good for Alabama?

AMDG

Aguilera was bad -- tried to out-Whitney Whitney Houston with all the vocal gymnastics, and botched the words to boot. Horrible.

The Black Eyed Peas were worse -- just dreadful. No real talent in evidence whatsoever.

The first half was almost over when I started watching, so I missed Aguilera (whom as noted I would have tried to avoid anyway). Some morbid curiosity drove me to watch the BEPs, and I found it really quite depressing. The combination of extremely elaborate technology, the "let's party!" mentality, and the simultaneously lewd and robotic dance moves that are popular now...all I could do was murmur "we're doomed, doomed."

Tony Esolen has a good piece over at Mere Comments about the commercials and contemporary "humor."

Yes, that Detroit ad might have been the best one.

Most of the commercials seemed like they were just variations on old commercials that might have been funny the first time around, but have been ground into the dust. They were just lousy.

AMDG

It's terrible to insult black-eyed peas that way.

AMDG