Most Imperfect Anti-Sound: Your Personal 'Nails on the Blackboard' Vibe?

Also, and this is another video thing, nu-metal guitarists that insist on hunching over while they play ala Korn.

.. But actually, lately.. it has become one of my favorite train wrecks. I can't help listening to it for ten seconds just to get pissed off.

I also hate the grunge voice.

Really, I'm starting to fucking hate music. I only want to listen to "The Flowers of Romance" lately. viva la Tanya Headon.

*"alternatizing" = making them sound like bands that were signed by major labels in 1995 and dropped in 1996.

All car advert music is shite, in any case - Peugeot and M People (guhhh), Ford and Smash Mouth (all the cool kids love 'em!), and Fiat's other horrendous reworking of Groove Is In The Heart.

Not even mentioning Zoom Zoom. Uggggghhhhhhhhhh..........

There's a particular way of doing rhythm guitar which spells disaster for me - I've mentioned it before. I'm not skilled enough to know how to describe it exactly but Oasis do it quite a lot. I kind of think of it as a song going into "Beatles rhythm" - a kind of nervous classicism that stilts any groove/flow the tune might have had - like every instrument is aspiring to be the piano on "Hey Jude".

..not pop music, no.. but it is pop cinema.

it had a huge jolt also when "soul voice" began to be used as a contrastive overlay to robot-beats in dance music

as a listener, i hugely vastly endlessly prefer beyoncé k's version of it — where the omnipresent robotism is humanised and the bolt-on humanism is superlatively technicised: there's a really potent dialectic going on — to aretha f's, but i'm a materialist and an atheist, so that's no surprise prob

haha taking sides: boxing-as-competitive-escape-from-the-streets vs soul-melisma-as-competitive-escape-from-the-streets
(this needn't be girls vs boys, either since consider ali's daughter!! she = beyonce in the ring maybe?)

Those bad "triggered" mid to late 80s drums layered with too many effects are also disgusting.

And much as I love him I think Stevie Wonder, not Aretha, is the person most responsible for the r'n'b diva thing. He was the one who started to really stretch gospel lines in that rococo way esp. his playing around with the less obv. and slightly sourer harmonies that you have to be "really musical" to sing. Unfortunately his prestige meant that what should have been an interesting quirk in the work of a great artist became the standard approach for about 80% of subsequent soul/r'n'b singers.

I imagine some of the betterly earful complainants agst robo-divadom wd point out that the "slightly sourer harmonies" have fallen back out again since his autumn, though

...it hasn't gotten annoying...yet...but it will be eventually.

strummy shuffling midtempo rhythm

I think I've learned to block out over-the-top r&b diva or metal wailing, but it's that dull-as-fuck guitar thing that really gets to me now. I saw this Melbourne band called Gersey in a pub, and it was pretty much an entire set of that shit. The sluggish chugging non-rhythms pummeling into me almost made me feel sick. When I try to remember what it was like, all I can think of is the guitar in Coldplay's 'Yellow', over and over. Seeing Mercury Rev was similar, but the psychedelic textures and great melodies totally made up for it.

While vocal gymnastics are so ridiculously polyphonic(???) that I can just dismiss them as noise, the guitar thing relies on basic chord progressions that are actually very effective. So often I half-like that stuff and then despise myself for it. I think that the height of this problem of mine came when I bought Mogwai's 'Young Team', put it on, heard traces of that dreaded sound, and then thought "Aaaagh! I've paid money for a whole CD of it!!!" I've started to like the album quite a bit since then.

I never thought of it as a Beatles thing, more as the Velvets' minimalism slowed down with all energy removed.

Vocals - I've been thinking about this. I don't mind emoting in vocals, be it diva-ism or whatever - what I don't like is when a vocalist seems unable to turn it off. So Destiny's Child can do all the diva stuff but they also don't do it a lot of the time - so when it's there, it works. Whereas a lot of rock singers it seems to me can't turn it off - there is no 'low' setting for Nickelback man's voice. It's like the old cliche about 'she could sing the phone book and it would be beautiful' - most of my unfavourite singers I don't like because you actually could imagine them singing the phone book.

