Look, I am going state outright that I don’t like the guy’s music. I never have and I never will. You might and that is your prerogative. In terms of marketing and producing something that sells, well he seems to have got that right so credit where it is due I suppose.
Right, now on to the South African national anthem. Lets be honest, I mean brutally honest. When performing a national anthem you generally are going to be unaccompanied with very little effects. This mean you best have a vocal range above or below a semi-tone. I am sorry but it is the truth. Singing in a studio now a days is one thing. Stacks of pitch correctors, reverb, echoes and many more things to make you sound like a rock opera singing. Multiple takes to get it right, pitch shifting and the list goes on and on!
Then we move on to live gigs performing with your band. Generally the sound is so out of whack, levels are all over the place and then add in the alcohol and weed floating around ANYTHING is going to sound good.
Then we look at the national anthem. First let us define national anthem:
“A national anthem (also national hymn, song etc.) is a generally patriotic musical composition that evokes and eulogizes the history, traditions and struggles of its people, recognized either by a nation's government as the official national song, or by convention through use by the people.”
http://ping.fm/veRiY
So with that in mind let us consider what a good candidate to sing a national anthem would be:
- A child (as illustrated by the FNB advert)
- Someone with a voice that has the capacity to describe the emotion of what is being sung
- Someone with a vocal range and strength that doesn’t require accompaniment.
The point being that the singer HAS to be able to evoke enough emotion and patriotism in the audience listen that they end up standing with their right hand clenched over their heart singing the national anthem with a tear running down their cheek as they sing the last line of their anthem.
Well Ard Matthews 1) is not a child (although it looks like his mom still dresses him) 2) Has a voice that carries no emotion 3) Does not have a voice that is strong enough to go without accompaniment. So in my opinion no, he shouldn’t have done it. Perhaps pride got the better of him? Ag who knows.
To Ard Matthews, sorry bud. I can’t even say nice try. At least you know now for next time.
In Ard Matthews defence: our national anthem is not one that evokes a great deal of emotion. It is wishy washy and tries to please everyone. In my opinion it should have been rewritten in it’s entirety. Not borrowed from bits and pieces of everything.
To close: I remember the days when you would stand when you heard the national anthem, the days you would sing it in school laughing and joking about it yet feeling and overwhelming sense of pride because it belonged to your country.I also remember the days where the youth stood up for the elderly on buses, men let woman through the door first, adults where respected not because they could dish out a hiding but because they had been around longer, sportsman held down full time jobs and children ran around outside playing sports, climbing trees and building forts. Fond memories, stashed alongside the ones of singing my country’s national anthem.
P.S. for all those that are going to bin the old regime labels on me, don’t bother. I am not condoning what previous political parties did, all I want is the same sort of pride in our country that was found then to prevail today and in the future. Everyone in our country just wants to make enough money to get out. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and ask your buddies how many of them would leave if they could.
P.S.S If you turn this comment thread into a political soap box I will remove your comments. If your comments are objective they will stay, I don’t want emotional baggage here.
When running performance tests on it it turned out that adding 5000 items to this array it would take 71 milliseconds as opposed to the 2 milliseconds to do it natively. What a bummer. Well back to the drawing board I guess. This means if it takes 0.0004 milliseconds to add one item natively it would take 0.015 milliseconds to add one time using this method. This equates to 37.5 times longer!
When running performance tests on it it turned out that adding 5000 items to this array would take approximately 35 times longer than doing it natively. What a bummer. Well back to the drawing board I guess. This means if it takes 0.0004 milliseconds to add one item natively it would take 0.015 milliseconds to add one time using this method.