Soul vs Technique

[datura800.livejournal.com]

I hope he won't mind me quoting him, but I read an interesting assertion in Alex's review of the new Mariah album (today's Guardian):

"Carey's voice has been mocked, bizarrely, as being a triumph of technique over soul - an argument that fails to comprehend that technique and soul are intertwined, that technique primarily exists as a means to convey emotion".

I thought this would be a good discussion to have here - it's a point I quite strongly disagree with (generally, not specifically with relation to Mariah), but I'll wait to see if anyone is interested in commenting before launching into it.

Comments

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

Tom's opening comments here echo what I said about Al Green, soul and technique in an article for Freaky Trigger a few years back. I think technique is a really useful thing, and it's all but impossible to make a worthwhile recording without at least some of it. Dylan has LOTS of technique, but that technique doesn't include being able to sing in tune - that's far from being all that contributes to vocal technique. My problem with Mariah is the flipside of what Tom and I say about Al Green - Mariah has more of a range than Al, and you can't fault her pitch and so on, but I don't hear the same kind of intelligence in her songs, and I don't feel she does a good job of conveying the emotions, beyond just doing the customary vocal tricks to signal "THIS IS AN EMOTIVE BIT", without making the emotion at all specific.

I was also thinking about this while watching the recent American Idol episode where they all had to sing Dolly Parton songs. The one who did 'Jolene' had a nice and technically good voice and did nothing wrong, but she failed completely to recognise the (outstanding) acting elements of Dolly's performance of that great song, and so lost most of its value, just giving us a pleasant tune instead.

Anyway, I do find Mariah bland, but that isn't because of the exceptional level of her technical singing ability at all, as lots of my favourites are strong in that kind of area, but because I don't think she applies it with enough emotional or cerebral nous to convert that skill into sufficient effect, for me.