I have been watching The Voice from season one but, I confess, never all the way through.<\/p>\n
This may sound strange, but I simply LOVE the chair-turning round in which four professional singers have their back to the auditioning singer and have to judge him\/her\/them solely on their voice. (The live audience may provide some influence, but mostly…) I watch this round\u00a0in my browser and switch the window away so I also cannot see the singer before they begin. I pretend like I’m a judge and turn my window only if I really\u00a0like what I hear! IMHO, the only thing that could improve the bind auditions would\u00a0be if they truly became blind — no intro story to try to sway our opinions before they go onstage. Give us exactly the same experience as the coaches.<\/p>\n
This show has lost me\u00a0well before the final round in each of the five first seasons. The battle rounds were a BIG problem at first. I found them tedious, and with no power to vote for the survivors, there was little investment for me. In fact, the battle rounds tripped me up until season 5, when they introduced the steal — this added drama and helped quite a bit. It did not, however, solve many of the other underlying flaws in the battle rounds:<\/p>\n
The biggest problem with the battle rounds is that they don’t show every\u00a0type of singer to full advantage.\u00a0I have noticed that no duo has ever survived the battle (to my knowledge — correct me if I’m wrong). The battles also unfairly favor singers who can do “tricks” with their voices — falsettos or warbles or long, long notes. Don’t get me wrong, some of that stuff is cool, but there’s a lot more to a great singer. The net result of the battle rounds is, I fear, a group of finalists who are all of a type — big voices and high energy.\u00a0Since the\u00a0singers did not even get to choose their own songs they have absolutely no mechanism for defining themselves as artists until the final rounds, by which time I’ve lost track of whatever\u00a0individuality they brought into the competition in the auditions.<\/p>\n
Adding a second battle round this\u00a0season was an awful decision for all the reasons I just said — if one is bad, two is, well…<\/p>\n
I got through the battle rounds in season six by half-watching\/listening on my browser while I did other things. This approach meant that by the finals, there were some singers I was definitely more invested in than others — the ones that made me sit up and pay attention!<\/p>\n
After the battle rounds, each coach’s top five had the chance to perform a song of their own choosing and the coach then picked their top there.\u00a0At least this time the singers got to choose their own songs and begin to define themselves, but once again as the viewer of a reality show, I was left feeling no connection. It wasn’t even up to me until there were 12 left standing.<\/p>\n
The finals rounds are a problem because of their slow pace. Each week, two artists are eliminated, and then we have to do the whole thing again. We go from 12 to 10 to 8 to 5 to 3. Each singer is essentially awesome at karaoke, and we watch them choose\u00a0different songs each week.<\/p>\n
Again, I’m sticking with it this year by watching in my browser while I do something else.\u00a0At this point there is only one thing that has made any of the singers stand out from the rest — an emotional connection.\u00a0This is not something that the coaches have touched\u00a0on much as they are hyper-focused on technicalities. Me, not knowing musical technicalities, only know that some\u00a0singers make me feel a song and others are just very, very good with song choice and vocals.<\/p>\n
This year, Josh and Kristin have made me feel it. Josh actually gave me goosebumps during his performance of “I\u00a0Can’t Make You Love Me.”<\/p>\n
Ultimately, I feel like The Voice is giving us a few things that other singing\u00a0competitions don’t have and I applaud them for that. I will probably keep watching the chair-turning try-outs every new season. But I don’t feel like they’ve found the right follow-up yet, and I wish they would keep trying. Playing\u00a0with the format to see what happens.\u00a0FWIW, I would like to see more audience\u00a0participation much, much sooner (#1 recommendation) and possibly an alternative to the battle rounds that encourages more diversity in the final choices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have been watching The Voice from season one but, I confess, never all the way through. This may sound strange, but I simply LOVE the chair-turning round in which four professional singers have their back to the auditioning singer and have to judge him\/her\/them solely on their voice. (The live audience may provide some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[498],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3631"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3631\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3632,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3631\/revisions\/3632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}