About My McLovin

nobody@vox.com(akaijen) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 10:07:08 -0500

The formula for a winning KttD performance is at once obvious and elusive. Of course you must sing badly, but as has already been pointed out this year, merely not hitting a few notes here and there with less than crystal clear tone is not going to bring home the prize. Now that the truly tone-deaf have mustered up the guts to put a lifetime of ridicule behind them and willfully put their vocal non-stylings to the ultimate test, those who can kinda sing may never take the podium again.

As Hotrod has chronicled these past few weeks, song choice and presentation is as much part of the game as your inability to carry a tune. One of B's challenges would be learning the lyrics to any song he chose. He would also need to project. And anyone who knows B also knows that he mumbles most of the things that he says. When he speaks up, it's just louder mumblings. His biggest hurdle would be annunciation, so that there would be no question as to whether or not he knew the song.

The inspiration for Roberta Flack's already vaguely atonal "Killing Me Softly" came to me a year ago. Even though we were held hostage in Holland for two years, B's eventual showing at KttD was never far from our minds. Fantasizing about his rise to glory was mostly nostalgia for our lives lost in America. Perhaps, though, it was fate that when Emma took the crown in 2007, the first seeds were being sewn for our to return to the U.S.

To illustrate why I knew that "Killing Me Softly" would be the perfect song for B, you have to reach back in time a bit further. Not being able to sing is not a new revelation for the tone-deaf that walk among us. Look into Emma's eyes, and you can almost see the little girl with her stringy pig-tails, hand earnestly placed over her heart, receiving sideways glances from her classmates during "My Country Tis of Thee." In B's case, his own family rejected his froggy renditions of holiday favorites. These are people who have been unwittingly humiliated their whole lives, and for them to put that aside and take the stage anyway is no small achievement.

I was telling people last night that the inspiration for "Killing Me Softly" came from the movie "Little Miss Sunshine," but I was mistaken. In fact, the fog cleared when I saw this scene in the Hugh Grant movie, "About A Boy" -- one of the many Hugh Grant movies I secretly rented in Holland when B was away on business.

About a Boy - Killing Me Softly

While the kid in the movie doesn't resemble B in the slightest, it wasn't hard to imagine little B standing in front of his peers, all knobbly-kneed in his school uniform of 70s-style short-shorts and a golf shirt. He would have been shy and sincere, his little out-of-tune voice shaking and occasionally cracking. Always smiling, B's big, toothy grin would have overshadowed the fear in his eyes.

Over the past few weeks, we'd been analyzing and reanalyzing the fate of this song in B's KttD war chest. Our biggest concern was whether he could learn it, and that it might just be too hard. The real song , as we all know, is barely in key. It's whininess is almost too putrid to listen to all the way through. We knew that B's rendition would make your ears bleed, IF he could piece it all together.

In the run up to the main event, he began to abandon "Killing Me Softly" for the safer "Greatest Love of All" by Whitney Houston. Houston's cryptic ode to self-determination and the inspiration of children took on a whole new, creepy dimension when B turned his pipes on it. The clincher in that song, of course, would have been the irony of singing about dignity in a competition that trades on humiliation. Don't get me wrong, he can't sing that song either, but with "Greatest Love of All" he'd have had to rely more on the fact that it's just not right for a man to sing about children.

Contrary to popular opinion, B designed his own training regiment, practicing his songs in the bathroom with its unforgiving acoustics. All this going down with his work colleague, who we don't actually know very well at all, listening in the other room. It was Clay, who I'm sure is still skeptical about the whole thing and who is now more certain than ever that he doesn't want to live in Old Town, that convinced B to lead with "Killing Me Softly."

Even though there are those that cast a shadow over B's KttD VIII victory, I think the proof is in the audio. B's vocal warblings sent shutters through the audience. On several occasions, B himself could hear groans from the crowd. As his wife, I couldn't help but take on some of his discomfort as note after discordant note rolled off his tongue. It was much, much worse than any of his bathroom renditions.

I felt my own embarrassment and tinge of humiliation as I considered the monster that I had unleashed on that unsuspecting crowd of drunk townies and miscreants. THAT guy was going to come back to our table and sit next to me. He would probably put his arm around me and lean over for a drunken, triumphant kiss. I think I know what it's like for those parents of undeniably ugly babies. In your heart, you know that god is punishing you. But you smile and pucker up.

The Cup

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About My McLovin