I don't get opera.
I don't get opera like I don't get country music.
And I don't get both of them like I don't get rap. By the way, did you know that rap is spelled with a silent and invisible 'c' ?

The West Australian Opera Company (now don't laugh, we do actually have stuff like that over here and no, they don't wear bikinis or wrestle crocodiles) is turning 40 this year! Yay! And this Saturday they are celebrating with a concert at the Government House Ballroom. DON'T TURN UP IF YOU ARE FAT OR UGLY! Nowadays opera singers have to be young and hot and preferably personal trainers during the day and the audience has to be hip and happening as well as nicely blinged. Yo!

Poor old Dame Joan Sutherland. No oil painting, was she? These days La Stupenda (as she was known) could not compete with the market appeal of Marina Prior. I was always told that opera singers were "large" because they had big lungs and big lungs needed an acoustic body! Maybe the microphones are bigger now? Maybe the singers have birch veneers? Maybe it's Maybelline?

And what's happening with all these pop-opera groups like Il Divo and The Ten Tenors, etc etc.? They're everywhere! I blame Pavarotti for starting it: him and Domingo and Carreras and their little boy band!

It's just all weird and warbly to me. The only good opera is rock opera. Thank you, Queen! Scaramoosh scaramoosh, shall we do the fandango?! Nothing odd about them.

But here is the worry: First it starts with the various trendy opera ensemble groups popping up in our weekend newspaper lift-outs. Then we'll see Amici Forever doing a cross-over featuring Gwen Stefani (what genre hasn't she had a go at?). Next we will have it the other way around and Beyonce will be covering a song from La Boheme ..
and then .. oh dear readers! And then the rap blingerati will mutate and 50 Cent will release an album called LA SCALA at the same time as Eminem releases a video of him narrating, in tempo, the entire four acts of Il Trovatore with a holographic Maria Callas until finally
THE WORLD ENDS WHEN KEITH URBAN, DOLLY PARTON, SHANIA TWAIN, AND GARTH BROOKS FORM A COMPANY AND DEBUT IL RIGOLETTO WITH A BOOT-SCOOTING CHORUS OF BREAKDANCERS AT NASHVILLE AND TAMWORTH!!!! yEE hAA!


oh rap.


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