Taking a Barthes (the voice in pop music)

AGAINST THE GRAIN: Thinking about the Voice in Pop

Melody Maker,  November 20th 1993

(part of a Melody Maker multi-author feature package/cover story about Vocal Heroes)

by Simon Reynolds

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, Dogg has a Southern accent, giving his voice a sidling, serpentile quality that's seductive in its menace.  Ragga's rasping, patois insolence is also full of grain, harking back to the gruff-but-luscious 'talk-over' voices of early Seventies reggae (mainstream reggae singing has gone slick and oily like US soul).

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 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

then again AutoTune misused creates a new vocabulary of digital distortions, which perhaps offers a kind of post-carnal or dis-emboded surrogate for "grain" - glitches in the transmission medium itself