Vocals vs Minimal Vocals vs No Vocals at all.

So hypothetically, if you had to choose one of these, what would it be and why?

I've been deep in Burial and miminal techno recently and find coming out of that space into 'actual song' territory kind of weird. Almost as if structured, coherent language and 'stories' just distract from tones, beats, atmospheres, and various kinds of 'deep meaning'. However, that is an extreme position.

At the risk of sounding pretentious, if there's an 'essential' music, does it have vocals and what are they like?

Am aware of other threads about vox but those all look more specific than what I'm asking here

*minimal, ffs

"if there's an 'essential' music, does it have vocals and what are they like?"

If there is an essential music, yeah, it has vocals, but not words. Like chanting or evocative, yet semantically ambiguous sounds. I'm with you on the "kind of weird" thing. With albums where you have long instrumental passages or tracks and then there's a track with lyrics/vocals, it can be jarring. It can also be really cool, but it's tricky to pull off and who listens to whole albums anymore anyway (besides me and hopefully some of you).

Words narrow things, feelings, down. I think the earliest music was wordless chanting and percussion (this is obvious, yes). Does earliest = essential? No, but. It's the core, the essence. So yeah, essential.

Essential music = Popol Vuh so... minimal vocals is the answer I guess.

http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2012/235/2/d/mic_da_microphone_follows_no_rules_by_rabbitasaur-d5c5zc9.png

i wish the vocals on this were mixed way lower

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49lY0HqqUVc