Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/14/from-shy-to-badass-13-year-ol.html
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she reminds me more of Jen Durkin from Deep Banana Blackout. (not that Janis isn’t a good comparison too or Joss Stone)
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Get her a bottle of Jack, a painted Porsche and a date with the ghost of Pigpen stat.
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Eh, she’s all right.
By which I mean: Wow.
(Hey, why do YouTube videos no longer play on Boing Boing?)
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i get the janis joplin comparison, but janis might not be the best role model for her. i mean, what a short, painful life janis had : (
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The cynic in me thought…was her shy, demure persona part of her act to provide startling contrast to her singing/dancing? (Probably not, but I thought it anyway.)
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You aren’t the only one that thought it. I actually feel the astonishment the judges are displaying is impacted more by her personality shift from demure/shy kid to the frenetic dancing showman and less about her voice.
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For 48 years people have been trying to find the next Janis. But she existed in a certain time and place. Some of what made her was being in San Francisco in the sixties. She was an outcast, and found her place in a neighborhood that wasn’t about 3 minute commercial songs of perfection. The music business is nothing like that now.
Also forgotten is that her “sound” very much came from Big Brother and the Holding company. You can feel the heat in “Summertime”, which comes in part from fuzzed up guitars. An old song, at a time when music was very open to digging up the past and fusing various genres together.
It’s ironic, one of Janis’s idols was Bessie Smith, but it caused us to listen to Bessie Smith (and other artists did the same for other “forgotten” artists). More time has passed since Janis died than the time between Bessie Smith dying and Janis’s time in the spotlight, though oddly, Janis and many others from the time have been continuously available, while in the sixties many “old” performers were only getting back into print as a result of people digging them up.
And then so much of that was abandoned, not many years after Janis died, in some ways a long trail to current music that lacks guitars and firms around tv shows.
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I got some intense frisson from that!
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Gawd how I hate how commercial entertainment is these days. This whole ‘got talent’ thing, reality shows, etc. They suck. Look at what it did to politics in the US as the ugliest example. And it’s not about talent, it’s about hard work. The name of the show is misleading, to put it mildly.
But back to this kid. Yeah, cool. I guess.
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Yeah, I think so too, but that is a good strategy for this show, and she pulled it off, so I am ok with this.
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what really burst the bubble for me was finding out that this girl was already on The Voice Kids UK last year and lost in the finals (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dqS31mj2TQ). So, the whole shy thing is probably just part of the act.
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Looking forward to hearing more from her!
Welcome to Boing Boing.
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Sorry, but I beg to differ - it was the moment THAT voice emerged from the waif-like figure that did it. That voice was amazing - more so for only a 13-year old. The overall performance (‘frenetic dancing’ etc) was good, but that voice…
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Agreed. Phenomenal voice.
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I agree her voice was sensational. Just we’ve seen multiple multiple times amazing voices come from bodies we never thought they’d come out of. For some people that will still strike the hardest chord…but the performance is something we have not seen very often.
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I know where she can get a kick-ass 8 year old drummer.
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She was a finalist on The Voice Kids and was on Britain’s Got Talent along with several other shows.You can’t make be believe Simon didn’t know who she was. She’s got 50+ videos on YouTube.
