Good and Grumpy

  I've created this hub to put voice to anything in the world which makes me grumpy. That pretty much covers everything in popular culture, politics, religion and art. I aim to point out the reasons that these things annoy me (and should annoy you too, if you care one bit about your place in the world), and grump thoroughly about the fact that they do.

 Please feel free to add your feelings and criticism, which I will then grump over some more if I don't agree with you. 

 I'm not a nasty, rude or bitter person and I wont be attacking any type of people for who they are (maybe for what they do) and I promise to be reasonable. If you can prove me wrong I'll back down.

 My first grump is looking at the glut of so-called talent shows on the TV these days. These programmes have the premise of giving singers a chance to show their talent in front of a panel of show business celebrities, who then choose a winner by a process of elimination.

 Sounds simple enough. But there is a glaring error in the make up of these shows...they aren't judging talent, they are judging ability.

 Talent is something which a person has as an innate quality. They are born with it and it takes little development or nurturing to bring it to a peak. Look at Beethoven, writing world famous tunes at five years old. Youtube talented kids and you get plenty of vids of near toddlers playing instruments and doing stuff they no way spent 5 years training for; they just can as they have talent.

 Then you have ability. Ability is something that is learnt. Spend enough time practising something and you eventually get better at it. You gain the ability by virtue of repeating the action many, many times. This goes for so many things in life; speech (no one is born talking), driving, cooking, sports (yes I don't believe sportsmen and women can have talent, they have skills, not talents), the list goes on.

 So now we have established the two concepts of talent and ability, lets take a look at these 'talent' shows shall we? The contestants always perform someone else's song. OK, you might say, that's because no one would recognise the song and know if they were doing it right if they sang their own. Poodles. There is no talent in imitation. Anyone can learn to ape something, the only prerequisite is the genetic disposition in the persons vocal chords to be able to produce sound of roughly the same tone and frequency as the sound being heard. That is an ability then, to imitate a heard sound. No talent required.So long as you aren't tone deaf and your vocal chords are grown in a way to allow you to produce the correct sounds, anyone is able to imitate a song by nothing more than repeatedly trying to and correcting errors until it works. Not dissimilar to learning to ride a bike, but we don't have talent contest on TV for people to ride a bike around the stage (yet).

 Now the grump.

 Why do we have talentless people who at best are just well practised karaoke players, paraded across our TV screens like they have something special to offer ? Anyone can do what they do with practice and the luck to be born with a functional throat and ears. There really is nothing talented to see there. They all sound like they have chosen their voice from a choice of no more than six successful artists, cookie cutter style, and stood in front of their bedroom mirror for two years until they got it right. Which anyone can do....

 Talent is the born with gift to create something original  from within. Ability, the learnt skill of repetition.

  Get the boring talentless people off the screens and put some original content there.

End of grump!