Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2004 19:42:47 -0000 From: "steven_durben" To: audities@smoe.org Subject: Re: worst bands Message-ID: Regarding Michael Bolton... I've never knowingly met a Michael Bolton fan. NEVER. Not even by pure happenstance. Im just so curious given the volumes of stuff he sold. Could there be a secret cult I know nothing about? I actually have a friend whom I met on another Internet list who is an open and unabashed Michael Bolton fanatic. She holds a Ph.D. in music and is the head music librarian at a large midwestern university. She's in her late thirties, is highly intelligent, happily married, and doesn't appear to have suffered from brain tumors, drug addiction, an anvil dropped on her head, or anything else that might've caused the sort of neurological damage that one would presuppose in an otherwise-intelligent Michael Bolton fanatic. Her academic credentials give her a certain amount of rhetorical juice when we engage in one of our frequent friendly arguments about Bolton's merits, but in the end her frequent references to his leonine hairdo and her attraction to long-haired men undermine her scholarly credibility. I mean, hey, I think Izabella Skorupco's hot, but you're never going to see me defend *her* music. She's pretty used to defending both Bolton and her own taste; she says that people constantly put Bolton down in her presence once they find out that she likes him and his music. She gets quite exercised about the fact that hitherto-polite people will dump on Bolton at the drop of a hat, not in spite of the fact that she likes him but *because* she likes him. It's as though liking Bolton is a serious-enough social faux pas that people consider it a license to demean him in her presence, which she finds quite rude. She has a point. Nevertheless, since she and I are friends and I actually try to debate her upon the man's musical merits while taking her arguments seriously (we went round and round for weeks on whether or not his cover of "When a Man Loves a Woman" did Percy Sledge a favor or not), she takes it in stride when I launch salvos at her hero. And, believe me, I do. There's nothing quite like having a friend whom you can tease about Michael Bolton and get away with it. Among the epithets I've used to refer to Bolton in our discussions are "the Sheik of Shriek", "Soul Stepbrother Number One", "the Hollering Hairdo", "the Bellow Fellow", "the Miasma of Melisma", "Michael Boil-tone", and my all-time favorite, "the Hunky Hunky Howler Monkey". Gregory Sager