Yesbut- he’s such an annoying little wombat to anyone old enough to drink- that he drives us to drink. In other words, it’s hard for some of us to appreciate his talent when we’re plugging our ears and going “TURN IT OFF! TURN IT OFF!”.
You do NOT get to the level of Vanilla Ice without having a great deal of talent. Er, whatever that level was.
While I would say that Vanilla Ice did have some talent, you do realize that you are comparing a one album wonder with someone who has had 3 #1 albums already in his career?
We all know any nuance has been lost in this thread.
I hope you are only criticizing his rapping, and not implying his acting was less than top notch.
Just tired of banging my head against the wall. I will stop now.
As for myself (as if anybody cares), I’m just surprised that a person who has at or near the top of the charts since 1998 (a 17 year span, if my trademarked Fingers&Toes™ counting method hasn’t failed me) hasn’t earned the sobriquet of “megastar” yet, even among people who don’t like their music.
People here are quibbling about Elton John who’s been in the charts on and off for much longer than that. Beyonce is a newbie by comparison. You can’t please everyone.
There are two things going on here.
One is a debate about the role of technical skill in art. Some people really get off on displays of technical skill. Photorealistic drawing excite them. They enjoy intricate guitar solos. They love actors who do their own stunts. They just really enjoy seeing displays of technical prowess, and see art primarily as a means for displaying technique.
Others (myself included) just don’t get that twinge of joy from seeing technical experts go their thing. It does nothing for me. I’m more interested in mood and feeling. I think photorealistic drawings are dead boring. I think overly intricate guitar work ruins songs. For me, art is primarily about emotion.
This is an old debate, and we aren’t going to resolve it here.
The other issue is that music exists in context. Beyoncé makes club music. It’s music designed to be enjoyed in a crowd with low lights and sweaty bodies moving. It’s music to dance in a crowd with. And when people are listening to it at work or in the car, they are trying to capture a bit of that euphoric, sexy, dark, shared experience. Everything about the beats and rhythms and words is mostly about dancing, and all of the influences it draws on are in that context.
How many of you haters spend a lot of time in sweaty clubs? If that’s not something you do or enjoy, the music is probably not going to evoke pleasant things for you.
For the dude who like white hipsters with acoustic guitars-- I’m guessing you probably enjoy something like sitting in an indie coffee shop writing blog posts. Acoustic white guys write music for indie coffee shops, and so the music evokes that pleasant feeling for you.
I’m not convinced this is true. I love a lot of classic soul and hard bop jazz stuff, both types of music played in hot sweaty clubs. I like a lot of traditional dance music, whether Irish jigs and reels, classical waltzes, or American folk dance music, despite not dancing. And I can enjoy songs about places I’d never want to be, or even could be, for example folk songs about wars in the olden days, or some classic hip-hop like NWA or Public Enemy. And yet a great deal of modern club music leaves me cold. Truly great music can take you away from where you are and transport you, not just remind you of when you heard it in a place you enjoyed. A great club track should make even someone like me want to be in the club, and should also be enjoyable on a musical level.
I think I get where you’re coming from- people will say that Justin Bieber isn’t talented… in the same way that people will say that David Carr sucked, or that Matt Leinart sucked, to use a football analogy.
Maybe those guys aren’t NFL quarterbacks, but they definitely had enough talent to be outstanding college quarterbacks and get drafted into the NFL.
I think that’s similar to what brickbacon is getting at- Bieber may not be a particularly great musical talent- he’s not Michael Buble or Eric Clapton or anything, but he’s a big popular star, which implies some baseline minimum level of talent. Whether or not you like that, is something entirely different. I mean, I really don’t like Nicki Minaj or Iggy Azalea much at all, but they’re definitely talented in their particular defined spheres.
Just to be very clear, I said I don’t put Elton John in the same category as the Beatles, Elvis, and Michael Jackson. I didn’t say anything about his stardom otherwise.
The thing is: He actually is very good. And his actual music (if you’re into that genre) is often above average.
He’s more of a Jay Cutler, maybe. He’s no Tom Brady and sometimes he sucks and his attitude stinks but here he is.
“Bang your HEAD. Metal health with drive you ma-ad!”
I am always amused at people’s very disparate ideas of what constitutes “great”. 
I’m not totally disagreeing with your opinion here - he has a nice voice and is award-winning and all that. But is he really Clapton-great?
If you listen to the lyrics of the latest album, BEYONCE, there’s a lot more going on than that. One of the reasons I’m interested in Beyonce is she’s pretty normal and nice, but like most normal people, there’s still stuff going on under the surface. On the album, you’ve got songs about motherhood, grief/miscarriage, jealousy, hints of affairs, sex, “I hate us for making good love to each other”, feminism, sexism, the effects of the misogynist fashion industry…and the videos all go along with the themes really really well. As one example, Grown Woman is accompanied by a hilarious video where she basically deconstructs the whole ‘flawless megastar’ thing.
To me Beyonce made the album relevant again (I think one of the reasons her singles aren’t as ubiquitous as they might have been is the popularity of the album first). I hadn’t bought an album since the Django Unchained soundtrack and a proper studio album? I can’t remember the last time.
I find her interesting because of that album, basically (and I’m intrigued by her partnership with JayZ and relationship with her sister). I didn’t much care for Single Ladies, but Destiny’s Child had some great songs.
(Yeah, I know she doesn’t write all of the lyrics and music. I don’t care.)
It’s funny that mileage varies. I struggled to sing a Taylor Swift song till recently. I’d heard that haters song but didn’t know it was by her.
[QUOTE=brickbacon]
Right now, we have at least two gems of this sort:
Why do black pupils in the US underachieve academically when one factors out poverty?
Steophan: ‘“Blacks are subhuman” is either true or false, and by itself has no moral component’
[/QUOTE]
I agree that this board is just getting worse and worse for this sort of thing (and in this thread you’ve got people reducing Beyonce to being a ‘burlesque dancer’…) and I regret starting that first thread which has just given a platform to the usual suspects on this sort of pseudoscience.
Nice. I was referring to the fact that, IIRC, you are the same person who, in another thread, equated Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer with Starship’s We Built this City.
:smack:
We clearly have nothing to discuss with regards to music, and you don’t appear to be interested in learning, only getting on a soapbox, so I am outta hear.
Why don’t you care?
Well played.
Because it’s beside the point. No one is all “I love Beyonce because she’s such a good songwriter!” and then no longer has any respect for her when they find out she doesn’t write the songs. People love Beyonce’s voice, her style, her looks, the songs she chooses to put on her album.
People who are good at writing songs write songs for Beyonce to sing. People wrote songs for Aretha to sing. People write songs for Cher and Celine and Buble to sing. People wrote Elvis and Sinatra’s songs. If you are hung up on the idea that those people are talentless hacks because they don’t write their own songs then that is your problem.
I was checking out alist of the best-selling singles of all time today. More than half of them were not written by the credited performer. Are all of those performers without merit?
A great singer-songwriter is an exceptional thing, or a band that collaborates to perform all of their own songs. But they are exceptional. In the entertainment industry, they are not the be-all-end-all. For many - for most - it takes a team of talented people.
Get over it.