Well...you cld say that Aaron Neville predates all of 'em - and wasn't little Stevie W a Ray Charles disciple, at least to begin w/? Plus if we're talking abt importing gospel vocal mannerisms into secular pop-soul then Sam Cooke also needs to be taken into account... or Little Richard and Otis Redding... James Brown...

And above all, The Sweet Inspirations - pop/gospel group inc. Whitney's mum (and Whitney, of course, is the Queen of modern soul voc )

The comments on the "chug of doom" are keenly observed, tho' as noted, to link them to the Beatles in grossly unfair, Lennon and McCartney were superlative rhythm guitar and bass players. It's the lack of attention these kinds of detail that makes Wasis more like the Cranberries than the Beatles.

Still can't bear to listen to that type of singing though. I find it actually makes me angry for some reason - an anger beyond 'please shut up' irritation, a kind of 'how DARE you' anger. Does anyone else get this?

same deal also with punkers who hate "rock-style" improvisation (= "wank")

technique is uninteresting if you regard it as an "end-in-itself" or as an "evil-in-itself": but if you plunge into the central zone where we actually all live, you can usually shrug off mere symbolic dislike in favour of the REAL THING haha (flutes!! why??)

There were so many of these singles (all one-hits [Jan Arden, anyone? er, Meredith Brooks, um, Natalie Imbruglia]) throughout the 90s that each one got more depressing...oh no, another young woman consigned to the dustbin.

And flutes - yeah, ouch. Piccoloes are even worse.

And I can't believe nobody has mentioned those fucking PAN-PIPES.

Didn't this observation start one of a couple of threads about adverts/music Tom? I'd link to it for Sarah if I knew how to do such clever stuff...

ray, er, yes and no: i really really really doubt that eg actually divas only discuss other divas' note-per-second ratio and not how and why and when they use this style (not to mention other less immediately obvious elements within the style) => however some of those outside the "zone" DO only discuss this, as an excuse not to make distinctions

i still cleave to my boxing/athletics analogy: "fuck all these skillz just feel it man" is not why ali is a hero-to-most etc etc, and i suspect there is a thing going on abt black cultural attitudes to skills attained, the good and the bad, which just gets totally missed when punkahs and slackahs merely junk the whole lot as bard-art-on-principle (admittedly that still doesn't help me like sassy's singing any bettah)

anyway dan perry to thread, since he actually CAN sing

Surely you mean Tom's brother JOHN Fogerty (of CCR fame), no? Can't hear that, myself.

Tracer Hand, are you saying that all international superstars are talented by virtue of being international superstars??

Which current singing styles do you prefer and how do they differ?

Here's the thread where we talked about this before.

..And no, I don't know or want to know about singing. But that's not exactly what I was talking about anyway. The question was why is it considered "good"? I'll admit that it takes talent to perfect a vocal technique... but if the result of the technique is nails on a chalkboard, blah blah blah....

Rich Little is really good at imitating people - takes talent... doesn't mean anyone wants to listen to it.

If you're outside that culture and tradition you may not have that connection to the singing-feeling link-up and so it sounds bogus or false to you, and maybe just aesthetically horrible too. So from within the rock tradition Kurt sounds like he 'means it' and no doubt he does mean it but his choosing to express meaning-it by screaming and hollering is a cultural decision.

I regard myself as from within the general western culture/tradition of WH and KC (whereas NFAK does sound more 'alien' to me), and I still find their vocal styles 'bogus' and 'false' when it came to expressing emotion (well, WH anyway - not bothered much by KC) : there's another aspect to this which is to do with ideologies of how emotion is expressed generally within our culture: for some people, myself included, a sense of 'reticence' or 'attempted self-control' is part of how we interpret this stuff: you know when you can hear someone struggling to hold it together and their body is forcing their voice to just slightly crack up - that is usually a much more moving expression of emotion to me than someone really letting rip. It might be caricatured as maybe a fairly tight-ass Victorian-Dad inheritance, but I think it's got some function to do with 'is this for real'?

