I don't know about anybody else, but I'm getting really sick of histrionic singing passing for emotion that has come to dominate popular music. If I have to listen to one more wannabe diva screech out her undying love in an upper register I might just go postal. Just because opera singers, who've probably spent more hours studying how to sing than most of their pale imitators have spent singing, can use the upper registers to for emotion, doesn't mean that everybody should do it, or that popular music is even suited to such stylings.

If that abdominal woman in Las Vegas wasn't bad enough, screeching her way to a million a week, the airways are now dominated by the clones of Brittany or painfully insincere, breathless voiced idiots who have to "share" their feelings with us. Why can't they all just stay in Oprah land where they belong and leave the rest of us alone? Their singing is bad enough, but the brainless babbling that passes for lyrics is the final insult.

You would never know by listening to any of these supposed vocalists that they are the musical descendants of people like Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and Janis Joplin. All of whom could not only sing circles around any of them, but had more genuine emotion come out of their mouths yawning than these yahoos can ever hope to produce singing.

Compounding the insult of having to listen to these voices pollute the airwaves is the knowledge that there are vocalists as good as Janiva Magness out there, who don't get anywhere near the popular acclaim of the pop tarts.

Listening to a disc like Janiva's most recent release, What Love Will Do, on Alligator Records, makes you realize there is really no justice in the world and that pop music industry executives have their collective heads so far up their asses they've cut off all oxygen to their brains. There can't be any other explanation as to why Janiva Magness isn't on the top of the charts or her music in constant rotation on every radio station playing some form of popular music.

At least the blues industry can recognize talent when they hear it so she hasn't gone completely unnoticed. Janiva won the best contemporary female artist award in 2006 and 2007 and was nominated for the B. B. King Entertainer Of The Year award in 2008 at the Blues Music Awards. Yet if you don't follow blues music closely, there's a good chance that you'll not have heard this woman sing, and that's a damn shame. Her husky and smoky voice growls out funk, brings real passion to a love song, and can send shivers up your spine with its power to speak to your heart.

Unlike some female vocalists who seem to sacrifice musicality for character, Janiva has more than one note in her repertoire. Aside from having the huskiest voice this side of Marlene Dietrich, she also has the range to prevent it from becoming a monotonous drone. She's equally able to sing slower, almost torch song numbers, as she is up tempo funk and blues.