Some people get delightfully embarrassed if you sing a song about them. Think about the feeling you might get when your friends sing you “Happy Birthday”, or when that special someone sang “A Whole New World” to you at the karaoke bar.

And then there are those people who are so self-focused that they feel the need to constantly sing about themselves. This famous aria from Gioachino Rossini‘s The Barber of Seville is practically a love-song that Figaro sings to himself. Does he deserve all this praise? Well, he just might. Try singing along with him at 3:45 – just use the syllable “la”. Not so easy, eh? Not only does he need super-human tongue abilities, he needs to sound good and sing loud at the same time.

Ok, ok, you win – go ahead and sing about how awesome you are. You deserve it.

There’s really nothing weird about singing a song about how awesome you are. Modern-day popular examples include “Ice, Ice, Baby“, “What’s My Name“, “My Name Is” (it’s practically a rite of passage for a hip-hop artist to use a song to promote him/herself).

If you live anywhere near where  I do, the rain is really coming down today!

Art imitates life; you can find all kinds of musical attempts to capture the spirit of a good cleansing storm. You got your gentle snow storm, your generic winter storm, and then you got your classic thunderstorm, compliments of Gioachino Rossini and his opera, The Barber of Seville. Like most Italian opera, it’s light and elegant.

This week, a post was going around Facebook about the Worst Composer Hair in History. I’m glad someone finally called out Berlioz on the hideous mop he wore on his head.

Also mentioned in the post was Rossini‘s epic comb-over. Naturally, I immediately started hearing the overture to The Italian in Algiers in my head as I inspected his unsuccessful attempt to cover his shiny bald head. Fortunately for him, he also had an epic knack for writing melodies that are exciting, lyric, and most importantly, memorable – an honor which arguably makes him the most-borrowed-from-composer of Looney Tunes.