Why Some People Hate Celine Dion
Novelist Mary Gaitskill examines the phenomenon: ‘It’s not that I don’t know from weird singer-hate: Billy Joel, Boy George, and Mark McGrath of Sugar Ray all have voices that used to make me inwardly spasm with misanthropic disgust for seconds at least. But apparently Céline-haters don’t spasm in silence or for seconds—they scream and froth at the mouth at length: “ … the most wholly repellent woman ever to sing songs of love,†spewed Cintra Wilson, “I think most people would rather be processed through the digestive tract of an anaconda than be Céline Dion for a day.†Bitch, excuse me? We’re not talking about Bernie Madoff or the Abu Ghraib torture team—this is a pop singer who annoys Your Excellency. In response to the relentless snideness described by Carl Wilson about Dion’s teeth, her Québécois accent, her kooky arm-movements, or her clueless fans (which some asshole in the U.K. sneeringly imagined as “over-weight children†and “Granniesâ€), by midway through the second chapter I was solidly in Dion’s corner without hearing a note.’
