The sound of your voice

and go home. Which is too bad because I fucking hate that song.

This may be why I don’t like to talk about vocals a great deal. It’s partly a defense mechanism, partly an inability to believe I can really speak about them intelligently. Perhaps my poor singing skills made me initially more sympathetic to figures like Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, who clearly didn’t spend a great deal of time on their vocals, ever. Of course it wasn’t their vocals that attracted me to their music. And it’s not usually vocals that make me stand up and take notice.

Sometimes it is. Yet the industry rarely produces those voices that would grab my attention. There isn’t anything technically wrong with the voices on most of top 40 radio for the past 25 years or even five years. Nothing in particular. They’re just…too often missing something elemental and specific about that person.

You can find those qualities in vocal performances that no one would confuse with the highly trained sounds of a music student:

As the opening scene of Un Chien Andalou may be considered the tenth most shocking scene in film history, it behooved the Pixies, in writing a song about that film and that scene, to make their presentation equally shocking. Black Francis/Frank Black does his best by ignoring the concept of melody altogether in favor of a full throaty psychotic screech. It’s exactly what’s required. It won the Pixies no awards. But it encapsulated an idea, a surreal and uneasy feeling, that propels an otherwise cheerful little indie pop song to the fuzzy edge of the screen. That’s what good vocals do.

They also use contrast to present tension, all while once again eschewing melody entirely:
03 Tricky Kid

Is it cheating that this is Tricky and not someone who actually sings? Well, perhaps. But examining the quality of the voice is what makes this a more fair comparison. Not one hip-hop artist I can think of has ever aimed for an actual croaking phlegm-in-the-throat sound as Tricky does here. The words seem to have trouble getting out of his throat, punctuated by speedy, snarly incursions from Rock. You get an unsteady, wavering view into the vulnerability and self-deprecation that lie beneath the MC surface. It’s this vulnerability I remember; it’s a vocal performance that would never make the final round of a talent competition but is unforgettable in my opinion for what it reveals in context.

And then there’s a Bristol buddy of Tricky’s:

Portishead – Chase The Tear from Mintonfilm on Vimeo.

This new-ish track may not fit in with the epic Goth-rock masterpiece Third, but the simplicity allows the Beth Gibbons vocal to stand out. Still shrouded in mystery after all these years due to her refusal to do interviews, Gibbons seems to double down on disillusionment and fear every time out. I personally love her for it. Because no one gets it quite right like she does. She never misses a note, and there are moments on the earlier albums that make you realize she has powerful vocal cords, but the tentative, nearly tearful approach clearly speaks to her as an artist and a person. It is the sound of someone deeply uncomfortable with the spotlight, deeply saddened, afraid of being burned but not with a Gloria Gaynor kind of attitude. There is strength in the amount of fear she lets us hear in her voice. That strength plus the resolve of the Krautrock backing makes this a special performance, one of many for Gibbons.

I think this is, in the end why I simply can’t watch American Idol. I’m not sure I believe any of these people are actually people. Do they have emotions? Fears? Vulnerabilities? Can they really make you feel a song? Would they be brave enough to take a nontraditional route to the right vocal? Of course not. And that always seems to work fine for the Idol winners and runners-up who produce useless well-produced album after useless well-produced album. Yeah, it’s the sound of their voice on those records.

But when it’s the sound of your voice, you should be there too. If you’re not, if I can’t hear you, I’m not interested.

———

Speaking of “not interested,” in trolling about and looking for information about Tricky, I ran across this Bucharest performance from I’m-not-sure-when. Bizarre to me is that the whole track “Tricky Kid” has been stripped of MUCH of what made it a stunning statement in my mind. There is only a mumbled chorus, plus the unseemly addition of funk-metal-esque touches. Very strange how that could be good enough for the audience. Were they just not listening? Did Tricky forget his lyrics backstage? Does he need a teleprompter? It’s a little sad to watch, but it’s the perfect example of how a musician can try to smooth out or rework the original work and, in the process, lose much of what made it special.