“I’m sick of it”: The genre Linda Ronstadt grew to hate
Any singer who’s in it for the long haul could afford to take a few cues from Linda Ronstadt.
She might not have been the coolest singer in the world during every facet of her career, but ever since she first started singing at the Troubadour, she has done pretty much everything she wanted to do by the time she retired without worrying whether her records were going to sell or not. If she succeeded or failed, it was going to be on her own terms, but after years in the industry, there tended to be a few genres that Ronstadt felt didn’t deserve to be revisited ever again.
Then again, there are probably a few genres that wouldn’t have been a good fit for her right out of the gate. She wasn’t really the type to sing heavy metal, and even if her heroes were the biggest names in early rock and roll and soul music, there wasn’t a chance that she was ever going to hop over a hip-hop beat and do the same kind of gospel runs that you heard out of modern R&B.
Her voice wasn’t really built for that, but ever since she became the queen of country rock, she has always been trying to reinvent herself ever so slightly. She didn’t want to be playing generic country music for the rest of her life, and once she reached the 1980s, you could hear her trying out different spaces within her own voice, whether that was working on new wave songs by Elvis Costello or trying her hand at singing on Broadway in the production of Pirates of Penzance.
But as soon as she got a taste of what those kinds of singers were like onstage, she wanted to go far beyond her roots in country. She hadn’t had proper musical training ever since she started, and when she began working with Nelson Riddle and eventually making her Mexican albums, she was going to get a better handle on how she could sing. It was a lot different from what she was used to, but when someone refines their instrument that much, they’re not going to want to go back to generic pop music.
And considering Ronstadt was seeing how the sausage was getting made, it’s not like she wanted to go back there, either. She had already seen the shady side of the industry, and while she was able to tactfully evade some of the more disgusting pieces of the industry as best she could, she felt that there was no point for her to try and score another pop hit by the time she reached her twilight years.
Her voice wasn’t going to fit on pop radio anyway, and even in the late 1990s when crooners like Celine Dion were storming the charts, Ronstadt didn’t think that pop had anything good to offer anymore, saying, “I’m 53 years old, and I’m sick of it. I’ve just had enough of it. I hate to travel, and I hate the culture, you know? I hate it all. I’m not interested in pop music. I’m not even very interested in recorded music. I’m really interested in the kind of music that happens in my living room. I’m really sad that this culture delegates dance, music and art to professionals all the time and that it can’t be validated unless it goes on television.”
That’s a lot easier to say for someone that was seeing bands like Backstreet Boys and the Spice Girls on television, but it was simply another version of what music could be. It was a far cry from the days when Ronstadt was used to leaving it all onstage, but the entertainment industry was just moving in another direction that catered to the bubblegum side of pop a lot more often.
There were still artists out there that had something to say, but Ronstadt felt that she was better off staying far away from the usual flavours of the day in the late 1990s. That wasn’t what she was brought up to listen to, and she was bound to be a lot more happy once she started working with people like Aaron Neville instead.
