Melody Maker, November 20th 1993
Most rock-crit doesn't have much
to do with rock as music. Usually
it's amateur sociology, or Eng-Lit analysis of lyrics, or biography/gossip. But
even those who do grapple with music-as-music seldom get much purchase on the
Voice, beyond saying a particular voice is 'great' or 'original', or gushing
superlatives. And that's because the
Voice is a mystery, defying analysis. It's
hard to say why one voice leaves you cold and another pierces the marrow of
your soul, gets in your pants, fits you like a glove.
The few who have attempted to
"explain" their preferences often fasten on Roland Barthes concept of"the grain of the voice". The
French critic argued that what got you
about a much-loved voice wasn't what the singer did expressively, it was the stuff of the voice itself: its texture,
its carnal thickness. In instrumentation, the equivalent of 'grain' is timbre, i.e. not the way Hendrix bluesily bent his
notes to express emotion, but the "colour" and consistency of his
fuzz-tone and feedback. For Barthes, an
accomplished vocalist who's adept at manipulating the conventional mannerisms
of 'good singing' in order to emote, can actually be less moving than a stiff,
unwieldy singer. The proficient vocalist suppresses "the grain of the
voice" by being too eloquent, too fluent in the language of singing. For "grain" is the body's
resistance to the singer's breath, resulting in "language lined with
flesh": the listener is always reminded, blissfully, that this voice isn't
pure soul, but comes from deep inside a specific human body.
But critics often misconstrue
'grain' as synonomous with 'grit'. Aretha Franklin is often acclaimed as a
grain-rich singer, but to my ears she's all bombastic virtuosity and
pyrotechnic passion. Certainly, the octave-spanning acrobatics and mannered
idiosyncracies of consummate singers like Tim Buckley can astound and enthrall,
fill you with awe. But often, a weak or
limited voice can be more heart-quaking: Barney Sumner, Alex Ayuli from A.R.
Kane, even a one-note droner like Lawrence of Felt. Neil Young is a case in
point, not just for his torn-and-frayed drawl-whine, but for his guitar 'voice'
too: his wracked, wrenching one-chord solo on "Southern Man" communicates
more grainy anguish than a century of Clapton's addle-daddle nuances.
Barney Hoskyns' book From A Whisper To A Scream is a rare attempt to elucidate the Mystery of The Voice. Hoskyns also cites Barthes'
'grain', but he's a bit biased towards
technically superb and Black voices. If the greatest singers combine virtuosity
and grain - Al Green, Van Morrison - I'd like to redress the balance and state
the case for the deficient, unfluent singer.
Like early Morrissey: what struck a deep, carnal chord with miserabilist
youth like myself was the lachrymose, mucus-like quality of his voice, so
vividly evocative of drowning in self-pity.
There's a similarly clotted, inconsolable but luscious, almost edible
thickness in Stevie Nicks' singing on Rumours
and Tusk, and in Kristin Hersh's
voice on the first three Throwing Muses albums: again, it's the viscosity of
the voice, the way it resists the singer's expressive range, that's so
blissful. But as Morrissey got "better" as a vocalist, he became
merely plummy in his plaintiveness.
Iggy Pop's voice also declined as
it got more singerly. On the Bowie-fied
solo albums, Iggy sounds like a cadaverous supperclub crooner, Jim Morrison's
corpse. For the real animal you have to turn to The Stooges first two albums:
the Sinatra-on-barbiturates of "Ann" and "Dirt", the feral,
masticated vowels of "Loose", and above all, the breath-sucking,
beyond/beneath-human gasps at the climax of "TV Eye" (which get my
vote for Greatest Vocal Moment of All Time). Johnny Rotten seldom gets his
rightful acclaim as a vocalist, although Dave Laing has pinpointed the
gratuitous way he rolled his "r's" and over-emphasised his
consonants: a grotesque, thrilling parody of rock aggression. But it's on "Bodies" that Rotten
truly plumbed Iggy-esque nether limits, gargling lines like "gurgling
bloody mess" to bring home the abject horror of human biology. In recent
years, only Kurt Cobain (who's gotta a lotta grain) has reached, or retched,
such extremity.
Along with a critical language for
the mystery of the individual voice, we also lack a history of vocal
trends. Why, for instance, has the early
70's blues rock voice resurged in the last couple of years? Why does it
resonate with grunge youth? I'd also
like to understand what happened to the black mainstream voice. As soul evolved
into 'urban contemporary', rural grit got replaced by jazzily urbane, slimy
smoothness. Swingbeat groups like SWV, Bell Biv Devoe, Jade etc have eerily
futuristic production and kicking beats, but the singing's putrid and pukey
(aren't Boys II Men the absolute pits?!).
While swingbeat singing is all
elegance and over-expressiveness, rap is a haven for 'grain', in so far as it's
vocal but non-melodic. Rhymin' finesse counts for a lot, but for me it's the
stuff of the voice that grabs. My current fave is Snoop Doggy Dogg, sidekick of
Dr Dre and currently taking off as a solo mega-star despite being charged with
murder. Like a lot of black people in Los Angeles US
But ultimately you can't legislate
about the voice: one person's 'grain' may be another's bland white bread of the
soul. When it come to the voice, preferences are idiosyncratic and
unjustifiable. Something in the singer's body resonates inside your body,
reopens wounds and triggers pleasure-centres, and who can really say why?
interesting to reread this in light of -
my relatively recent (last 16 years or so) interest in "extremes of the human voice" / mouth music / vocal manipulation, extended vocal techniques
my relatively recent (last 16 years or so) interest in "extremes of the human voice" / mouth music / vocal manipulation, extended vocal techniques
my ardour for Auto-Tune, which Barthes probably would not have liked at all since it enforces a new kind of grainlessness - puts a blatant layer of digi-mediation between the listener and "the cantor's body", and which also enables / encourages extremes of legato and hyper-melisma.... all those wobbly jellyfish like ornaments and slip-and-slides in R&B singing - which would seem to intensify all the singerly dramatic artistry that he dislikes in Fisker-Diskau
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