Gawker had this video of an 11 year old girldoing an awful rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. Not awful because she forgot the words or couldn’t reach the highest notes, but just that she’s a terrible singer.
Here’s the kid’s website where the music is no better. Should parents be supporting this? Isn’t it only setting her up for a fall once enough people tell her the truth? Are they really helping this child?
Encourage kids to have fun, explore and learn, but at the same time give them the resources to do these things. In this case, get her a voice coach and a piano teacher.
Yup. Not everybody has natural musical talent, but almost everybody can learn to be a better musician than they currently are.
Take my case, for example. Up to the age of about 25, I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. Absolutely no idea of how to sing on pitch or how to tell when I wasn’t singing on pitch. It didn’t hamper my career because I wasn’t trying to be a performer, but eventually I decided I’d like to do something about it.
After a couple of decades of voice lessons, hard practice, working away at choral singing technique in choirs and other choral groups, working away at solo singing technique in opera workshops and recitals, I’ve got so I can carry a tune in a bucket. I’m still somewhat pitchy and nowhere near what you’d call a lovely voice, but I am no longer somebody who absolutely can’t sing.
I personally consider this a life-changing success story, but then I never aspired to be a professional musician, nor did anybody ever encourage me to try to be one. If this 11-year-old is really hoping for the big time, she is up against a LOT of people with a LOT more natural advantages.
Although, having listened to that national anthem rendition, I have to say that the girl in question has some not-bad natural sound literally BURIED under her absolutely abysmal and destructive attempts at grown-up-sounding vocal technique and effects. If she keeps that up she won’t be able to sing at all in a few years, and the whole issue will be moot. Yes, get her a decent voice teacher pronto, not just so she won’t sound so awful, but so she won’t completely ruin her larynx before she gets her driver’s license.
Forgot to link her professional website.
Coppell, Texas, huh? Let me put on my surprised face.
My instinctive answer to the question posed in the title is that no, it is not a bad thing to encourage someone with a poor singing voice to be a musician.
There are numerous types of musician, and while some are enhanced by good singing, most do not require it.
My second impulse is to suggest that proper musical training can do wonders for people who appear not to have a good singing voice.
Now, should anyone be encouraged to pursue music as a career–especially those with limited natural talent, and those who are dazzled by ShowBiz? Um, not so much.
I decline to follow the links to offer an opinion on any one person.
I’m pretty sure that Bob Dylan’s or Rod Stewart’s parents are glad they didn’t stop their kids.
Holy crap, that was painful. I made it about 45 seconds in. :eek:
I actually feel sorry for the kid–kids that age often don’t have a clue about whether they’re talented or not, and go by the people around them to let them know it. This kid is being deluded by a lot of people, and I think by the time she grows up a bit and get some perspective, she’s going to be horrified that the people who supposedly love her let her embarrass herself that badly in front of the world.
They also probably recognized when/if proper lessons were needed, unlike this kid’s parents.
I’m sure they were surprised that their sons were successful because people of their generation had a limited idea of what a good singer sounds like. “Honey, practice your piano and let someone else do the singing,” is probably as encouraging as they got.
I’d probably leave out the “I spent my entire life to learn to not suck completely” part of the story if you tell this in person. That’d convince me to give up for sure.
Anyone worried that the little girl will be curious about all the traffic from straightdope.com on her website and find all the snark here?
I don’t think it’s a bad thing to encourage anyone to be a musician. Music is an excellent hobby, especially for a young person. And she’s still pretty young. She has time to become a virtuoso with enough training and practice.
It’s pretty ballsy to push her out into the public as a professional at this stage, but hey. There’s a long tradition of people hiring less-than-stellar performers to play at bar mitzvahs and birthday parties. Back in the day, you with the face and I picked up a few dollars here and there to play our violins at various parties and functions. We weren’t prodigies and we weren’t under any delusions about our abilities, but could we generate some passable background music? Yeah. For most people, this is good enough.
Kids should absolutely be encouraged to pursue things that they have limited natural talent in. There is immense value in learning how to steadily improve at something via hard work and persistence, and it opens up a lot of mental doors when you realize that you can still enjoy and even succeed at things that you aren’t necessarily particularly well suited for. You don’t want your kid to be that gifted kid who skates through life on their gifts and never learns how to actually work at something. It tends to catch up with you eventually, and between talent and hard work, hard work will win every time.
That said, in order to learn these lessons, kids need to have a realistic understanding of where they are, if not just so that they can see how they are improving. This doesn’t mean putting them down or telling them that they are no good, but rather encouraging them to improve and exposing them to appropriate competition.
I don’t think this girl is necessarily a bad singer. But she has some truly awful coaching.
I’m pretty sure whatever snark there is, she has dealt with it at this point.
Texas parents defend daughter, 11, after critics blast her rendition of national anthem
The kid is a bad singer. She and her parents say that it wasn’t her best performance, but really, she had no idea of how to pace the song. I’ll grant you, the Star Spangled Banner should probably be known as the Star Mangled Banner at this point, and there have been plenty of professional singers who have mangled it. The parents and the child seem to think that she could have done better, but that she has talent. I don’t think she’s a talented singer at this point. Maybe she would improve if she had lessons, or if someone would at least tell her how to phrase the song.
How is it that whoever is in charge of picking singers seems to consistently pick BAD singers? Don’t the singers have to audition, even if they are pros?
Sounds like the kid learned how to sing from watching American Idol auditions.
I feel bad for her. She wasn’t ready for that song or that venue. Gotta give her points for poise though. (Assuming she made it all the way through – I managed about 30 seconds.)
Actually, as far as I’m concerned that’s the best part of it. You may never have had the experience of being completely incompetent at something you’d like to do, so you don’t know what a triumph it can be just to achieve mediocrity.
The fact that I can sing difficult music and enjoy it, and that people who hear me can enjoy it, even though it’s very far from a virtuoso performance, to me seems like having a club foot repaired or finally finding an effective treatment for crippling allergies. That’s a joy that somebody with natural singing talent can never know.
Absolutely. As I always say, if a thing’s worth doing it’s worth doing badly. You want to do it as well as you can, of course; but even if your best isn’t very good, it’s worth it just to be exploring this ability and learning something about how it’s done and what makes the great ones great.
Anybody who’d “give up” something they loved doing just because they realized they were never going to be very good at it probably didn’t love it all that much to start with.
Really? Because it doesn’t sound like their parents got the proper lessons for them.
Well, if you bailed before 1:30 into the song, you aren’t really being fair. She’s not even that bad, even though the American Idol comparisons are apt. She’s totally unsure of herself up until about a minute in, then finds the tune, then goes all American Idol. While its not fantastic: she’s 11 (they aren’t known for their exquisite taste at that age), she’s able to meet the tune halfway, it’s the friggin Star Spangled Banner (that thing is hard to sing!), she’s already better than my dad ever was.
Either way, it’d be worse to encourage a kid who’s bad at math to be an engineer. What’s so bad about being a bad musician?
John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi is supposed to have told him every day of his teens “The guitar’s all very well, John, but you’ll never make a living out of it”.