So, maybe it's because I have seen this episode ten zillion times and can recite it in my sleep, but I was not made uncomfortable at all by "Once More With Feeling." I get that there is a lack of talent and that its goofy, but I just didn't feel the discomfort. What it almost reminded me of was watching a home made movie, where you have to laugh at it no matter how serious some of the content is, because it is just silly watching your friends and these people that you have really gotten to know get up and do silly dances. But again, maybe I'm biased because I have seen the movie literally hundreds of times.
So I wanted to use my blog post to talk about the use of sound in conveying serious themes. We see in "The Body" how a lack of music makes scary and horrifying moments seem so real and personal, and how the silence moves us. We also saw in "Hush" how music can set a tone without saying any words. "Hush" also demonstrated how theme music can be established within an episode or series, and so certain songs start to trigger certain responses from an audience. Even if we look at the music from the ballet of "The Nutcracker" we see an issue with sound, where we as an audience attribute those melodies to triumph of good, family, and christmas, and so when we try to hear them in a darker context along with a darker story, it doesn't settle with us.
"Once More With Feeling" shows how music hyperbolizes emotion, and how things can get explosive if everyone wears their thoughts and hearts on their sleeves. All the tension that was building in season 6 comes to a climax in this episode, and what better way to make it explode than with music? I don't think Joss made this episode just to make a musical, and I don't think he wrote music to fit the episode plot line that he had in mind. Rather, I think he saw that musical expression was the only way to bring everything out into the open at once without giving the characters a chance to reflect on things, and so the only way for the season or the series as a whole to progress was to have each person sing out what they have been thinking for episodes and episodes on end.
I wasn't uncomfortable either... I do wonder if it has to do with the fact that, having watched the series, we've seen the tensions that "exploded" in this episode slowly build, so it wasn't so unexpected or cheesy—we had some basis for viewing it. Or maybe my musical ear is too weak to care. I also agree with what you said at the end—while I recall reading that Whedon did want to make a musical episode, and while with the story-line he'd need an episode that dealt with these issues, this was the best combination of the two. If he had played the episode more like the rest of the series—that is, non-musical—it may have been too melodramatic to work or for us to willingly suspend our believe, and a cheesy musical episode in a non-plot-serious context might have been too much in the way of cheese and over-blown musical comedy. So this was a pretty good synthesis, the way he did it.
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