Death by singing

No, God, please… Make him stop, I beseeched in my mind as I stood in church last Sunday. The gentleman right beside me had opened his mouth to sing the first few bars of the entrance hymn. It wasn’t that he was screeching or belting it out. His voice was just always half a key off of every note — just couldn’t hit it. But the energy was there — too much of it, in fact. He was all-out with the emotion. The enunciation, phrasing and breathing pauses were perfect. His voice even had that slight vibrato at the end of every line, except that he was painfully off-key. Yet he had a big smile plastered on his face and his eyes were twinkling. He was having the time of his life!

I double-checked. It wasn’t my imagination nor was it my inner bitch because other people surrounding us snapped their heads in his direction the moment he started singing. They looked at him first, then at me. Initially, Then it dawned on me: they must have been thinking I was his wife and the expression on their faces was — I surmise — a plea for me to go ahead and gag him! 

I tried to inch farther away from him to make it clear we weren’t, er, together, but people were shoulder to shoulder in the pew. I thought of transferring my nine-year-old between us to serve as a buffer but she was, at this point, miming her own slow death due to the gentleman’s wailing.

Meantime, the singing continued with total abandon.  The gentleman went as far as closing his eyes on the high notes he would never be able to reach, even with a cherry picker truck. While he was lost in song, I snuck glances at him: middle-aged like me but a little shorter, gray hair at the temples, big eyes, regular clothes, regular shoes, regular watch — regular guy even if there was nothing regular about his absence of inhibition in a church full of strangers. 

Wait. That wasn’t all. He saved the best for last. When the music for the upbeat, Filipino recessional hymn, Humayo’t Ihayag, was played, out came his inner Disco Fever’s Denny Terio, circa ‘’77, as he shimmied and clapped and brayed at the top of his lungs. He wasn’t simply smiling. He was beaming. My nine-year-old asked, in confusion, “Mama, why is he like that?”

“He’s in deep prayer — happily. He’s thanking God for everything he’s been given,” I told her.

“He must be rich,” she said.

“Very.”

Admirable man, despite the hour’s worth of ear pain. Still, I do have a beef with men who sing. I know: weird. Unless you’re Justin Timberlake, though, don’t sing.

It gets weirder. I don’t “get” Frank Sinatra — seriously.  Now I know an entire generation of Baby Boomers will come at me with newly sharpened machetes. Just being honest. People look at me with undisguised contempt when I mention I don’t get Frank, big band music, debonair balladeers and crisp, clear voices. And yes, that includes Tony Bennett although I did leave my heart in San Francisco because I lived there for many years. It also includes Michael Buble and Harry Connick.

I much prefer the so-called noise of rock music, the rough, raspy vocals of Eric Clapton, Rod Stewart, Mick Jagger, Axl Rose, David Bowie, Michael McDonald, Chris Daughtry, Steven Tyler, Michael Stipe, Eddie Vedder and Anthony Kiedes or the strangely high-pitched wailing of Steve Perry, Mick Hucknall and Adam Levine.

I also prefer the gritty R&B sound of Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Jay Z. 

Rap is my religion and my favorite rapper of all time is Eminem — the great storyteller of pain, yes, of darkness, yes, and ultimately of reality that is often ugly. He’s not going to fly you to the moon or send in the clowns to cheer you up. He’ll take you to 8 Mile Road to see the other side of the tracks and how the other half lives.

But then I have male cousins who love to sing ballads and I “get” their singing. What gives? The men in my family can sing until the cows come home. Yes, they lose themselves in song. Yes, they close their eyes on the high notes. Yes, they can carry a tune — some better than others. So how come other men who sing turn me off? 

Is it fondness and affection for them, or is it simply a surrender to something one has no control over because I can’t very well make anybody in my family stop singing? Or perhaps it’s quiet awe at someone else’s courage in doing something I couldn’t do — I can’t sing to save my life. Is it the same reason why I didn’t go right ahead and choke that gentleman beside me in church? As the minutes wore on, he did start sounding like Justin Timberlake. Or at least he must have felt like him.