Angelina Jordan is a singing prodigy, a REAL one!
Here’s her at 8 years old!
youtube.com/watch?v=jnnzbdt4_RE
Here’s her from the ages of 12 through 13 (she’s currently 14)
youtube.com/watch?v=eTcvvO6B3Io
youtube.com/watch?v=NVRWYEk8T3A
She (at the age of 14) has an amazing discography! Adele, Michael Jackson etc…
Another one from Angelina Jordan:
And an honorary mention for child prodigy singers:
Angelica Hale…
Try to listen some songs of Lata Mangeshkar. Perhaps, your opinion will change, even though the language will be alien for you.
With love,
Sanjay
A 90 year old is not a child prodigy! I’ll listen to her, but it’s totally off topic. There’s also an amazing Taiwanese singer in her 30’s, again, not a child prodigy. I can’t understand what the fuck she’s saying, but she’s amazing! Just not a child prodigy!
You know who the most famous singing child prodigy of all time so far is? Michael Jackson
Ok, Zinnat! I know several things from these searches of Lata! She sings rip off songs from the western tradition in the 1950’s, her tone is similar to Dolly Parton’s (who is more famous in the west for her breasts than her songs). This music you sent me is not on the scale of a child prodigy! I’ll listen more though! But her best song has like 40 million hits! Aren’t there like a billion people in India with computers or phones now?!?!
Did not impress me at all!
Ecmandu,
Thanks for taking time for listening her. It is ok if you do not like her.
With love,
Sanjay
I just laughed out loud after googling to check if the mentioned singer is truly 90 years old.
You mean the guy who sang Blame it On the Boogie?
A critique of this Angelina Jordan:
To begin with, what strikes me the most about her is an extraordinary case of vocal mimicry. Obviously to pull this off you need both extraordinary vocal ability and versatility, and perhaps more notably an extraordinary ear for detail (stylistic nuance etc.) - the impressiveness of which is only enhanced by the lack of years’ life experience that she’s had to pick up these things and develop the ability to pull them off to the effect of essentially sounding like a recording of the original.
So at this point, I’ll elaborate on what I mean by “critique”, by exploring the notion of what it means to be the “best singer”.
Certainly all of the above comes into it, but looking instead ONLY at the effect of her performances, why is Angelina the best singer and not Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse et al. themselves whom she’s simply able to replicate?
Looking at the relative disparity in maturity and experience, she has far more efficiently achieved that effect, assuming Whitney and Amy weren’t just the same when they were her age - they were probably very talented but let’s just assume not quite as much. But is “best singer” in any part a function of efficiency? Perhaps to a small degree - hence the term child prodigy being closely associated with the best in whatever field in which they are prodigious.
Though if one looks at “best singer” systematically - with inputs and outputs - there is more to input than efficiency. I would even argue that efficiency is a flaw compared to a long protracted process of being moulded by time and experience, slowly forging a unique identity as a result, and finally beginning to emerge and flourish through their natural talents into an entity who unavoidably exudes their story with every breath of their performance.
What should be immediately apparent is that “input” has in this way a direct effect on the “output” as more than simply an extraordinary experience of vocal/auditory ability. Angelina clearly emits passion and feeling, with the songs and her enjoyment of covering them definitely carrying significant meaning for her. But honestly, next to the almost uncomfortable damaged desperation of Amy Winehouse, or the tangible experience of heartbreak known by Whitney Houston - it seems kinda empty. It’s not even her fault - she’s a child, and it’s remarkable that even a child expresses as much as Angelina does. But as an artistic performance, which encompasses far more than how good someone sounds, it’s just not a fair competition between a child and an adult when it comes to something like “best singer”. It’s safe to assume that there’s no way she’d be able to produce the hits she’s singing by herself (although I guess technically she might be able to, despite the lack of evidence, and I’d like to be proven wrong here), simply because she’s not had the same amount of time and experience to become the person who is compelled to create the original hits that she’s singing. It might even be an obstacle to her becoming one of these people - that she’s enjoying so much praise and attention so young, when suffering does seem to help many people grow into becoming one of these people. Though at least some people also suffer from success - not that I’d wish that on her.
