Final rant of the dragon ride

Hate is a strong word, but I think I hate Simon Cowell. Forget all the pop shit he cranks out like he’s vacationing in Thailand; if he didn’t do it, someone else would. The principal reason I hate Simon Cowell is Il Divo. It’s the final death twitch of the Renaissance, the triumph of economic rationalism over beauty.

‘Unbreak My Heart’ from Toni Braxton was not my cup of tea, but you know, it was good for macking in highschool. ‘Regresa a mi’ is only good for making me want to stick knitting needles in my ears and the ears of those I love. ‘My Way’ (check out the original French lyrics on the link – crazy) from Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Elvis Presley, and even that guy who performs it on Italian variety shows, going “I did it my-my-my-my-my way” instead of “I did it myyyyyy way’, was my favorite post-second-guessy-breakup song. Besides maybe ‘I Changed My Mind’ by the Quannum Project. Of course, that was before Il Divo gave us “A Mi Manera”, a noise as messy as regret itself. What’s next? Are you going to target the Quannum Project next, you sick bastard? No. Worse. On the new album they do ‘Unchained Melody’, giving a cold shower to one of the best oral sex songs ever written, as if putting it in ‘Ghost’ hadn’t done enough damage. Is there so much oral sex in the world, Simon Cowell, that you want us to have less?

Simon Cowell. Jehovah did not plague him with locusts, nor did the earth gape open to swallow him whole when he decided to create a monster that could simultaneously piss on opera, pop, and R&B. For he, in himself, is our God-sent plague, he our road to perdition. We deserve him, for he knew that ‘Unbreak My Heart’ or ‘My Way’, poorly opera-cized from the pretty mouths of two tenors, one ‘vox populi’ and one lonely little baritone, was going to sell like hotcakes to people who want to be too sophisticated for elevator music but aren’t city enough to see classically trained singers like Fides Krucker, Romina di Gasbarro or kajillion others who successfully incorporate pop sounds into their repertoires. And he also had to have known it was going to suck. Suck in a way that is almost impossible to comprehend.

Another reason I hate Simon Cowell is that he ragged on Geri Halliwell in 2004 for being a UN Goodwill Ambassador, saying it made her look foolish as ‘she knew nothing about it’. What sort of dumbass expects a UN Goodwill Ambassador to know anything about anything? Their job is to be famous. That’s why they’re UN Goodwill Ambassadors, for fuck’s sake, and not actual ambassadors. Is that rocket science, Simon Cowell? Is that like ‘lecturing NASA on rocket physics’? Dick.

On a cute note, look what Carlos Marin listed as his personal ambition in the biography section on Il Divo’s website. God, I miss European boys sometimes.