To: VOCALIST <vocalist>
Date sent: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 22:54:12 -0000
Subject: Re: First Bad Review
Send reply to: VOCALIST <vocalist>

> Hello listers, I am in need of cheering up as I have had my first bad
> review. I have been doing some opera vocals with a pop band and one of our
> recent concerts was reviewed in a national rock music weekly today (I am in
> Britain, by the way). The comment was obviously due to the reviewer's
> personal dislike of opera merged with pop, not anything about my technique
> or singing voice, but it's still rather nasty:
> "During the band's set a dolled-up opera singer slinks onstage and vomits
> over two songs"

Hi Sara

It is a horrible 'review', but I do not, myself, consider it a review as such. One thing that
occurs to me is the general distrust of opera in the general public in Britain today. Opera
and classical music has been getting bad press as music only for the upper classes with
tickets priced so high that the general public can not afford to hear live opera. The new
Royal Opera House in London was built with a promise that it would provide much more
affordable seating for the general public, but I have recently seen one article in the press
which heavily criticises the new building for being just as 'elitist' as it was before.

So I reckon the 'reviewer' was jumping on the bandwagon thinking that he was feeding
popular opinion by slagging off opera in general. The use of the words "dolled-up" and
"slinked onstage" certainly suggest that to me somewhat. He has no actual comment to
write about your singing, and he instead picks on the fact that you were dressed well, as
if that in itself is a crime?

I imagine that much worse has been and will be said in the popular music press about
opera in general. It is unfortunate that you got caught in the firing line, but on the positive
side I greatly admire your guts for getting on stage with a pop/rock band in the first place.
In reality, what you did was so different in the eyes of the average pop/rock
listener/reviewer that a number of them were bound to not understand it, distrust it and
say bad things about it.

If you enjoy singing with the pop band, then keep it up and good luck with it. Popular
music is always in need of something different. Miles Davis got slated by reviewers for
being different because he kept changing his musical style and they could not understand
it.......

John