and you wonder why I didn't try with you.
discrediting Christina's place in the royal vocal kingdom is very like of you pressed lambs; stale, weak and just so tired.
And true! You forgot to mention
true. Christina could not sing the way Mariah could in her prime. And that's not even meant to be shade; simply a statement of fact. Christina struggled to hit her higher belted notes live, and while Mariah sang most of her most challenging songs a half step down, that half step down was still notably higher than Christina was singing anything. Mariah had a more challenging repertoire and she pulled it off with more technical aplomb.
I don't even think Christina's bad in the grand scheme of the pop universe, though; I think she's more upper-middle tier. Better than the "Get-by-on-catchy-melodies-alone" people (Looking at you, Rihanna, JLo, Katy Perry, et al.), not as good technically as singers like Kelly or Beyonce or Leona or Celine, and not nearly as good as once-in-a-generation talents like Whitney or Mariah. It's sort of difficult because there's an intersection between
talent, which Christina has a lot of, and discipline and technical ability, which is Christina's failing.
I was talking to royalan about this last night, and I mentioned that I thought that Christina's biggest problem was that of lack of discipline. She has mentioned in interviews that she didn't have any formal training coming into stardom; she learned by listening to the radio and copying her favorites. The problem is that she simply didn't know all of the complicated and frankly counterintuitive things one needs to be doing in order to sing like that (posture, breath support, singing from the diaphragm and not forcing power from your throat, keeping a neutral larynx, etc.). She was relying upon her intuition to do things that, say, Mariah and Whitney had been taught how to do correctly through vocal coaching (either professionally in Whitney's case, or by her mother, in Mariah's case). She was able to get by on that, more or less, because she's got a pretty big voice naturally and even using her instrument incorrectly, she could still do some very impressive things with it. But it seems as though in some cases she simply never took the time to learn the proper way to do things, or in others she knows about them (and you can hear her talk about them as a judge / coach on The Voice), but she does not follow them in her own live performances; in either case, it reflects a lack of discipline.
And I think that she could have been on the same tier as Beyonce, Kelly, etc. in terms of combining sheer natural talent with technically accomplished singing, but for that lack of discipline.
Mumei, I'm curious, tell me what you think of Christina's
Man's World performance
I really enjoyed it the first time I heard it, both vocally and as a performance. As I've been learning more about vocals, though, now I notice the problems vocally that I didn't before because I didn't know about those things. In particular, as I listened to her more, I realized that things that she did that I thought were stylistic choices on her part vocally were actually things that she was doing incorrectly that were damaging her voice. I still honestly rather enjoy it as performance, but I've never denied that she has good stage presence.
So now the performance doesn't do much for me vocally. I still like most of her performance of Hurt where she was wearing the red dress, though. I generally like her modal voice in
this range, and I like her head voice through around middle of the sixth octave.
I don't actually think she has a bad voice, in any case.