[ufomuffin]

That's the thing, anyone can create poetry. But only a group of people of the same taste will appreciate it. There aren't any rules, if you suck at singing, your cd will probably be dead in sales, but that doesn't make it "not music". I've seen there's people for everything in the world, and when people start saying he is not singing right it's usually about the context. If you're gonna sing opera of course you need to sing opera-like, but in general you should be able to experiment in any sense. That's how new styles are born.

[regularfry]

If you suck at singing, you'll wreck your throat and need surgery to fix it. That's a large part of what vocal coaching is for. In that sense, there's definitely a "wrong way" to do it.

[_delirium]

Empirically that doesn't seem to be true for many areas of rock--- there are singers singing "wrong" with no surgery for 30+ years. Note that she incorrectly predicted that Ozzy Osbourne would have a short career based on the way he was singing, when in fact he had an exceptionally long and successful one.

From an artistic perspective, in some areas an operatic-style voice is just inappropriate. Operatic vocals on a punk band might be an interesting novelty, for example, but it's not usually what you want; you usually want something more like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGjk1Y_j8QE

(From that perspective, metal was a fairly good choice for this interview, because operatic vocals are often appropriate in metal.)

[regularfry]

I'm going to come back to this because I think it's an interesting point. Without "rules," how do you identify an example as belonging to a set? Rules for inclusion and/or exclusion must exist for the set to be defined. "I know it when I see it" is only really acceptable if you're a supreme court judge :-)

Specifically, we're talking not just about "music" here - which has an absurdly broad definition - but "metal," which falls under the category of western vocal-led performance. There are rules to this, and while breaking them might leave you with something that is ostensibly "music," it may well not leave you with "metal," "singing," a "song," or a "performance."