Wing: The crazy story of New Zealand’s best worst singer
Wing. Florence Foster Jenkins. The Shaggs. Mrs Miller. Real talk, are all these meant to be “inspirational stories?”
In case you’ve been lucky enough to miss the careers of all these musicians, let me elaborate. These are all women who made careers in music that’s so bad it’s good…supposedly.
Each of them rode their complete inability to hold a tune straight into the limelight, a place that the vast majority of people who are genuinely talented will never, ever get to. While, for the most part, their 15 minutes was up in probably half that time, they still have a bizarre form of cultural clout for the sheer strangeness of their career.
Now, for the most part, they were in on the joke. Weirdly enough, the further back you go, the more examples like the aforementioned Florence Foster Jenkins and Leona Anderson you find. With them, it’s clearly a comedy act performed by someone who knows exactly what they’re doing and what their appeal is. The fact that this was happening at a time when the entertainment industry was (only slightly) more predatory and exploitative than it is today is mind-boggling.
Today, perhaps responding to the success that singing talent shows on TV had 20 years ago, throwing gullible, tone-deaf nobodies convinced of their own genius on screen, we’ve started doing something slightly different and a lot more gross. Finding people who really don’t seem to know that they can’t sing and putting them on a pedestal to point and laugh at them. Perhaps I’m being conned myself, and everyone’s in on it from the “talent” downwards, but it still feels groddy.
The story of Wing feels to me like a perfect example of this.
Who is Wing?
Born Wing Han Tsang in 1960, not a whole lot is known about Wing’s early life, other than that, at some point, she emigrated from her native Hong Kong to New Zealand.
While settling into her new home, she took up a new hobby in the form of singing. Something she had a genuine love for and… not a whole lot else. She got her start singing for patients in hospitals and nursing homes. While the jokes should write themselves about what happened next, this turned out to be the making of Wing.
People loved the enthusiasm she sang, and encouraged her to make an album. She put out a record of covers built around a… spirited take on the title track of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical The Phantom of the Opera. This lead to a string of similar releases which went viral in her home country, leading to a spin around the New Zealand talk show circuit. This laid the groundwork for her most high-profile appearance, as a recurring character on the American comedy series South Park.
Wing spent the rest of her career in much the same way. Releasing covers albums of everyone from The Carpenters to AC/DC, adding rapping to her repertoire (really) and generally not letting anyone else define her life or her music until she retired in 2015. I guess that’s what people say when they call these inspiring stories. That these people fly in the face of the naysayers and become a star despite what everyone says about them.
Still feels a bit like defending a circus freak show, at least to me. However, so long as these people are making a bit of cash out of the world laughing at them, I guess that’s the same thing as dignity.