Nobody is really arguing against Celine Dion?
Huh.
Back in my day all we did was talk about how much we hated Celine Dion. (Although I never had much of an opinion either way. She never did anything I found offensive, she never did anything I would chose to listen too.)
She is, technically, a very good singer, but...
I'm far from an expert on Celine Dion but it seems like..
(A) She has an extremely limited range of song topics. (Love songs, also love songs, and love songs.)
(B) As a performer she's incapable of humor, sarcasm, subtlety or lust. All her songs don't sound the same, but they all serve the same function; overwrought songs about eternal love, unchallenging and predictable.
(C) She's a rhythmically boring singer. She hits NOTES perfectly but she also tends to hit note-lengths perfectly. Each quarter note takes exactly 1/4 th of the measure, and she can't swing or groove.
(D) Her choices of words and syllables to emphasize while singing are boring and predictable. Contrast with Whitney Houston who is great at finding surprising and interesting ways to deliver her vocal lines.
(E) She sold a lot of albums because (A) EuroVision is a major boost, (B) she's not just BI but MULTI-lingual, and (C) there are a lot of people who don't really like music much, and just want unchallenging background music.
Although googling around it seems like she's still really popular (I had no idea!) she has a passionate fanbase, she's made some attempts to update her sound, and (IMO) she has vassssttly improved as a vocalist in recent years
and she is kind of cool for the first time ever. Good for her!
(And am I the only one who read Carl Wilson's "
Let's Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste? It talks about how Celine Dion is a really important, inspirational figure to French-Speaking Canadians, and how controversial that is, and how the bland image she cultivated in America is really not true.)