Boss Radio

...or so I am led to believe having been told so 4 times recently. By my television.

Let's take reality talent shows, and straight into one of my world famous (This is the internet after all) tangents. Weren't talent shows always reality? I've seen artificial talent shows on various comedy, soap, and drama programmes, but they weren't talent shows any more than a man flying a 'plane in a Bruce Willis movie is really flying a 'plane, real talent shows are, by definition, reality, so calling them reality talent shows is something along the lines of tautology, but not quite. I don't think the word actually exists in English, I'd invent a word to cover it and get myself into the dictionary only I can't be bothered. Someone help me, is there a word which means 'stating the obvious'? If there is I'll shout it the very next time I hear some lame-brained MC shouting "And now, live on stage..." It wouldn't be much of a show if they were anything less than living, would it?

So about a quarter of an hour ago, on a TV talent show, I heard one of the judges saying "What people don't realise is that that is a very difficult song to sing...". Yesterday I heard Simon Cowell say almost exactly the same thing, and that was just channel flipping, Heaven only knows how often he actually says it. But he wasn't the first.

Somewhere in the region of two years ago on yet another talent competition, albeit this one was a pro-am talent show where all the contributors were stars, a contestant had just made a complete pig's ear'ole of a song and an overly generous judge promptly awarded her more points than she'd previously got for singing almost in tune, on the grounds that she had chosen a particularly difficult song to sing. No it wasn't. You're an idiot. Stop annoying me.

Ah, I hear you remembering to ask, but what of the fourth occasion?

That would be the world famous Ausie soap opera, Neighbours. Two weeks ago, unless you happen to live in Australia in which case it was a couple of months ago, a character was told that his songs were a little difficult to sing and could he make them easier for the new vocalist to perform? He reluctantly, soap-wise, agreed, but since the music is all prerecorded anyway the songs weren't actually changed one iota, who cares? It's only a soap.

What got up my nose was the suggestion that these songs were especially hard to sing.

If you can sing then no song is especially hard to sing. The human voice is the easiest instrument in the world to play. You just think the note and out it comes, heck, most of the time you don't even have to think it, just just know what the next note is and you sing it. Scat singing, which I really don't like very much, does at least require the singer to know something about chord structure, absolutely everything else just requires you to open your mouth and hit the right note. If you can sing you can do it and if you can't: you can't, it's as easy as that.

Now there are those out there who are right now probably getting most upset about finding something hard to sing when they are convinced that they can sing and here's me saying they can't.

Try changing the key.

With Christmas time upon us now seems the right time to bring this one up. Have you ever noticed that Christmas carols are always in the wrong key? That's because although almost nobody has a vocal range that ties in with the 'rules', music, until very recently, was always written with a particular vocal range in mind. Tenor, contralto, baritone, it doesn't matter which, it was written and arranged for that vocal range and if you weren't one then you either squealed it, rumbled it, jumped up and down an octave like a yo-yo, or you didn't sing at all.

Nowadays we choose the key to sing in. If you're singing 'My way' and you want to finish on Tom Jones' last note rather than Sinatra's but your voice won't do it, you lower the key of the song until you can. If you have a massive upper register and can reach notes that Robert Plant has to screech for, you up the key a bit until you have to screech for them as well. In the right context screeching is good, I've tried it, people applaud it, I don't know why but I like applause so I always try to stick a screech in somewhere near the end of a song.

OK, so not everyone can match the pyrotechnics of Little Richard, Aretha Franklin (Actually her sister Carolyn was even better at it but let's not have too many tangents in here...), or Rance Allen - Strangely I can't think of anyone more current who shares their vocal skills - but those guys are singers plus something else, your basic singer just has a voice that sings in tune and that's it. You may like one more than another, you may respect one more than another, but the bottom line is they are all singers and nothing they perform qualifies a hard, difficult, or... well OK, I won't say 'impossible' because some things are impossible.

But they're impossible for everyone.

Trust me, these songs do exist. I should know. I wrote some of them. In fact I probably wrote all of them.