Well, I have been edumacated today. Not only have I learned a new word, but also I have learned its purpose. Funny, I had previously thought that the idea was to throw enough notes at the song in the hopes that one of them was the correct one. Shotgun singing, I suppose.
If I were Simon, I’d have stopped the audition as soon as the melisma started and asked the contestant to sing a straightforward version of Happy Birthday or something. I don’t know how the judges stood hearing every last one of those kids doing it.
Isn’t that also supposed to be bad for your voice in the long run?
I, too, learned a new word from this thread. Now I know what people mean when they say that Joni Mitchell has nice melisma, and I tend to agree with them.
Long “run”? HA! You’re killin’ me here, Guin … 
RickJay writes:
> The worst offender in pop music in Christina Aguilera, who really doesn’t have
> a very good voice, but hides it with a neverending string of runs and vocal
> tricks. Mariah Carey does the same thing, but she actually has a legitimately
> great voice so in her case it’s just an irritating habit. I don’t know of any newer
> singers I particularly trust to have good voices because all their voices are run
> through synthesizers now.
I saw a program on VH-1 that gave the top 20 (or whatever) best voices in rock, as voted on by viewers. Mariah Carey came out first, while Christina Aguilera was in the top 10. I think that Aguilera has a decent but hardly great voice. It’s just good enough to handle things like runs. There are a lot of people like Britney Spears on MTV/VH-1 who truly aren’t good singers at all and can’t even handle runs. I don’t think that Mariah Carey is the best singer in the history of rock and roll (let alone in all music today), but she might be the best one that comes to mind for a typical MTV/VH-1 viewer.
I can’t stand that style of music. It’s just fucking annoying. Small doses, people. A touch of that here and there can accentuate your sound. Anything more than that is just wrong.
And gospel music IS that popular. Chicago has Gospel Fest every year, and they come out in droves to listen. Personally, I love it (purely from a musical standpoint). It’s a much more positive sound than some of that ‘somebody-just-died’ sound that some religious music has. As they used to say, “it has a good beat and you can dance to it.”
Chiming in to say I really don’t like the way a lot of kids sing today, this overdone and badly done melisma is the worst. Also annoying is singing in a whiney, childish tone and singing in short little breathy bursts of sound. And why do they have to change the melodies of the standards? They never, never, never make an improvement. Now you can tell that I’m a cranky old middle-aged woman, right? Whatever.
I like American Idol because I like to critique 
. I didn’t watch the first season and had only heard of Kelly Clarkson but not heard her sing until just about a week ago, on Jay Leno (I think), and was very impressed. She had a lot of musicians and back-up singers, it was a great song, she’s cute as can be, fully dressed!! and wasn’t relying on gimmicky crap. So I guess there’s hope.