I haven’t had a rant for some time, so I thought today would be a good day to let you into my thinking.

Serendipity generally means that a good but unexpected outcome evolves from some unrelated happenstance.  And today, I am here to announce such an event.  It is a significant one for a ubiquitous industry, one that affects all of us, consciously or otherwise.

I am talking about the music industry.

Admit it.  Hasn’t it ever grated on your ears when you hear a female singer’s version of a song originally written for a male singer or vice versa when it came time to make the original lyrics fit the sex of the singer?

For example take this famous Ray Charles ballad:

Now, see what happens when a female attempts to adapt it as her own,

See what I mean.  When she gets to the part about her true love walking out of her life with his new love, she has to awkwardly substitute other lyrics to make it work, spoiling the original intent of the song.  It is even worse when they try to fit in the proper gender of her true love’s new love.

So there it is.  See how the gender change can change the mood in one utterance?

This is where serendipity comes in.

This is one of the unintended benefits of marriage equality.  Now they can simply leave the gender the same in the song and it still works, because Jim is walking away with his true love, Tim, rather than Jill.  Isn’t love grand?

Ray Charles’s original ballad now works just as well for female singers as it does for male singers.  Aren’t you glad that I pointed this out?