Poor Fergie. She and the other Black Eyed Peas have been smushed into the corner of our cultural dinner plate by the cruel tines of music history retrospectives. Will.i.am is now mostly some sort of tech mogul(?), and Fergie’s Double Duchess record, from last year, failed to move units or critics. And now, given an opportunity to reappear for a very public performance of the Star Spangled Banner, the world can only discuss just how bad a job she did.
While all of us, with immediate animal instinct, understand that Fergie’s jazz-inflected rendition of the National Anthem was something of an abomination, one man has helped explain exactly why it sounds so horrible.
Vocal coach O’Neil Gerald has, through his YouTube channel, dissected the decidedly un-Fergilicious performance with an expertise that gives us more helpful terms to work with in describing her singing than “upsetting,” “tortured,” and “actually sort of an avant-garde musical criticism of modern America if you think about it.”