"I have an opinion," Saint Clair Shores singer-songwriter Jennifer Westwood declares Monday afternoon on one of her three Facebook pages.
"I feel better for bitching," country singer Jennifer Westwood says in her Facebook thread on auto show lip syncing to Motown classics. (Facebook photo)
Her bluntly stated view, sparking a thread that has reached 57 comments, is about lip syncing entertainment at Detroit conventions, business conferences and events such as the auto show, now in its preview week. She allows Deadline to repost her views:
It's pathetic that at every automotive/engineering/press event, the chosen welcome entertainment -- in a city full of talent -- is three girls pantomiming to the same damn Motown track.
You can't change the track? Perhaps hire a Motown, jazz, blues, gospel, garage rock band?
I just overheard visiting foreigners [at Cobo Center] complain about it being the same uncreative thing year after year. So, no -- visitors don't find it charming anymore and neither do I.
In response to friends' supportive comments -- "lame," "cheesy," "time to move on," "how in God's name can that be considered entertainment?" -- Westwood adds:
We don't honor our legacy. We treat it as a musical epitaph.
There's music that came before and after, as well as Motown. . . . My first thought was Hot Club of Detroit.
Wendy Rogelle of Waterford Township, singer and bandleader of Nouveauté, adds this personal anecdote from an earlier Detroit auto show:
One year I did a session of what I was told was a reference vocal. When I happened to go to the show, I saw a model pantomiming to my voice. Funny.
Westwood performs "hill country outlaw swamp music" at bars and clubs with a band called The Handsome Devils
North American International Auto Show lobby and lounge entertainment reportedly is booked by Gail & Rice, a Farmington Hills agency. It didn't respond to an invitation to comment on this article.
