vincero!

this morning as i was getting ready (15 minutes later than usual because i allowed myself to be 15 minutes late to work. bosslady, if you're reading this, i'll stay fifteen minutes late. surriously.) i was flipping through my itunes, deciding what to listen to to pump me up for the day. most days i listen to morning edition, but somehow i really wasn't in the mood to hear about corrupt fucking dick cheney calling OTHER PEOPLE corrupt (give me a break) or girls and boys dying in iraq. or the aftereffects of hurricanes katrina and rita, or how dirty the potomac is. this morning i wanted music.

i thought about andrew bird, a good quiet, focusing album. no, i thought, i'm taking the train to connecticut tomorrow and need something i can listen to all the way through. better save it. i was running short on time, so i had to make a quick decision: aretha franklin it is.

before i knew what was happening, there i was in my apartment, standing in my towel, witnessing to the lord and to the power of aretha's voice. i've written a blog before about the fact that listening to aretha instantly turns me into a wannabe drag queen. no other artist has this power. when aretha's on the stereo i'm standing there beating on my chest like patti labelle. i made it through her classics, "i ain't never loved a man (the way that i love you)," "natural woman" (a personal drag favorite), and "respect." then, thanks to the miracle of itunes shuffle, one of aretha's more controversial covers: "nessun dorma" from turandot. i don't know the exact story behind this widely-reviled live recording, but what i've heard is that pavarotti pulled one of his extraordinarily-usual last-minute freakouts and she had to step into sing it.

it's sung half in awful italian (but she does valliantly roll all of her r's), half in english. it's terrible. it's something puccini never intended. and i. absolutely. love. it. love love. love it. love. it captures something in aretha's singing that's been lacking since the early 70's, when, in my opinion, she made the best albums of her career: an urgency, a vulnerability. it's not slick and smooth and polished. aretha's pushing the bounds of her musical ability; her italian is shaky. but she goes at it with such aplomb, fearless, unapologetically adding gospel-style melismas to the ends of phrases, breathing in the middle of words, just like her gospel upbringing taught her. by the time she goes for the final high note--it's a high b-natural in the original, but i'm sure this has been transposed down--i get chills every single time. it's not opera, mind you. it's a song that aretha has taken and made her own.

i've never met another singer that could stand aretha singing "nessun dorma." not a single one. amanda, hilary, everyone. they hate it. they don't just dislike it--they get angry when they hear it. they see it as a mockery and bastardization of puccini. i suppose this should tell me where my loyalties really lie, as opposed to those of most other classical singers. i'm a classical singer, yes, but first and foremost i'm a homo with a penchant for big black lady singers.

singers named laquonda.