The Scottish Name... Don't THINK About Mentioning It
April 26 2009

Theatre people will never talk about Shakespeare's Macbeth. They only talk about The Scottish Play. It's an old superstition. Go figure.

Well, the Pianobabbler is proposing a similar tradition in music.

There is a certain Scottish woman. She has been in the headlines worldwide. The story we are told, is that no one expected such a homely (the condescending euphemism for 'ugly') woman to be so spectacular a singer.

The author of The Scottish Play might have justly painted the engineers of this sad object of attention as False of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand, hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey!

There is no story. She is no singer. We serve her ill by paying attention. We humiliate ourselves by attributing artistic importance to her work. The public has been duped.

So to stop feeding the frenzy, the Pianobabbler proposes we only refer to her as The Scottish Woman. Maybe she will then go away. And we can all return to the arts.

What happened? The Scottish Woman auditioned for a TV show. Her performance was given months before the story broke. which means plenty of people knew about her singing long ago. Which means, that the media's picking up on the story must have been engineered. It's not a story. It's a marketing stunt.

And a damn insulting marketing stunt. Insulting to The Scottish Woman. The story is not her voice. It's Prime-A karaoke singing. No more. It's that she's not good looking. The implied logic is that only lookers are artists. She's being treated, almost literally, as a talking-dog tale.

It's insulting to musicians. Artists have it bad enough, being judged for their art on the merits of their looks. We certainly do not need this dense reinforcement of a dunderheaded prejudice. While some manage to escape its effects. Elvis Costello, who's not much more talented than our Scottish friend- but I digress -comes to mind. But many gifted people, women especially, cannot escape the look issue.

It's insulting to the public. Media have the power to divert and direct its attention. We are their willing marionettes, to a point. The strings are being pulled towards this tale as one of emotion and art. A variant on Shine. Nothing of the sort. It's mass marketing for a mediocre TV show whose appeal will baffle near-future generations, every bit as the appeal of 1960's televised Charades baffles ours.

And while the mass attention is diverted in this way, gifted musicians, beautiful and not, are being ignored. What a waste.

So let us all agree to allow The Scottish Woman to get on with her life. Let's all return to the daily business of seeking out and valuing good music. And let's resolve not to charge at every red flag marketing departments of desperate TV shows wave at us.

Maybe they're the same doinks who coined It's not over till the fat lady sings.

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