Saturday 22 December 2012

Magazine beauty and impossible singing!!!

Magazine beauty, the unimaginable, unattainable, unrealistic measure of perfection!

Girls have been obsessed.  What is Victoria Beckham wearing this season, doesn't she look fab now that she's a size 00 (er... not really - have a mars bar love).  When will Kristin Stewart smile, and wow doesn't Amanda Holden look amazing just weeks after giving birth?

With exposure and documentaries galore, as well as pressure on the European fashion markets to only employ models that have a BMI of 18.5 and over, we are much more savvy about photoshop, and the magazine market.  We seem to understand now, having seen some pre and post photoshop pictures from the likes of Britney Spears and Lady Gaga, that the image we're sold is not real.  It doesn't always stop us lusting after the perfect body, with no blemishes, and absolutely no cellulite, and it gives us a sense of schadenfreude, when we see the candid photo's of our celebs on their days off!

So, why oh why, in this world, where we know that the unreal is portrayed to us in so many ways, do we still feel the need to vocally out-master the masters?  When we are in our singing lessons in Edinburgh, we're frequently asked, "why can't I sound like...?", "how do they do that?".  9/10 it's clever production, disguised fades to make it sound like someone is singing something all in one breath, when actually, they have laboured in the Studio for days.  Taking the best parts of various "takes", splicing them together to make us believe what we here is the perfect rendition of a song, in truth, it's an amalgam of many hours of hard work.  We've all heard Cher's "Believe", a song which was marketed as clever recording, but has become recognised as a use of auto-tune.  Auto-tune, can now be used as a vocal effect to give the singer a more "robotic" sound, but let's not forget that auto-tune is there and was developed, to correct poor performance.

That's not to say that there aren't talented singers out there these days, of course there are.  And it's not to say that we would want you to stop trying to be the best that you can be, but please remember that there is a very good chance that your desired vocal, has not even been achieved by the person you look up to!