Well, two things. One, this is a stupid complaint that people have, they just don’t want to wait in a line for something they are mandated to do. It’s not like they are badly run, people just find the process unpleasant. And, any issues with it is entirely on the local level, and usually because of underfunding more than anything else.
Most of the rest of the complaints are because the people themselves were unprepared. I hear people get mad at the DMV agent because they didn’t bring the right paperwork.
The people that complain about the DMV are people whose only contact with a govt agency is the DMV.
Technical issues in a very complex system that happened to actually be in a primarily Republican state. That were worked out, sure. We had a glitch in our voting system that took down the whole county for hours a few years back for the general election. It’s a Republican county, does that mean that Republicans are incapable of running elections?
Their job is to determine the quality of people to run for government, to represent the people of our country.
If this singer had gotten sick, or had an accident of some sort, or for some reason cracked a note embarrassingly, then that would be comparable to the sorts of issues that you brought up.
What she was was completely unqualified for the job they asked her to do. They did no diligence whatsoever to determine if she was up for it, 30 seconds would have been all it would have taken to review to see if she was. It demonstrates their utter lack of attention to detail, their apathy towards actually doing the job, their only job. Just like the candidates that they endorse.
CPAC reached out to the UCF college Republicans, which she’s a member of, and her name got floated. If she’s posting videos of herself singing then her friends would certainly know that it’s an interest of hers.
Someone at CPAC checks out her channel and sees a) a singer who is also b) ranting about liberals. And it certainly isn’t a bad thing that she looks like a Fox News anchor-in-waiting.
She checks every single box. She’s solid gold.
But nobody in charge of this portion of the event planning knows anything at all about singing. They don’t know that the anthem is difficult and they don’t know that a YouTube video is a poor substitute for an actual audition.
So they invited her and she accepted. Of course she accepted. She’s already putting her videos up on YouTube - that’s already a (potential) national audience. Whatever else you can blame her for, accepting the offer was the right choice. This was a huge opportunity with a non-zero chance of catapulting her to star status in the GOP.
She just didn’t know that she couldn’t do it. Lots and lots of singers who don’t participate in formal events (even little stuff like community theater) overestimate their abilities by shocking margins. Think about the last time you suffered through karaoke night somewhere.
So you take a normal level of Dunning-Kruger for a 19-year-old and add a political machine more concerned with appearance than ability.. and this is what you get. Live and learn, and hopefully don’t step onto any more Nazi-themed stages.
I just scrubbed through one, “Memory”, and didn’t need to listen to any of the others. Thing is – and I’m not a singer myself but I do have a long history with music – I think she has decent building blocks in her voice to work with there, if she could get a hold of a good voice teacher and really start afresh nailing all the basics down in pitch control and technique. Her sense of pitch is quite ragged. But I think it is something that can be worked on.
It’s also possible that she could, in fact, sing the song reasonably well, in the narrow confines of her own bedroom or in her car or whatever, where she has a small space and immediate acoustic feedback and can feel her way through the melody. If you’ve never performed in a gigantic open room with multiple layers of amplified and reflected audio coming back to you on a delay, it’s a completely different beast.
But then this is all part-and-parcel of the ignorant arrogance of the Dunning-Kruger crowd: “those dumb liberal pop stars sing all the time, how hard could it be? So-called expertise is for wussies.”
I’ve heard worse, and I’ve definitely heard better. I think she fancied herself a much better singer than she is and tried to do too much with the song. But I don’t think it deserves all the scorn she’s getting, it wasn’t THAT bad.
Once again, I blame the organizers for not doing their due diligence, but your evaluation depends on what curve you’re grading on, I guess. It’s better than some random schmuck off the street (probably), but for someone who fancies themself a singer, it’s honestly quite sub-par, to choose my words carefully and put it mildly. It’s worse than what I was expecting when I initially clicked on it.
A very valid point. Doesn’t even require a big amphitheater. I’ll often work up songs in my home, and think I have them down, but will be shocked at how different it is to sing them in a group, trying to project. And using a mic is a learned skill.
I suspect the same. She has videos up in which she has light accompaniment, and even in that circumstance - recorded, presumably checked after recording, - she wanders off key.
Robert Klein had a routine in which conservatives got bent out of shape over a non-traditional version of the national anthem, sung by Jose Feliciano at the 1968 World Series:
Apologies if this joke has already been made, but I ran out of attention 90 posts in.
Based on the applause she received it is obvious to me that this is the GOP trying to justify their “We only became nazis because you called us nazis!”-stance. They’re now adopting more stances based on what they have been called by liberals, starting with “tone deaf”.
