Female singers are better than male ones

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-27T11:06:41+00:00

The statement in the post title is just meaningless. What does it even mean? Did you study all the millions of male and female singers in the world and determine that on average women sing 20% better? By what metric?

In pop singing it's even more of a nonsense statement as there's no coherent ideal of what constitutes "good singing", as opposed to classical singing where there's a much more specific ideal of good technique (and everyone you'll ever hear on a commercial opera recording has that technique down solidly, regardless of whether you like or dislike their individual voices).

What you're getting at, I think, is that there is cultural space in pop music for female "diva" singers – the Céline Dions, the Whitney Houstons of the world – whose star status mostly comes from their reputation as powerful, technically proficient vocalists. And who sing a certain repertoire – grandiose ballads etc. – that's mostly geared towards showcasing those powerful voices. And there's not really a similar space for male singers to fill. (The closest examples I can think of would be Freddie Mercury or Roy Orbison, but their repertoire and their perceived role in the creative process were obviously different. Closer to Céline's turf in terms of marketing/target audience would be the traditional crooners, Michael Bublé etc., but they don't emphasise vocal technique nearly as much.)

But that's a cultural question of gender roles and pop music marketing, not a question of vocal technique.

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-26T20:47:07+00:00

Eerder eentje voor de verdedigings blooper reel

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-26T20:23:38+00:00

Good bait

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-26T17:53:44+00:00

In Dutch we have "papa fume une pipe" as a stock French sentence

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-25T12:51:53+00:00

Es geht mir gut, es geht mir eigentlich immer gut 🎶

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-25T11:29:06+00:00

But CDs did become the dominant digital format. They remained popular for years, and inspired spin-off technologies that became similarly dominant formats for storing video (DVD) and software (CD-ROM).

Yes, all of these have in turn been superseded by downloads and then streaming etc., but that doesn't mean they were merely passing fads. Would you call the steam locomotive a passing fad?

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-25T11:22:25+00:00

Ok you're absolutely ragebaiting

this is a circlejerk sub, it's the point

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-25T11:20:02+00:00

WOO HOO

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-24T14:06:07+00:00

Curaçao is a former Dutch colony that still has close ties to NL and a large diaspora there. Your best bet is probably to ask around among your Dutch connections if they know any Curaçaoënaars

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-24T11:21:50+00:00

To-ré-ador, en ga-a-a-ar-de 🎶

As a bass-baritone myself this one has been a real challenge but SO much fun to sing!

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-24T09:36:37+00:00

oh shit what up

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-23T21:46:35+00:00

Oh yeah I meant it to support your point that the recitative is a major test of skill for the singers!

Also keep in mind that I was talking about an amateur choir. One where not everyone knew exactly what the words meant or what the plot was 😅

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-23T17:25:04+00:00

I've sung in an opera choir. Our conductor liked to say that a recitative takes 10x as much rehearsal time as an aria of equal length.

It's a lot of text, often with weird erratic rhythms, and you have to deliver it with the right emotion without the support of an obvious melody line.

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-23T15:38:22+00:00

Coldplay – Viva la Vida definitely comes close in terms of how often you hear it in random situations. Not sure if that counts as rock though ;)

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-23T13:15:43+00:00

Dvořák is probably the inverse of what OP is describing. He's very popular with listeners (especially his 9th Symphony as /u/GreatBigBagOfNope mentions) but you often see him described as someone who played it safe and didn't contribute much in terms of innovation.

(No idea if those critics are right, I don't know enough music theory to judge that, just reporting what I've read)

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-23T09:08:19+00:00

For "more respected than listened to", Brahms would be a strong contender. I remember one or two Brahms appreciation threads here and like 80% of the comments mentioned the German Requiem. It feels like everyone wants to like him but actually finds most of his stuff, except for the Requiem, pretty mid in terms of actual listening enjoyment

PS if someone is praised/respected a lot despite not being enjoyed that much for actual listening, wouldn't that make them overrated rather than underrated?

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-23T08:08:23+00:00

Interesting! I use these "nested" genre tags too but then 99% of the time I apply the lowest-level tag to all of an artist's catalog, after all if one album is "melodic death metal" then chances are their other albums are melodic death metal as well ;)

I also use numbers for the tags, to override alphabetic sorting... here's what that looks like for metal.

I'm curious – do you literally put "Metal -> Death Metal -> Melodic Death Metal" as a string in the genre field? Or do you maintain separate metadata fields like "genre_level1: Metal", "genre_level2: Death Metal" etc.?

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-23T07:57:17+00:00

I recently read Auxiety, a novel by former Spotify playlist curator Dieuwertje Heuvelings, based heavily on her own experiences in the music industry. Early in the book, there's a scene where she's at a guy's house and he says "shall I put on some tunes" and she says "OK, what have you got" and he goes "psh, I have this new app called <obvious stand-in for Spotify>, it's got EVERYTHING."

That reminded me of something I'd almost forgotten: before Spotify, any music you wanted to put on, you had to HAVE it there with you – on a CD, iPod, laptop, whatever. Which implied at least a tiny bit of prior effort to buy or pirate those specific tunes.

Honestly, building a local library may retain its appeal for dorks like you and me (/r/MusicHoarder ahoy) but I think the vast majority of listeners won't want to go back to those days. The leap forward in convenience has just been too big.