I wondered about the following example - what would WH singing that 'Nothing Compares 2 U' song have sounded like, in comparison to Sinead O' Connor's version?
(There's another interesting sideband about the parameters along which SOC's version worked or not - but dammit I'm gonna get sacked if I don't stop ILx'ing instead of working...)

The problem with Whitney's performances doesn't lie in her melisma, which is usually appropriate; it's that she presses every note and consistently sings anything above a G flatter than the Great Plains. Mariah's problem is that she overused her female falsetto on her old records and now overuses her husky pseudo-sultry chest voice on her new records. Both of their melismas sound effortless to me, though, and are the last things I would criticize about their singing.

trouble is, i entirely doubt this: basically i think unless he's writing in that by-the-yard academic style as a self-mocking joke, he's got a total cheek taking shots at whitney et al, since she is clearly a WAY better and more expressive singer than he is a writer

dan's argument is actual music criticsm: jarrett's is pellmell flight from music criticism into comfy history-free stereotype, which can in fact be applied ie w/o actually ever listening to anything seriously

ray yr "versus" is hardly an either/or: *all* musicians operate on the borderline of that zone, and think about it, and some actively explore it => plus i think the athlete who fits yr preferred aesthetic is eddie the eagle!!

Jeez that's incoherent.

Ummmm...no, I wouldn't apply this 'aesthetic' to athletics/sports atall because I don't think they're in the same business: you'll have to spell it out a bit more for me.

I don't think ALL musicians operate on this borderline/zone either, there are other areas, but yeah I wasn't trying to imply there was some other way of doing it, just wondering what the distinction criteria was based on. I thought at the time of writing it how this is so much of what's involved in other kinds of representative art and performance stuff - the other thing it made me think of particularly was acting vs overacting: isn't the latter 'bogus' because they haven't got it *subtle* enough yet? I think a lot of techy vocalism reminds me in some way of almost deliberate overacting, or big-gesture silent-movie acting (but louder).
Or, in the more classical/operatic sphere the technique often seems to displace the singing so far from what I can hear as emotional representation that it sounds almost, well, indecipherable - is this just about not hearing it precisely enough, or not knowing the signifiers?
(I get a generally similar thing with loads of classical music though - esp. 'the romantic period' - can remember buying 'Symphonie Fantastique' (Berlioz?) when a teenager because of a review, and then finding it all bloated up like a diseased plum pudding...put me off for more than a decade.)

Isn't this partly about positioning of borderlines where THEY'VE GONE TOO FAR because (I can do THIS => Overegging The Pudding => Inefficiency Through Histrionics) - or do you and Dan P just find that is never really an issue in your listening?
(And what is it about S.Vaughn you don't like? - I'm not a Jazzster, but I'll try to hear some of her)

- what the thread's about isn't the idea of the melismania happening all through a song but the idea that it is de facto bad anywhere - the 'nails on the blackboard vibe'. And what mark and Dan are saying in part is that it's very rare for anyone except Christina to use it indiscriminately all through a song. So think of melisma as an 'acting technique' rather than automatically overacting.

- OR think of it as the equivalent of a non-naturalistic acting technique, like Noh or masked Greek Tragic acting.

Anyway, my original "nails on a blackboard" was over-emoting, both diva and grunge -- which melismania is but a small part of.

I do not deny that there are singers out there who are melisma-heavy, but since so many of them do come from gospel backgrounds, their use of it doesn't sound nearly as forced as Christina's does.

What universe is this btw where Otis Redding didn't go mental on the emoting? Have you actually listened to "Try A Little Tenderness" lately? (Actually I think Al Green was much better and for exactly the reasons Ray prefers Sinead to Whitney...)

I don't think a gospel background should be used to defend bad singing. Gospel moves (like any other) can be used heavy-handedly. Actually I think Patti LaBelle may be a key figure in all this, ie that she could be considered even a decent (rather than god-awful) singer.