I’ve tried to not detract from how amazing this kid is for her age, and maybe the above points are trivial to some who reading this - it’s just a critique, which I am making because it happens to mean a lot to me. Honestly, I think art has suffered a lot in recent years, by putting emphasis on virtuosity as little more than showcases of “dexterity”, and being able to technologically iron out the nuance and perceived “imperfection” that would otherwise carry the whole unique story with it - and thus the specialness of the experience. The more “perfected” the final product, the more replicable and formulaic it becomes as a result of these nuances being ironed out. Not incidentally, this is why famous singers these days are forced to intentionally embellish and warble exaggeratedly and almost tortuously around their delivery (e.g. Winehouse). By no means does this mean that lack of production positively correlates with quality - the whole reason production methods have become so advanced is to eliminate this risk for a more reliable result. But that’s the thing - without the risk, you lose the “failure” which can so often make a piece of art rather than break it. Technical flamboyance is incontrovertibly replacing feel across all artforms, and at least I personally suffer for it, if not others as well as me.
Okay, by changing from the specific to the general I’ve gone from critique to rant - but just to give context.
Angelina is commendable for being able to replicate these invaluable imperfections, which definitely enhances how good she is as a singer - on top of her ability to hit the notes with the right tone, timbre and dynamics - and do all of this with uncanny precision for her age. I just don’t think these criteria alone are enough to make her the best singer in the world.
Silhouette, I never stated she was the best singer of all time! That’s absurd!
My thread title meant to say she is current best singer. I understand the ambiguous of my thread title now. Apologies for that.
Yeah I don’t think I mentioned anything about being the best singer of all time, just in the world.
In fact, I think it was only you who brought up “of all time” in reference to Michael Jackson.
I did my best to stick to the title as “the best singer in the world”, and don’t think I implied more than that - though obviously Whitney and Amy both happen to be dead now I suppose. The only reason I brought them up specifically is because Angelina was covering songs by them, and she mimicked them incredibly, whereas Frank Sinatra, Elton John and Freddie Mercury she admittedly wasn’t mimicking quite so well because they’re males. And like Michael, they’re all dead too apart from Elton 
So if you’re looking into the fact that I was mentioning singers who are no longer current, that’s just coincidence because those were the artists that she was covering who people here happened to link…
For the best singer in the world who is still alive, I’d have to have a long think about that - I was just offering a critique, that may or may not make Angelina still the best singer in the world (at least for now), but probably makes her not the best singer in the world for the reasons I went into.
Eh, I dunno - just my two cents.
No, I appreciate that. Honestly though, would you rather go to an Adele concert or an Angelina concert?
As far as the best singer of all time, I don’t think that’s a possible question to answer… we have hundreds of one hit wonders who are the only person on earth who can sing that song better than anyone.
Angelina may never be a singer song writer. A singer songwriter really raises the bar for me.
At her age… Angelina really makes me think she is a prodigy of singing. Those don’t come around every day!
Angelina singing Adele performance in Norway:
To answer honestly? Neither. Unfortunately for me, I find mainstream music too frustrating and unstimulating - I usually have the patience to give some such songs a listen, and offer input that I try to make as impartial as possible, but naturally it won’t be completely devoid of my own subjectivity because it’s an artform. I find it difficult to pinpoint what exactly is going on, but to a certain extent I like music to be challenging (though not for its own sake) or at least thoughtfully/emotionally unique in a way that’s ear-catching beyond the base level e.g. because it has some catchy hook or an overly repeated simplistic theme (which is all pop is to me).
In short, I’m a music snob - though I dislike music snobs who not-so-secretly wallow in their “superior” discretion. I prefer to be self-effacing about it, because I begrudgingly appreciate that my views on music don’t have to be objective.
If I was to consider grounds for going to one of those concerts over the other, I’d be debating whether I wanted to appreciate a presentation of life experience, or to be impressed by something uncannily close to this despite an explicit lack of need for afore-mentioned life experience.
To be consistent with my above post on this thread, I’d rationally have to side with Adele, but going by feel (which I prefer to do when it comes to music) I can take or leave the overall result of either scenario.
This concords with a point I was trying to make about art “being special”.
I don’t mean a “specific person” being “special”, but an experience being special that just happens to involve some person rather than another. The “who’s who” specifics to me are largely irrelevant, it’s the generality of “specialness” that I think is so important (it’s the market technique of “branding” that so ingeniously inverts this in favour of abusing psychological loopholes for material profit).
Prodigies are special in that they are so rare. I honestly enjoy them in much the same way that I am impressed by all outstanding virtuosity from all ages - it’s a rare and welcome surprise. However the market for any old virtuoso has become somewhat saturated with easy global exposure enabled and facilitated by the internet through youtube etc. Nowadays virtuosity is less special, so it requires that extra competitive ingredient of “most efficiently achieved virtuosity” by younger and younger children.
I see this tendency as ill-fated, because I don’t want to feel like talented children are being more and more pressured too hard to become one of these 1-in-a-multimillion prodigies.
