On 2026-08-03 9:00 a.m., The True Melissa wrote:
Verily, in article <u5v07l90b11p18f2vd2j98afg68g7o59uk@4ax.com>, did NoBody@nowhere.com deliver unto us this message:
On Sun, 2 Aug 2026 21:28:35 -0000 (UTC), BTR1701 <atropos@mac.com>
wrote:
Absolutely nothing could have prepared me for the national anthem at the first
Women?s Pro Baseball League game last night.
https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/2083699277142839296/vid/avc1/628x360/OYL5NEjzDOxYt_BV.mp4
It?s like they put her out on the field and told her to pick a key and then >>> ignore it. And whichever one of them was surreptitiously strangling the cat >>> should be deported. Someone told her to 'let freedom ring' and then she rang
every note except the right ones.
Is she even supposed to be singing? There are two women in sparkly
costumes and one woman in a regular dress, and the latter is the one who sounds like a bag of cats.
As they reach "And the rocket's red glare," the costumed women look like they're giving up. One of them gestures at the uncostumed woman like
"Okay, I guess you're doing this." The costumed women come in again
later, and I noticed that they are on key, though it's hard to hear them under the caterwauling.
My intuition is that this woman inserted herself and nobody told her no.
You're clearly not familiar with the woman in regular dress, Martha
Reeves, who has had a long career in R&B:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Reeves
According to the article, she's 85 now and that may be why she lacked
the judgment to decline the performance when she's clearly nowhere near
the top of her game. Or maybe she just had an incredibly "off"
performance. It would be interesting to know if she (or her backup
singers) had any comments afterwards acknowledging that things went very
badly and it was all because of Reeves.
Led Zeppelin, which disbanded after their drummer, John Bonham, died in
1980, were persuaded to reunite for a one-off performance at Live-Aid in
1985. They worked out that Phil Collins would play the drums. But
apparently they didn't rehearse TOGETHER before the show! Before the
show, Collins assured Page that he was ready and knew the songs but the
actual performance, in Page's words, was "shambolic". If you listen to
it, the performance is a complete mess, despite the fact that Collins
was a great drummer at the time. (He can't play at all any more now due
to physical issues.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TudbbVdz8os [22 minutes]
There are videos describing what went wrong. Here's one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPJJdQfVxyg [27 minutes]
I haven't watched it but if I had to venture a guess about the cause of
the disaster, I'd made the educated guess that:
1. They didn't rehearse together, which is ridiculous if Zeppelin hadn't performed together in 5 years and they'd never played with Collins
before. If they didn't find a couple of days to get together and
rehearse, that's a huge mistake, perhaps a result of massive egos
thinking they were so good they didn't need to rehearse.
2. Maybe there were some technical issues. Plant mentions something
about needing a few minutes to get some monitors at the start of the
set. Despite the staggering volume of sound in the stadium coming out of
the PA - thousands of watts in total in a stadium seating over 100,000
people - those speakers all face OUT at the audience and when you're on
a stage like that, it can be incredibly hard for the musicians onstage
to hear each other. If the monitors are not set up properly, they will
not hear properly which can throw themselves off very badly.
I think it's entirely possible that Reeves and her backup singers had
the same issues:
a. they hadn't rehearsed together (or hadn't rehearsed sufficiently)
b. I don't know if any of them were wearing monitors - nowadays,
monitors are mostly "in-ear" rather than the big onstage speakers that
were used in the Live-Aid era - but maybe they weren't mixed properly so
that Reeves couldn't hear the backup singers which would tend to anchor
her to the key. Without them, maybe she lost the key and never found her
way back to them.
Blast this out over Iranian TV and they?ll surrender by dinner time.
Now that you've heard the worst, cleanse your auditory palate with the best.
Faith Hill, the GOAT:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUDJyoij5E4&t=31s
She is good, and I'm charmed by the "signing choir" as well. I never
thought of graceful, synchronized signing as an art, but there it is.
Not as bad as Rosanne Barr though.
And kudos to the lady standing next to her. She mostly stayed in key.
That takes serious skill with that garbage bellowing next to her.
I'm not sure which you mean, but the two costumed ladies both acted like pros.
--
Rhino
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