Word: vocals
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Ironically, Presley didn't write his own songs. He wasn't a proficient guitarist. There may even have been better vocal stylists. Nor was he adept at handling his career and business. He allowed himself to fall prey to greedy management and sycophants...
...this isn't about accolades; this is about soul. This is about that glorious mezzo-soprano, the gospel growls, the throaty howls, the girlish vocal tickles, the swoops, the dives, the blue-sky high notes, the blue-sea low notes. Female vocalists don't get the credit as innovators that male instrumentalists do. They should. Franklin has mastered her instrument as surely as John Coltrane mastered his sax; her vocal technique has been studied and copied by those who came after her, including Chaka Khan in the '70s and Whitney Houston...
Perhaps no one employed this strategy with more profound results than the incomparable Billie Holiday, who paved the way for an entire generation of black women vocal stylists, including Carmen McRae, Ella Fitzgerald and R.-and-B. singers like Aretha Franklin. Although Holiday, who counted Bessie Smith among her most important musical influences, was not a blues singer per se, her music was deeply rooted in the blues tradition. As a jazz musician working primarily with the idiom of white popular song, Holiday used the blues tradition to inject suggestions of perspectives more complicated than those the lyrics themselves contained...
That Bart is a cartoon character--a sheaf of drawings animated by smart writing and the unique vocal stylings of Nancy Cartwright--makes him both "real" and surreally supple. Cartoon figures can do more things, endure more knocks on the noggin, get away with more cool, naughty stuff than the rest of us who are animated only by a telltale heart. The face-offs of Bugs and Daffy in Chuck Jones' cartoons of the '50s involved many shotgun blasts and rearranged duckbills, but the humor and humiliation, the understanding of failure and resilience were instantly translatable to kids and adults...
While at Trinity, Robinson became a vocal advocate for human rights, fighting in the courts for the rights of women, married and separated couples, children, the handicapped, homosexuals (who were subject to life imprisonment under an obscure 19th century law), the poor and the unemployed...