"PLEASE STOP!" History's Worst Singers (an encore)

 

(I rediscovered these recordings a little while ago, then realized I'd already done a post on them. Well, if I can stand to hear them again, so can you!)

There's not much to say about singing like this - not even words to describe it, but I'll try. Most of these are "vanity" recordings, kind of like self-published books, and thus are a whole new definition of awfulness. But at some point, these people must have thought they could sing. Who told them that? Whoever it was should be incarcerated. At very least, there should be a stiff fine.

Ah! Emanuele Bucalo. You may ask - who is he? You will know even less about him after you hear this. But I will say, it's funny. There used to be a Hanna-Barbera duck character named Yakky Doodle, and this is who he reminds me of. Not even as tuneful as Donald Duck.

Sirach Van Bodegraven is another infamously un-famous singer who deserved his reputation. He has a way of blundering through the classics in hell-bent fashion, singing so badly that it's often hard to tell what the hell the song is supposed to be. Here he eviscerates Vesti la Giubba from Pagliacci with true operatic gusto. Or is it gutso?

Encore, encore! To thunderous applause (or is that a thunderstorm? Can't tell, my ears just went blank), Sirach treats us to his inimitable rendition of that other opera standard, Nessun Dorma. This is only marginally worse than listening to those fat adolescent boys in spandex body suits butcher it on America's Got Talent. Note to the audience: LOUD singing isn't GOOD singing.

Now, here we have "The Highest Voice". That is the title of the video, so that is what I am going to call it. It is the highest voice, I suppose, if screeching at the top of your lungs and "sort of" hitting the note counts. I had to read the YouTube description to find out who this was. It's Susie Summers! Sounds like someone from a Gidget movie, or maybe one of those dolls with hair you can pull out of its head so it reaches the floor. Anyway, Susie Summers is singing The Doll Song (appropriate!) by Offenbach, whom I don't believe for a minute wrote it the way she is singing it.

Adele's Laughing Song! But we're not laughing.

Thomas Burns may just be the Michelangelo of bad singing. The piano introduction seems to be preparing us for singing that is romantic and tinged with melancholy, and instead we get a constipated Elmer Fudd. I have heard that Burns was a close friend of that other scion of bad singing, Florence Foster Jenkins (badly portrayed by Meryl Streep, whose performing is now so weighed down by mannerisms that she looks like a candidate for Dr. Nowzardan). Maybe not, though - I think he was just added on to a CD of Jenkins' recordings to pad it out a bit. Florence only recorded a dozen or so arias, or perhaps the others just exploded into bits. When Burns sings, "O, Margarita", though. . . do I even need to finish that sentiment?

I shouldn't include this one, and I feel a little ashamed of myself, but here it is anyway because it is just so horrendous. It's not just bad singing - it's drunk singing, from a soprano who should know better. What's both touching and cringeworthy about it is how the tenor just keeps on valiantly singing, not trying to carry her but just keep his head barely above water. What else can he do - escort her off the stage? Really, someone should have, if only for her own sake. I had to look up her name - she's a well-known singer, when sober, with the incredible handle of Dragana Jugovic del Monaco. Yikes!

Natalie de Andrade. I can't find out anything about her. Obviously she must have performed somewhere, or her puss wouldn't be plastered on this programmy-looking thing. But she is awful. Simply awful. This sounds like a rehearsal, but of what, I can't say.

The face in the middle: or, am I clowns?

This picture reminded me of a certain non-joke I kept hearing a few years ago, mainly because I heard it wrong. The original was quite poignant, but it was hashed or rehashed in one of those dystopia/sci-fi movie things that I hate so much, the Watchmen or something.

After Robin Williams died, it became apparent to most people that this sad-clown joke kind of explained the whole thing. To paraphrase it badly:

Doctor, Doctor, I have this unbearable existential pain. 

Then go see this fantastic clown, he will cheer you up. 

But I AM this fantastic clown! 

This was supposed to explain the death of Robin Williams.

