a brief history of the recessive vocal

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

so instead of making use of my time intelligently or enjoyably, i was playin SOUVLAKI-TETRIS this mornin and listenin to UMMAGUMMA -- and as usual stuck on what an f.awful singer r.waters is, that his shtick is a distrust of emotive effectivness, and it occurred to me that there's a history in pop of the self-consciously characterless vocal, which operates by a kind of passive-aggressive second-guessing ("you admire this uninflected mumble as ART because it is not mere RECEIVED TECHNIQUE playing on your UNEXAMINED INSTINCTS... or some such)

it seems to me it's a feature "why indie is dislikable", and conversely an (haha unacknowledged) reason why r&b and pop divas receive so much kneejerk dislike from indie quarters (as if "being able to sing" = "suborned by THE MAN")

anyway what struck me as odd is that it's NOT a mainstream rock characteristic as of the 60s, 70s or even 80s -- vocal style characterful to the point of being gratingly dislikeable was the rule, and waters was really anomalous in his day

so A: was this the root of his prog credentials? did he make virtue of a necessity? (i'm not a syd fan but he belongs squarely in the post-dylan tradition of expressivity out of anti-technique technique... which is a very different thing)
and B: who does watersism start with? (cheeky burchill-baiting answer: julie london)

footnote: UK punk was notoriously suspicious of the borrowed expressivity of soul and blues in the white voice, but much less so of the borrowed expressivity of folk or country; in fact it pushed off into the exploration of modern urban cousins of folk and country, so it was in the dylan-tradition even when it was actively hostile to borrowed dylanisms

Comments

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

My own shtick is often not looking too deep, and I will employ it again here. :) I still think a lot of indie is "necessity as virtue" -- people do the best they can with the voices they have, and part of the "wall" that was broken through by punk was vocal stylings as well. Listeners' ears were prepared to accept virtually anything from vocalists by that point. And to that extent indie is not giving a shit too, not just being humble/faux-humble. "This is as well as I can sing and that's okay."

Where does Lou Reed fit into all this? Admittedly highly stylized, but at the same time I think there's some link there.

[mcarratala.livejournal.com]

Yes and but...
Yes, certainly in the 80s and in the early 90s English indie bands not only featured singers who couldn't sing, but folk who couldn't play their instruments (esp the drummers! oh, the drummers! Boy, were they awful...)
BUT: N as V hardens into ideology, and becomes fetishised on the Pastels/Beat Happening axis. At the same time, scorn is heaped on what is perceived as technique-for-technique's sake – say Level 42 or Whitney.
David Cavanagh's Creation book is good on all of that...
What I still can't get my head around is how Pete Doherty, who embodies all the bad bits and none of the 1980s indie, ends up getting hailed as a genius in the 00s...
And finally, I have no idea what, if anything, the Floyd have to do with this.

[cis.livejournal.com]

I don't think the recessive vocal really is "doing the best [one] can with the voice [one] has" -- there isn't really a correlation between how good your voice is, how well you can hold a tune, and how much expression you can put into your singing. The problem is that it sounds embarrassing in your own ears. I'm fairly confident that everyone, even the tone deaf, can do a passable parody of, say, the balladeer over-emotive style: but it generally sounds silly, and sounds especially silly from an untrained or weak voice. Theoretically, there's an in-between stage where the voice sounds expressive and not stupid, but it's hard work finding it, and people very often assume that singing with emotion automatically means sounding stupid.

So I don't think it's people accepting their limitations, I think it's people intentionally limiting themselves to a lowest-common-denominator singing style, which is socially the most accepted style for someone with a weak voice, or an untrained voice, or a strong voice that's shy.