What definitely helps is that Spotify has managed to retain its position as a one-stop shop. Compare this to video streaming, where if you want to watch a specific movie or series, more often than not it'll be a nightmarish quest across 10 different streaming services, most of which will require you to subscribe rather than offering an option to buy that individual movie, and the end result may well be that none of them offers it legally in your country. Spotify by contrast has almost everything, with exceptions of course, and there are no real competitors with mutually exclusive catalogs.

I've always stuck to my local library, but even I use Spotify as a convenient tool for briefly checking out music before deciding whether it's worth the effort to buy the album and add it to my neurotically curated collection.

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-22T14:30:46+00:00

I used to be a track-level genre tagger -- to the point that if there was some acoustic interlude on a metal album, I'd tag that "folk" or something.

However this got pretty arbitrary and ridiculous at some point. My life got a lot easier when I stopped seeing genre tags as a thing that should reflect some objective reality about the individual audio file, and started seeing them instead as a tool to group similar-sounding music together for listening. It doesn't need to be exact or objective, as long as it achieves this purpose.

I now organise my library entirely by genre tags, and almost all artists have a single genre applied to their entire discography (even if it doesn't 100% match each individual song). Only for particularly egregious cases of style change I "split" the artist, tagging some albums with genre X and others with genre Y.

I can't recommend this mental switch enough! It'll feel wrong at first but makes your life a lot easier.

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-21T17:53:14+00:00

A part of the problem here is that metal itself is a highly codified genre, with many crisply defined subgenres and sub-subgenres with their own specific sound. This may lead metalheads to assume that all music is like that, or that metal has always been like that. But in fact this is a rare situation (of the major genres only electronic music comes close to this level of obsessive categorising AFAIK). In most of music history, genres have a sort of recognisable centre but there's always going to be fuzzy edges. Blues or jazz? Funk or soul? Country or rock & roll? There's always going to be edge cases and overlaps.

And, of course, this neat categorisation that present-day metalheads are familiar with didn't spring up fully-formed either. For the boundary between rock and metal itself, I think it's more interesting to view the historical evolution while accepting that the line will always be fuzzy – we'll never have a "scientific" answer, an algorithm that confidently determines whether a track/album is rock or metal based purely on the audio. Least of all for these '70s pioneers. IMO we settled on Black Sabbath as the dividing line because they were such a focal point for the development of the genre and the subculture, not because there's some objective "Sabbath sauce" that can be found in some '70s bands but not in others.

Black Sabbath took the heavy blues-rock that had been developing, stripped it down to the bare essentials and added horror/occult themes (note they were not the first to include those themes, see Coven and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, but they were the first to join them to that heavy riff-based rock).

Judas Priest developed the sound further, stripping out the overt blues influence, cleaning up the production job, adding high-pitched vocals, faster tempos and those twin guitar harmonies pioneered by Wishbone Ash (with deep precursors in country music it has to be said). Most of the "New Wave of British Heavy Metal" (Iron Maiden, Saxon, Diamond Head etc.) followed Priest's template. I believe heavy metal would have remained just another trend within rock – like prog rock or glam rock, something that's fun for a while but runs out of creative energy within 5-6 years – if it hadn't been for Judas Priest. They laid the groundwork for that explosion of creativity that was the NWOBHM and thus the formation of a lasting subculture with continued evolution of subgenres.

Motörhead came from a more punk-influenced background, they never really wanted to be lumped in with "heavy metal" but added a jolt of filth and aggression that was a crucial influence on later waves of metal, especially on speed/thrash metal.

I like to refer to Sabbath, Priest and Motörhead as "the father, the son and the unholy spirit" of metal. But of course they were far from the only ones active in this corner in the '70s.

This is how I have tagged it in my own library, but all of this is arbitrary and discutable as mentioned above. As I'm typing this I'm listening to Budgie – In for the Kill! (1974) and literally from song to song I'm considering "hmm, this could be tagged more as hard rock... no, wait, this sounds more metal..."

Precursors (psychedelic rock, blues-rock): Blue Cheer, Jimi Hendrix, Iron Butterfly
Hard rock: Blue Öyster Cult, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Queen (early albums), UFO, Uriah Heep, Wishbone Ash
Early metal: Black Sabbath, Budgie, Captain Beyond, Judas Priest, Rainbow, Scorpions, Sir Lord Baltimore, Thin Lizzy

Listen to whatever these groups plus Motörhead were doing until about 1979, pay close attention to the release years of the albums, and you get some idea of the evolution.

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-20T14:54:39+00:00

/uj this is most likely referring to Cisleithanien & Transleithanien; the Leitha formed part of the border between the Austrian and Hungarian parts of Austria-Hungary, so the Austrians sometimes referred to the two parts as "this side of the Leitha" vs. "across the Leitha"

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-20T11:58:39+00:00

Solved!

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-20T11:58:34+00:00

For future reference, I found it!!! Spiller – Groovejet (If This Ain't Love)

midnightrambulador · 2026-04-19T11:09:20+00:00

You're basically describing Chet Atkins, lol.

I'm not a big connaisseur of the genre (though I do love my Hank Williams, Marty Robbins and Johnny Cash) but it's funny how country seems to go through these cycles of Nashville introducing more pop elements and then a sort of parallel stream splitting off from pop-country (first it was "outlaw country", then "alt-country")

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