Robin Williams died because he had something called Lewy Body Dementia which is far worse than Alzheimers and slowly eats its victims alive. He was a wraith, a shell of himself, and his "suicide" was his way of taking a final bow after his life had already come to a close. Could he have gone on? There was no "on" to go to. People have chosen physician-assisted suicide for less.

Though his Parkinson's disease is very rarely mentioned, no one ever says anything about the Lewy Body because it came out in the autopsy results a few weeks later. By that time, everyone had lost interest. He was a tragic clown, that's what he was, it was all settled, and besides, what the hell is all this Lewy Body stuff? He was romanticized as a tragic victim of Hollywood and his own excesses. The truth is, he died of a horrible disease.

Thus, yet another opportunity for the public to learn something landed in the sewer.

The famous picture of Chaplin and Einstein at the top of this post surfaced today as I perused the Weekly World News - oops, I mean The Vintage News, my current favorite source of internet comedy. There was a caption featuring a supposed conversation they had. Something like this:

Einstein: Must be nice to have the whole world love you when you never say a goddamn thing.

Chaplin: Nobody knows what the hell you're talking about, so would you please shut up?

I am sure they never had this conversation! I am making it up out of whole cloth.  But I did find many, many versions of it in many languages on internet memes with photos of the two of them together, two stuffed shirts, one the Stuffed Shirt of Physics and the other the Stuffed Shirt of Silent Comedy. So I guess it brought back the clown thing, the bad joke endlessly replicated and memed to death.

But that's not why I'm posting this.

As usual, the comments section in The Vintage News is the best part (especially that guy who always strenuously defends Hitler. His Facebook page has all sorts of war medals and shit on it.) There were the expected comments about what beloved figures Chaplin and Einstein were, along with people telling each other to fuck off (for no reason at all except that they could), and then someone said, "wait. What is that creepy face in the middle?"  

Can you see it? It seems to be peeping over Chaplin's shoulder.

Good question! Secret Service? I wondered. These guys may or may not have been wearing bulletproof vests under their tuxes. But maybe not! Einstein kept trying to work out how he could make himself into a time traveller, while Chaplin wanted to dominate whatever time he had here and now. Meantime, here is this guy! This mysterious figure - in dark glasses, is it? And on the left, you see more shadowy figures. I keep thinking I see Don Corleone of The Godfather.

These are either beings from another dimension, or - time travellers. 

I also want to set something straight that everyone gets wrong. The joke about the clown - they always call him Pagliacci. That means "clowns". So the punch line is, "but Doctor, I AM clowns." Unless you're making one of those wretched unfunny jokes about "schizophrenia", it makes no sense. "Pagliaccio" would be closer, but it means "Clown". "I am clown". The main character in the opera Pagliacci is called Canio, but no one would say, "I am Canio". Sounds like a dog or something. 

Another thing. I don't know how many times I've heard Leoncavallo's opera called I Pagliacci.

That means something like "I clowns", which is worse than "I am clowns". I'm not sure where this got started, but there are even excerpts from the opera posted on YouTube labelled WRONG, and it  just pisses me off. 

The aria posted above isn't from Pagliacci and it isn't by anyone alive. But it is my favorite aria, and by one of my favorite singers, who did not survive long enough to prove his true greatness. As a tenor, his voice would have bloomed some time in his late 40s, so he had all his best years ahead of him.

nza died suddenly the morning of October

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, whenhe was justthirty-eight years old. The particular physicalcatastrophe responsible for silencing forever a voice judged“black and warm and dead on pitch,”

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“a voice such as isheard only once in a hundred years,”

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will never be known.What remains of Lanza’s medical record is far too meager toreveal the secret of his premature death, and an autopsy wasnot performed. All we know for certain is that his health wasalready unraveling when he entered the Valle Giulia Clinic onSeptember

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,

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, to rest and lose weight. The day beforehe died he was fit enough to sing “E lucevan le stelle” from

Tosca

for the clinic staff, and the next morning to conversewith his wife and his agent on the telephone. Shortly after thetelephone calls, he was found “reclining on the divan [in hisroom], motionless, extremely pale and with his head bent to

This is it (so you'd better listen!)

