Critics down on Lara Trump's new music video

And this one has a house fire

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Oh, I know! I like The Shaggs! I’ve been a fan of sorts for nearly 30 years.

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With an open-minded assessment of My Pal Foot Foot, the lyrics (at least to me) have a cryptic charm and an emotional edge (loss), both absent in one particular 1953 No.1 Billboard chart hit (eight weeks there!). Can you guess what that chart hit was? The Doggie in the Window, sung by Patti Page.

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lol. i don’t blame you at all. your eyes and ears thank you.

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I long ago decided that the next time I hear some fogey saying, “Music today is awful! Music used to be great! Songs used to have meaning!” I’d respectfully inquire, “Songs such as Doggy in the Window, or Music Box Dancer?”

I V much disliked music box dancer, but it drove mom spare. It was constantly in short rotation on all the pop and pop-ish radio stations in our environs for at least two seasons, and the inability to escape it (or any long-overplayed song) was a crime against God. She was convinced this was solely due to payola, as well as its - she thought - doubtless inflated local poopularity. We both hated it, but she would actually snarl as she changed the station whenever it came on, then rant about it almost as long as the song’s run time.

I couldn’t blame her one iota.

Can’t recall another (radio) song’s having that effect on her.

{Edited to add a couple good bits & improve writing, inc rephrasing and condensation.}

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Not that I ever had to hear it all the time, but I liked Music Box Dancer. :frowning:

That said, this doesn’t seem awful to me. Like, it’s not at all good, and the ladder/louder rhyme is something I’d be embarrassed to come up with as improv. But all in all it sounds just like a thousand other songs used to fill in dramatic moments in serial TV shows, where you see that character has emotions and then you move on. Now that the scene is over it’s already disappearing from my memory.

Maybe I have poor taste, I don’t know. :man_shrugging:

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Yes… no shortage of wretched, yet popular, crap during that time. Perhaps people were still slap-happy with all the post-war consumer goodies (TVs and cheap portable radios) and tons more access to whatever splooged-out from the aforesaid, all analogous to the shit brought forth from the Internet.

BTW: I’ve at odd times wondered how much blame got (and still gets?) heaped on Doris Day by those who were so disgusted by Doggy in the Window, that they never registered, or bothered to listen to the radio play of it long enough to determine, that it was Paige – and never at any time Day – who sang that song.

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Mom’s Dad couldn’t stand Doris Day and her phony Ivory soap-scrubbed, purer-than-pure public image. Once he told mom, “Shit, I remember when she sang with a jazz group before she was a virgin!”

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The fire truck siren at the start of the video sounded better.

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For a family so obsessed with its brand, it’s a weird choice to choose “really bad at singing” as her thing.

I know it’s a very close election, but I think if TFG made a campaign promise that if he wins, Lara won’t release anymore music that it wouldn’t be very close anymore.

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… maybe she should do musical theater with James O’Keefe

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I would happily watch a video of that if it was part of some sort of inter-correctional-facility collaboration.

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This song would be improved with the addition of William Shatner’s spoken word “singing” … And that’s saying something.

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I also think that they’re a family that does not understand things like art and talent… they think it’s just something anyone can do at the drop of a hat, especially “genetically superior” people like themselves, and that doing something like singing doesn’t take any real work or talent… :woman_shrugging:

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Musicologist’s take on it:

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Great piece, good to hear an expert’s take on it. I also didn’t know just how ubiquitous Auto-Tune has become. Which is NOT to say that popular singers don’t have to know how to sing anymore.

What people are bristling at in Trump’s effort, I think, is that it exposes both Auto-Tune and her larger political project as a gimmick, or what cultural theorist Sianne Ngai describes in her book “Theory of the Gimmick” as “overrated devices that strike us as working too little (labor saving tricks) but also as working too hard (strained efforts to get our attention).”

Yet every single one of your favorite singers recorded in the present millennium, be they pillars of vocal skill or not, uses Auto-Tune, which is now a stand-in term for any number of tools (Melodyne, Waves) that perform what is called pitch correction. Pitch correction is a standard and ubiquitous part of musical post production during which vocals are “tuned up” or locked into place in a desired musical scale. This step of the process happens equally in genres that tend to be more finicky about authenticity, like country or rock. If that strikes you as a bummer, it is in some ways. There are all kinds of micro-deviations and expressive pitch gestures that simply do not make it through today’s production process. But you might be heartened to know that singing, or any kind of expressive vocal performance, far exceeds pitch alone.

On Trump’s “Hero” you’ll notice that Madeline Jaymes, who carries the first verse and the chorus, sounds pretty good. Perhaps unremarkable, but basically in line with a contemporary accepted standard of vocal skill and sound. She, too, is Auto-Tuned (or, more likely, Melodyned). What we hear when Lara Trump enters on the second verse is, yes, pitch correction, but even more, we hear a pile of acoustic accouterments — reverb, compression, delay — that are caked on to obscure the fact that Trump might be able to make sound, but she doesn’t command professional-level vocals. The things the performance lacks include: expressive timing, dynamic range, vowel shaping, thoughtful breath placement, to name a few. Even heavily Auto-Tuned pro singers have a sense of all these things. Trump’s performance is literal, where singing, no matter the genre, always requires a bit of poetry.

One of the most consistent and enduring critiques Antares has fielded from the listening public is that it’s not fair that Auto-Tune can make anyone a singer. What Trump’s “Hero” proves is that it can’t. It can put anyone in tune, sure, but singing is not reducible to pitch. It is a much more complex bundle of expression and skill that no one really has a precise handle on.

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Nice way to say that her singing is flat and nasally.

eta: I wonder if Eric Trump is telling her that she sounds fantastic? I get a definite Citizen Kane vibe.

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citizen-kane-orson-welles-clapping-8xlx6s9h6qj7z9qs

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