Instead I would prefer a much more healthy and sustainable competition to perform special experiences by virtue of working on a unique life that begs to be expressed in a special way. This is why I war against the tendency to fake virtuosity with too much production value eliminating the special in favour of more homogenous reliability to better suit a capitalist market for music that relies on uncertain debt and credit and therefore minimising risk. For the same reason I war against the showcasing of excessive warbling to compensate for artists being forced into the homogenous and reliable “well produced” limbo required of modern musical success. Even a naturally distinctive and imperfect, but honest rendition is preferable to my ears, even though I am particularly sensitive to pitch. It can really grate on my ears when notes are unintentionally missed.
I hope the irony of this performance is not only appreciated by me: a 13 year old laments with nostalgia, looking back through rose coloured glasses at the times “when we were young”.
Literally living the years of her life, or not yet even having lived the years of her own life that much older artists were fondly recalling from much further in the future…
Silhouette,
I’ll try to redeem angelina for you one last time.
She considers herself primarily a jazz singer, that was her influence as a child, and by child I mean 3 years old!
Here’s a song she sang that might make you think twice about what she’s about:
A long long time ago I proved through a masterful display of sophistry and well crafted argument that music could be objectively good or bad… in the same way an answer to a mathematical problem would be true or false. Forget how I did it but it was good man and probably right (I’m very often right).
I think a bit of superior discretion is called for if you are, indeed, a genuine music-snob. I am. I will not only tell you what you’re listening to sucks, but how and why it sucks. And if you do not understand, it’s not because there isn’t objectively good and bad music, but because you hath not ears and such things are inaccessible to you.
She’s singing someone else’s arrangement again?
Honestly don’t worry about trying to “redeem” her - I am conclusively impressed by her talents. My points are independent of her influences though, which I am sure vary far from mainstream pop. I’d still argue that this song lends itself to mainstream sensibilities with its consonant cadences and repetitious banalities about barley, but that’s Nico’s fault, not hers.
The performance is second to none, but allow me to temporarily debase this thread about the “best singer in the world” by offering an almost exactly contrasting piece of music that I was literally just listening to, which will no doubt simultaneously disgust and bore you: youtube.com/watch?v=5fIZ_T178ag - to give you an idea of the degree to which music can (and I think should) vary.
Obviously I am straying far from the topic of “best singer in the world” here, but to the ends of arguing my wider point about art.
The piece I linked is almost unbearably oppressive with its slow, heavy monotany, decorated only with “appropriately” almost indiscernable growls for vocals, which together with their “musical” backing nonetheless evoke a bleak, futile and unpleasant burden to consciously exist at all. The piece is broadly divided into 3 stages. The first third (twice as long in itself than a contemporary pop song) sets this scene, the second third raises the consequences of the first to thoughts of a resolution to finally act upon such a consumed existence, opening with an elongated wail of distress (expertly depicted by guitar slides with huge echo and delay effects with a volume shifter, I think?) that has surpassed all reason and the piece comes to a kind of “life” bathed in all the pain and unresolved negative emotions of the the first third. The final third is the fulfilment of all that came before it, closing the song in an extended simulation of physically as well as metaphorically drowning, and a kind of simple peace and resolution, absolution and maybe even revenge against life itself.
Whether you were able to sit through the entire 17 minute piece or not - why do I bring this up at all?
Instead of light, we have pure darkness - but if you dare to listen, we are unavoidably plummeted into the entire world of the composer(s) whether we like it or not, and there is a depth of connection experienced here that cannot be compared to things like the sunny recollections of parting with a lover (your second link).
Through some combination of seemingly endlessly repeated themes and a lack of melodic colour that would otherwise brighten the incessant dissonance, we gain a hugely more powerful insight to one of the more extreme extents of the human condition than an Angelina song could ever offer us.
The exact opposite of all her talent resulted in a far more meaningful artistic piece? Well, I’ve listened to this piece on and off many many times in my life, and I’ll probably never listen to Angelina again by my own accord.
Again, it’s all subjective, but my point is that the depth I’m seeking doesn’t lie in a nice voice. Art goes deeper.
Before I listen to your song,
It sounds like a 3 movement sonata from Beethoven… who invented that shit in the first place.
As far as classical music is concerned (and I’m sure you’ll love this tidbit). The most beautiful songs are not songs for god, but songs for funeral marches, songs to death and songs to the devil! Pretty ironic eh?
So… I listened to your song. It sounds like background music to me. You know, back before recordings occurred, if your song didn’t grab attention on first hearing … your career tanked instantly.
The selective pressure was so much higher back then!
Now, anyone can get away with anything!
Let me show you an example from Liszt…