Chuck - Chrissie is very well-known for being a brilliant rhythm guitarist. As a songwriter, she is known for using off-time stuff and keeping players on their toes. She drives her drummer Martin Chambers nuts with the complexity of her playing…
Part of me doesn’t want to continue the hijack about female rock singers, but a bigger part of me can’t believe that no one has mentioned Melissa Etheridge. 
(Or Paula Cole, or Mary Chapin Carpenter, or Shawn Colvin, or KT Tunstall, etc.)
Which is, slowly, changing the shape of music. I don’t think the revolution’s happened yet. These are just some precursors.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I don’t mean qualify the music, I just mean that some bounds have to be put on what a person mean when he or she talks about the music scene. Often when people talk about “music today,” they’re talking about either mainstream music, or indie, or the folk circuit, or whatever. I definitely get what lissener says about the pyramid of experience/expertise, and I do admit to playing a little bit of a devil’s advocate here, but if one is going to try to encompass the entire music scene, then there’s not much definitive that can really be said. I wouldn’t refute a statement about music today with a cite of some home recordings a friend of mine did. Not that they wouldn’t be valid in some contexts, but that context has to be chosen. That’s all I was trying to get at.
Yeah, that was poorly written. In light of what I just wrote above, what I meant was that choosing the most financially successful music venue as a context for opinions about music is a very valid, yet debatable, thing to do.
Stephanie Corby, who I stumbled upon a few years back when I went to see The Nields play with SDMBer andygirl. Stephanie was opening for The Nields, and I thought her per formance was great. I bought her CD, Fireworks in March, which continues to get relatively regular rotation in my stereo. One or two tracks I’m not such a huge fan of, but some real gems as well.
I agree with you here 100%. Particularly because you don’t have to dig that far to find great music, nor has there ever been a lack of trite, smarmy pop in the history of modern rock and roll.
I’ve been getting into Japanese female singers. Maki, of High & Mighty Color, has an absolutely gorgeous voice. Aiko is a great singer-songwriter. She doesn’t have the greatest voice in the world, but her singing is wonderfully expressive and emotional. That’s the main thing that attracted me to her music - I can’t understand the words, but I can still feel the emotion in her singing. Aiko writes all of her own lyrics and composes her own music. She plays piano, though when she performs she just sings, and somebody else plays piano.
Then it’s a good thing that nobody did anything remotely like that.
I caught myself singing along with Cheri Baby in the produce department last week. And I didn’t care.
It’s SHERRY.
And, Frankie was whacked on the Sopranos because he’s a terrible actor.
Man, one of us is either doing a poor job of explaining or a poor job of understanding. Knowing me, it’s probably me on both counts. 
I stepped into hyperbole there, but my point was that Joe Schmoe’s totally awesome home recordings are on a spectrum of music that’s available if one spends x amount of effort. I could have used “independantly released albums” and maybe sounded a little less dismissive. The point is just that you or I or whomever automatically limits the discussion to music that you or I know or have been exposed to, and also leave out a great deal of music that we have no idea exists.
To discuss pop/rock music with an eye mostly for the most pervasive, popular, well-known, and convenient songs will definitely leave a great deal out, but so would a discussion that included all of your musical knowledge as well. So, calling those who have either by choice or by circumstance limited the discussion to the former ignorant (which I realise was Equipoise’s comment, not yours) is just a bit questionable. Sort of like if a neurologist called a proctologist ignorant about medicine because the proctologist had claimed that a lot of medicine had to do with butts. Of course, there’s the OB/GYN listening to the conversation from the other room who thinks they’re both off their rockers.
Just because they each have specialized knowledge in their respective fields does not make them ignorant of medicine as a whole. What it does make them is non-experts.
I don’t know… I think I started off ok but ended up in really convoluted territory, so I’ll end that there.
Then it’s a good thing that nobody suggested anything of the kind.
Your devil’s advocacy insists on addressing nothing but extremes and false dichotomies, while almost everything that I, speaking only for myself, have said, has been about spectrums and pyramids; about the entire gamut of experience and expertise. You’re arguing with someone, but not with me.
Van Morrison just sings? You mean the Irish guy, right? The mult-instrumentalist iwho has written hundreds of songs? The guy who wrote all the attributed songs and played most of the lead instruments on this breathless masterpiece? Poetis Champions Compose
Karen Carpenter, quite possibly the finest female singer in the second half of the 20th Century. If not #1, certainly in the top 3.
Karen Carpenter is one of those people, like Doris Day, who had a GREAT voice, but mostly pretty terrible taste in music. Too bad; I’d’ve loved to hear her stretch outside her comfort zone a bit.
And I can’t believe I left so many soul/R&B/motown singers off my list, above. How can I have listed Ella but not Aretha? Shame. And Gladys, and Etta, and Rose Murphy–and Patsy and Loretta and Tammy, and and and . . . there have truly been some great female singers in this century.
I don’t think that contemporary commercial music rewards vocal quality the way it used to; that may be why many singers with truly great voices have fled the commercial landscape for smaller niche markets where they are appreciated. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t good singers out there, though. Certainly opera, musicals and jazz have always favored vocal quality, and I believe that they always will.
For those who feel that there aren’t talented female artists out there, I would encourage you to find Laney Goodman’s Women In Music on a radio station near you. There is usually a solid hour of rebuttal to that opinion.
For anyone who’s interested, I’ve just found out (thanks to Equipoise) that Mary Margaret’s album, Miss America, has just been rereleased. This album has been firmly ensconced in my top three of all time for about 15 years now. My top 10 fluctuates wildly, but this album has never fallen below 3 on that list for as long as I’ve known it. And even among the other top 3, Miss America is somehow the only album I have that, though I’ve listened to it, must be thousands of times, I can put it on any time and be transported.
Caveat: I didn’t much like it the first time I heard it: too quirky. It confounds your expectations at every turn. But once I found a way to fold myself into it, I never wanted to climb out.
Not that I’m a huge fan of Karen Carpenter’s, but the subjectivity in your statement makes it tough to take you as an authority on female voice/music.
I tend toward liking more distinctive voices, but there’s no denying she had a pure voice, and good control.
Cem
I’m curious: how do you speak objectively about the quality of someone’s voice or their taste in music? I was under the impression that someone who’s an authority on female music would have been exposed to a broad range of it, not that they’d manage to identify greatness according to some objective chart.
The quality of the voice is easy to speak about objectively.
vocal rang, clearness of tone, how strong their voice is, all of these are easily objectified. Ask a vocal teacher.
As for taste, that is subjective.
Beat me to it! Brilliant little gem; unusual structure for a pop song. My favorite of all their tunes.
Good point. I was being overbroad in my use of “quality,” here – people like Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello may not have great vocal quality, but they’re still great singers.
Even so, hearing a large quantity of singers doesn’t make anyone any more capable of saying who is good and who is not. It’s not like someone has heard everyone. Every single ‘singer’ and then can say ‘with authority’ that ‘this one is better than that one’. Each peson can only say “These are my favorites”.
And, IMHO, when it comes to music, each individual is able to judge for themselves. (as long as they are not completly deaf) If you like it, it is good music. If you don’t like it, it isn’t good music. And you should never, ever, listen to something, just because some authority told it was good. You should try it, and if you don’t like it, it doesn’t mean that you are ignorant. It just is not good music, to you.
Oh and BTW (range)