Today, while I was doing some Christmas shopping at a well-known department store, the Christmas music was alternately in English and then Spanish. I do not know, for the most part, who was singing, but I certainly knew the songs.
I had the very unfortunate experience, again (this happened last year, too) of listening to simple holiday songs being butchered by the vocalists. How hard is it to sing a pitch-accurate version of “Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer”? One vocalist was not only flat but far away from the actual melody and her changes were not “improvisational” so much as they were avoidance. The major sixth pitch leap on “red-nosed” was a bit much for her so she consistently sang those two words on the SAME pitch. She shortened the range of the entire song so it covered about a fifth (kinda sorta, as much of it was off-pitch anyway).
Since they fix these things now, why, WHY, would this recording be released to the public? Is everyone in the recording studio deaf? Sadly, the other renditions were just about as bad. Only the songs that were OLD (as in, from decades past) were musically and vocally accurate and, believe it or not, pleasant.
And, the current practice of picking four, six or maybe even eight measures of a song and repeating them over and over is incredibly annoying. It strikes me as some kind of aural torture. “Jingle Bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way”, eighty times is not my idea of generating holiday spirit, no matter how they dress those measure up. It makes me want to leave the store!
The current Coca-Cola Christmas commercial that has Jimmy Durante’s version of “Make Someone Happy” truncated by leaving off the last three words of the main lyric is also terrible. Bad enough they usurped this lovely song to sell us sugared, colored, gassed water, but they had to mutilate it in the process?
Oh, bah, humbug, and fie on them all!!!!!! : /