The 1980s icon Linda Ronstadt knew was never a good singer: “More an entertainer”
Linda Ronstadt tended to have a much higher standard for her music than most other pop singers.
Not everyone was looking to be the pop-flavoured answer to people like Rosemary Clooney and Frank Sinatra, but Ronstadt clearly had the same kind of talent and finesse in her voice to compete with some of the greatest artists of any generation when she opened her mouth to sing. But she also felt that there were some artists who didn’t really have what it took to be the same kind of showstopping voice that she had.
But no one could have managed to have the kind of diction that Ronstadt had whenever she sang. She may have been insanely critical of her own voice in the beginning, but the idea of someone being able to have that strong a voice, no matter what genre she was working in, was beyond anything that anyone could do. That was all well and good at the time, but that wasn’t what the biggest names of the 1980s were focused on anymore.
The biggest draw to music at that point was MTV, and even though there were more than a few artists who had a few cheap videos and then disappeared, everyone had started using it as an art form. Ronstadt could do the same thing when she wanted to, but she never felt that she fit in with the television world, either. She liked the idea of playing her music to the people directly, and the last thing she wanted to do was lip-sync to one of her songs.
That’s not to say that she couldn’t see the beauty in what the next generation was doing. The best artists at the time were people like Michael Jackson, and since Ronstadt was at the 25th anniversary of Motown when ‘The King of Pop’ busted out the moonwalk for the first time, it’s not like she couldn’t see one of the biggest stars in the making right there. But in a world dominated by people like Jackson and Prince, Ronstadt was a little less thrilled with what Madonna was doing.
Then again, how the hell could anyone have ignored what Madonna was singing about? She lived to be a little bit in-your-face whenever she sang one of her songs, and even though there were moments where she didn’t have to have the cleanest voice in the world, it was enough to carry her through some of the greatest highs that any pop singer has ever reached. But Ronstadt did have a problem with that one word: singer.
As far as she could tell, Madonna was a fabulous performer, but she drew the line at calling her a good singer by any stretch, saying, “The culture is giving a lot of support to people who are entertainers, but who are… entertainers more, like Madonna, she’s more an entertainer than she’s a singer. Madonna’s not much of a singer but she’s a stylist, and she does something that’s evocative. I’ve never had a record of hers in my house, but I have to say that she’s evocative. I mean, she’s talented, she has her own little art thing that she does. Whatever it is.”
But that can of stylist background was half the reason why Madonna worked so well. Visual imagery was never a bad thing for her, and whenever looking at her greatest works, it’s as much about the way that she presents herself as it is about the music, whether that’s the image of her performing ‘Like A Virgin’ at the VMAs, the religious imagery in ‘Like a Prayer’, or the stuttering beats on ‘Ray of Light’.
Each of them adds to the kind of mystique that she was always going for, but that shouldn’t turn people off from what she does as a singer. There may be a few times where her voice doesn’t mesh with the traditional manner of singing or anything, but throughout her entire career, has there ever been a time when Madonna was trying to embrace the traditional side of popular music?