Well, this is it. I promised myself I wouldn't post 29 versions of Vesti la Giubba, so I had to choose one. So many of them have things to recommend them. Bjoerling even had tears streaming down my face from his tender pronunciation of  "Columbina" (the wounded core of the aria) and the tiny, bewildered, hopeless head-shake that went with it. Kudos also to Placido Domingo for staging it "properly", not IN costume but looking at his costume (and himself) in utter contempt.

Most of these don't have a visual, which meant I wasn't as distracted, and most also have shitty sound quality, which is too bad. I try to imagine this one with pristine modern acoustics. More than that, I try to imagine being in the room with him. I've never experienced it, but I have heard the power and beauty of being close to a superb singer is unbelievable.

There are many versions of Lanza singing this, since it's kind of the old nag of opera, and he sounds different in each one. I think "classical" singers scorned him because he "went Hollywood", made a whole lot of highly sentimental films (still worth watching for the singing) and record albums of popular music that sold like mad.

I don't know what I think of him as a person, and he died awfully young, his health destroyed mostly by booze and food. Some of the singers I heard today had better (smoother, more melodious, or even more powerful) vocal equipment, and a few were better actors (Domingo!), but this version has a nearly-crazed quality, a sense he is about to break loose and do something absolutely terrible. Which is what Pagliaccio is all about. He just sings it, letting the music produce the drama. Bravo, bravissimo.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Willie can Wail: Disney's all-time worst character

Ah, childhood! Was it ever as grotesque as this? Probably not, because until recently I never saw the animated version of what we used to call "Willie the Whale". We had a set of 78 rpm records telling the story, with a lot of long, boring, unnecessary narration to fill in the gaps. There was a picture of Willie dressed as Pagliacci on the cover, with a gigantic fake nose and a tutu.

It was decades later that I learned that Willie's melancholy story was actually an animated short tacked on to the end of a little-seen Disney movie called Make Mine Music. I don't know much about it, and frankly I don't feel like looking it up.

I am sorry to say this, but Willie was one of the most grotesque Disney figures of all time. You can't animate a whale, not like this anyway, with his mouth in the middle of his stomach. He looks like a foam-rubber toaster, and his inside is worse than his outside, with three gross-looking tonsils (or whatever) hanging down, indicating that he could sing tenor, baritone and bass all at the same time.

Disney did a much better whale with Pinocchio, but this one was spozed-ta be a friendly one, the reason for his loveable squashy shape. What ruined the effect was the bizarre opening in his stomach where hot air (and arias) blasted out. (And if his mouth was on his underside, how could he get a decent breath?)The story is about "a voice that sang at sea" that turns out to be Nelson Eddie pretending to be a large rectangular sea creature. Soon a demented scholar named Tetti-Tatti goes after him with a harpoon, claiming "the whale has-a swallowed a hoppera-singer!". (Though most hoppera-singers look like they've swallowed a whale.)

It's confusing to me at the end, as it's not really clear if his career singing "grand opera" (a creaky term if ever there was one) at "the Met" (which I assumed was the Metropolitan, a local department store) was all just a dream. At the conclusion there are some ferocious Melville moments, and the ending is more depressing than Old Yeller. But we get to see Willie at the end, presumably in heaven, now colored lavender with green wings and a halo. The Pearly Gates have a sign hung on them: SOLD OUT. We always suspected "our Willie" was a sellout: success spoils everybody.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1896300693/qid%3D1064537730/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr_11_1/103-6792065-9634225

http://www.amazon.com/Mallory-Margaret-Gunning/dp/0888013116/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319992815&sr=1-1

Micro-phonies!

I don't think I've laughed like this in years. Guess I have a primitive sense of humour.