Under the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out, secure in the protection of the muslin curtain. The June sun was still high in the sky, and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line, pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as babies' diapers. Whenever her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful contralto :It's the fact that she doesn't have a generated, synthesized voice that makes the music beautiful. Jazz and Blues music lovers have known this for ages. Rock will come around. Trite and true, but some people are just born with singers' voices, and the rest of us ain't. No amount of vocal lessons or AutoTune can change that. Talent has never been democratic in distribution, much as it burns the talentless to admit.
It was only an 'opeless fancy.
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred
They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye !
The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound. He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street, and somewhere in the far distance a faint roar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.
Civil_Disobedient: My problem is that it denigrates the concept of talent. By lowering the price of admission to the recording industry, it pollutes the waters with a sea of pretty faces with mediocre voices.I have the exact opposite view, and interpretation of that passage. Music belongs to everyone willing to do it. In a few generations we've gone from a culture in which a majority performed music of some form in front of other people, to a culture in which music is owned by the lawyers, and we have utterly stupid debates as to which recording of a song is definitive. As if any single performance can be frozen in time, packaged outside of context, and treated as a sterile museum piece.
« Older This Ecstatic Nation.... | While Gerorge Soros and Jim Ro... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
If you can't carry a tune without pitch correction, you have no business calling yourself a professional singer.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 7:19 PM on June 10, 2008