Gold Star!

People love to hate other people for being untalented. I, sadly, am no exception to the rule, for I too partake in such guilty pleasures as laughing at American Idol contestants, giggling to myself mindlessly when hearing drunk people karaoke, and watching MTV's 'Made.' It is, for some reason, a common fact among humanity that seeing other people 'lower' than our own talents somehow makes us feel better; perhaps this is some form of biological imperative in that we realize if 'singing' and 'dancing' well makes us more likely to survive, we're much more likely to survive than that pretend hip-hop dancer over there.

However, there are moments that, for whatever reason, we automatically ascribe bad characteristics (e.g. she can't sing, he can't dance) based solely on what we see. Humans, myself included, are oftentimes so quick to judge based on looks, or personal wants, or preference that we miss some of the greatest talents of our time simply because we weren't looking. By now, everyone knows who Susan Boyle is; ten or twenty years ago, she was just an anonymous face in the crowd. Of course, this form of judgment based on a social stigma transcends merely looks and goes in further; white boys can't rap, guitar players can't understand music, sociologists can't understand hard science. Some really are simply because an object embodies qualities we would not expect normally in someone proficient in the craft and others are actually true due to deep, underlying reasons.

Musical stigma is perhaps the biggest and most widespread one, but perhaps the most prominent is that between classical music enthusiasts and everyone else. Classical music is to many, the pinnacle of musical talent in performance and composition, containing complicated riffs and emotions and ensembles that are simply ten times larger or more than popular music groups. People who have been raised on classical music sniff that other genres simply do not have the depth of display and consequently, have given rise to a mentality of classical music being elitist and completely unapproachable. I'm not even speaking about this in terms of music theory as much as I'm speaking just in terms of perception; certainly, people in classical music today study for years with drills hours and hours a day would believe that little pop singer who took a singing lesson once a week could never understand real dedication to the craft.

Classical music is one of my favorite genres, and the first song I ever cried to upon a listen was by Rachmaninoff. The soaring melody with a gorgeous, rhythmic counter was overwhelming and I admit I started bawling like a little baby. Good music is rooted deeply in the core of humanity's emotional consciousness, and thus, has the potential to inspire any form of emotion from within ourselves. Certainly, this was due to the complex expression, the years of performance practice, the knowledge of how to actualize something as unquantifiable as emotion into counted notes, time, and measure.

Or was it? Recently, I had an emotional reaction to another piece of music; the ending performance in Glee.

I never truly believed that classical music was beautiful because it was the 'highest form of art.' If music, so deeply rooted in emotion, should be judged by the emotional inspirational capacity it contains then certainly classical music contains many gorgeous pieces but every type of music has the capacity to inspire emotion. Sometimes, it's not about how complicated the notes are or how deep the rhythm is, or how much screaming there is or how many guitar parts but simply about how much emotion is placed into the work for it to blossom. As I sat watching Glee and felt the tears on my face, I was somewhat amused that something as simple as a bunch of actors and actresses performing some pop-culture song as a musical would strike me enough deep enough to cause such a response. Maybe it was because there is a beauty in performing with so much emotion that you don't care whether people hate it or dislike it, or even if it sounds beautiful to anyone else but yourself.

Sure, that kid on American Idol might suck to us, and probably could use a few years of lessons and, yeah, should be a bit less defensive when it comes to dealing with how horrible he is but at the same time, you gotta admire the guts he has for performing with the 100% he's got. Perhaps he deserves a gold star not because he was particularly dedicated, or because he was good, but because he was willing to drag the oldest form of music out from himself into the world. Purely artistic expression, with no regard to accepted standards or judgments and only for the sake of birthing something new into the world.

Today is not raining but is mad warm, so I'm staying home to watch Glee again. For the umpteenth time. Man, I wish I could sing.

Cheers.