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| Billie Holiday with her dog, Mister. Photo credit: William P. Gottlieb. Available from Creative Commons |
In light of the horrible influence of TV network talent shows, I was thinking about how Billie Holiday would have performed on The Voice.
She had a boxer named Mister (above), but she probably didn't need him, given her famously pugnacious approach to conflict resolution, according to stories and lore.
In a Facebook forum (this link to the forum may not last forever), music folks were reacting to a post by Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters, who asserted that people shouldn't go through talent shows as a road to success. Instead, they should start with no talent and keep playing until they suck less and less, and presumably hope for the best.
I had another thought:
A separate aspect of damage that these shows do is to codify a certain kind of pop singing based on yelling. Of course, there are technical aspects of yelling, and Blake Shelton does mini-lectures on them in every show. You start out yelling softly, then you move up to yelling loudly, accenting a specific syllable and emoting properly. Imagine how Billie Holiday would handle her moment on The Voice. She'd swivel Shelton's chair around and punch his face in.
I have carried the impression of Holiday as a fighter for more than 35 years, dating back to a conversation with English Professor Mike Liberman at Grinnell College. He said Holiday once got into an argument with a sailor in a club, and she suggested they take it outside — where she beat him to the ground. A similar story is told in Farah Jasmine Griffin's 2001 biography, If You Can't Be Free, Be A Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday.
Of course, people interpret Holiday in terms of their own often extravagant emotional baggage, and my take is just one more. I find it quite satisfying to see her as a fighter.
She had a boxer named Mister (above), but she probably didn't need him, given her famously pugnacious approach to conflict resolution, according to stories and lore.
In a Facebook forum (this link to the forum may not last forever), music folks were reacting to a post by Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters, who asserted that people shouldn't go through talent shows as a road to success. Instead, they should start with no talent and keep playing until they suck less and less, and presumably hope for the best.
I had another thought:
A separate aspect of damage that these shows do is to codify a certain kind of pop singing based on yelling. Of course, there are technical aspects of yelling, and Blake Shelton does mini-lectures on them in every show. You start out yelling softly, then you move up to yelling loudly, accenting a specific syllable and emoting properly. Imagine how Billie Holiday would handle her moment on The Voice. She'd swivel Shelton's chair around and punch his face in.
I have carried the impression of Holiday as a fighter for more than 35 years, dating back to a conversation with English Professor Mike Liberman at Grinnell College. He said Holiday once got into an argument with a sailor in a club, and she suggested they take it outside — where she beat him to the ground. A similar story is told in Farah Jasmine Griffin's 2001 biography, If You Can't Be Free, Be A Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday.
Of course, people interpret Holiday in terms of their own often extravagant emotional baggage, and my take is just one more. I find it quite satisfying to see her as a fighter.
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