Do you hear that popping sound? It's my eardrums exploding.

I hate this woman. I hate her breast implants and her bad roots. I hate the fact that, while my fabulous singer friends who are talented and amazing slave in crappy jobs so they can take three gigs a year, she signs the largest record deal in the UK ever. EVER. That the record label, who also records some excellent legitimate artists and should know better, is marketing her as a classical singer makes my blood boil. Yes, she went to the RAM. So? This does not mean she has talent. Potential, maybe. But I've heard some Juilliard grads that would make every hair on your head jump out of its follicle and run from the room. Yes, she won some Welsh choirgirl competition 100 years ago. She, according to the BBC, is a prodigy. But a prodigy for what? Her accomplishment of becoming some Welsh soccer team's mascot? She has been praised for her performances of sacred and traditional music, and I can believe from listening to her that she would be an excellent chorister. But the voice is not well trained. She sings miked, she uses no support, her vibrato is thin and out of control, her technique abysmal. I am appalled that her marketing machine will mislead the public into thinking that this is what opera singers sound like.

I am always angered by successes such as this. They dig at my sense of fair play. Why should actual performing singers be told that classical recordings are a dying breed so they shouldn't bother trying to make them? Why is this label calling her an opera singer if opera doesn't sell? Oh, wait, real opera doesn't sell. Dolly Parton songs in Italian sell. Poor Dolly. The BBC called her an opera singer. How can she be an opera singer? Outside of school, she's NEVER BEEN IN AN OPERA. Take a look at this. A great classic success story? Hardly. This is not Carmen. This is Jessica Simpson singing the Habanera, if JS were Welsh and even more of a talentless hack than she already is. This girl was signed right out of school. She was signed for her looks and for her marketing potential. Ironically, I've seen better looking and more talented singers get passed over for roles every day. This girl couldn't carry a role in a performance if it were stuffed into her already overcrowded bra.

But the thing I hate about her the most? She is called a mezzo, and this is what the idiots who buy her album are going to think a mezzo sounds like. Fabulous.