The power of the, uh, power ballad

Today smacking: Boring vocalists.

It has greatly pained me in recent years to hear people bang on about how great the voices of sweet crooners like Norah Jones and Katie Melua and Dido et al are. Sure, I can appreciate their dulcet-toned coquettishness, and that people like their easy-listening appeal, but sweet Pete do they bore me to tears. And I don’t even have functioning tear ducts! Or normal human empathy, for that matter. The Wizard of Oz says he has a heart on back-order for me, but I’m not hopeful. I told him that this crusty walnut in my chest cavity would have to do for now.

But I digress.

I am of the firm opinion that good music expresses a lot of really consuming emotions that absolutely must be belted the hell out. The kinds of emotions where you have to do unnatural things with your facial expression in order to sing about them properly, because the recollections they evoke are really intense, like when you need to take a piss so bad you start consuming your own bottom lip, and you clench your thighs together so tightly they spontaneously petrify and rip the seams of your pants.

If, like Norah Jones or Katie Melua or Dido, you don’t have the kind of voice that can belt those emotions the hell out, then you’re not expressing any emotions I’m remotely interested in hearing you whine on about. Go and write a bowel-voidingly powerful song about real shame and lust and betrayal and loss, and then come back to me when you’ve got inoperable and career-destroying nodules on your vocal chords – and not a minute before.