And, yes, Otis Redding could get carried away at times. "Try a Little Tenderness" is one of my least favorite of his records for this very reason. But let's compare, say, his version of "White Christmas" to Whitney's "Star Spangled Banner."

obviously "background in gospel" shouldn't be used to defend bad singing: equally "knowing nothing about music" (cf michael jarrett) shouldn't be used to attack good singing (or in fact any singing)

Tom I get the thing about it being 'non-naturalistic' - it's what I was (badly) implying when mentioning 'signifiers' in context of old operatic/classical singing - but I'm not convinced that this kind of 'decoding' is actually what's purported to be involved in the WH context, I think there's much more an *implied* direct mapping between the sound and the feeling, but it's a map I think is all distorted - and which is maybe even vaguely threatening in what it implies about communication problems!
Ultimately I too must plead guilty to being 'inflexible' - I do find melismania an unpleasant sound, anywhere. But I can now at least imagine what might be going on in appreciators thanks to your phrase
'invigoratingly over-the-top.'

I was gonna say we've got into so much water here because this vocal style is a complex syntax/semantic thing more so than just picking on an instrument timbre (eg flutes!! why??) - but then once again I realised I was talking crap haha.....sigh :(

i.e. if you don't like melismania there you won't like it anywhere.

Hmm…. It would be a tired strategy to attack the mainstream/middle-brow in order to ingratiate oneself with ‘the kids’ or some kind of avant elite (although I don’t think that’s what Jarrett is doing). An even MORE tired strategy is to embrace the mainstream in order to shock the middle-brow (a standard European reaction, see Film Noir, Punk).
Mark s.: Nobody likes bad academic writing, and we’re all suckers for the occasional anti-intellectual tirades, but maybe you should forgive your EngLit Profs for not immediately recognizing your genius.

So, what's the criteria here for making a critical statement?

i feel a bit bad coming down SO hard on it so repeatedly, but if there's one thing i fkn DETEST it's people using their LACK of knowledge abt something as a badge of qualification to be superior towards it

as i studied maths and philosophy i have never been particularly bothered that the eng lit profs didn't recognise my genius

well maybe he *does* go on to do this elsewhere, but if he does, then he can't be hoiked in here to make the point being made

Offers more sustain than acoustic varieties. This and control over amplification allow more sympathetic ringing of strings that aren't actually being played - allows a denser, more detailed sound. The strings are also easier to bend and vibrate than on acoustic guitars, which allows more exploitation of and control over microtones ("notes that would fall in between the keys on a piano") - pianos, organs, and non-tunable electronic keyboards offer none (unless you tune the piano microtonally and even then you still can't bend or vibrate pitches - you can even play with the tuning knobs while playing strings on the guitar). Wide availability of cheap effects pedals allows a great deal of control over timbre, with a degree of control that keyboards don't always give. The strings are also easy to prepare (i.e. you can stick things on top of them or even use weird objects to strike or scrape them to change the sound you're getting). It's easier to change the preparations while playing than it is on a piano.

no, he's critisizing a certain kind of excessive technique connected to a certain time in history. In your rejection of his ideas, you focus only on the level of his style - too academic, the written equivalent of melisma, etc. Can you explain in what ways the Jarrett quote is so clearly "wrong" besides making empty rhetorical statements about how he knows nothing about music?

"asst eng-lit profs i am describing and/or inventing wd far better constitute a "dissipated" culture than the black music community jarrett seems airily to be conjuring with"

Jarrett is making comments about very specific stylistic traits and specific performers: WH, Bolton.

Because they sound good.

multiple male folkies singing a first person lyric in harmony. Simon & Garfunkel and CSN totally qualify. I can't explain why this bothers me and female artists (like the Roches and Indigo Girls) or rock groups like the Everly Brothers don't necessarily have this negative effect on me. Probably because I'm not a fan of folk in general and it adds a weird level of perversity to the often self-righteous lyrics.

Joni Mitchell.