Critical Review of Richard Hacken's Singing
by Richard Hacken
Designed perhaps to persuade those of us who don't care that each of the lines culminating in a rough anapest really does match up, approximately, with what Sir Arthur Sullivan had in mind in his "Modern Major-General," the travesty in audio format feloniously hosts three or more of the most futile and extraneous megabytes ever posted to the web world wide. Straining to reach notes, straining to keep up to the proper tempo (and failing, most notably at the end), indulging in melodramatic and strung-out, mock-heroic measures that port the intended comic effect into realms of low tragicomedy not even redeemable by kitsch or camp standards, nor by unfavorable comparison to the scratching and squawks of a tiding of magpies, the malevolent monotonist is in dire need of ana-pesticide for his anapest, 73 months of voice lessons and a vocal chord transplant, elementary instruction in triple-time diction, and a barrel of Dramamine to pass out to any listener who attempts to follow the twists and turns of his looping and loopy cacophony. This is one Hack writer, to whom we must explain the handwriting on the wall. It says: "Enough already."