I went last night to the Southern to check out Jolie Holland‘s show, and was forced to reflect on a question I’ve pondered many times: Can a human being truly come out of the womb speaking fine, but singing like her tongue is competing with marbles for space in her mouth?
If you haven’t seen her, Holland is a great, understated performer. She sings in a limber, jazzy voice with a slow attack that melts the edges of her words. (In that way, she is the opposite of Metallica’s James Hetfield, who punctuates each line with a "gah" that sounds like he’s trying to chomp the words as they escape his mouth.) When she hits the hook of her catchiest song, "Mexico City," she sings, "Oh, limmy-a-longah-day," in which the words are supposedly, "The living and the dead." And too bad for marketing purposes, that’s the name of her new record, which I plan to buy after seeing her.
Exhibit A: Jolie Holland’s "Mexico City." More below.
But not without struggling with it. My frustration is this: For some musicians, singing in a difficult voice has a way of coding one’s music as "difficult"—perhaps more difficult than it really is. To wit, Holland said that she recorded that record after falling in love with some of the best, most difficult music pop music that exists, that of Daniel Johnston. If you invent a funny way to sing, your music doesn’t have to do the heavy lifting.
Maybe Bob Dylan had "difficult" in mind when he abandoned singing through his throat (which he later picked up again on Nashville Skyline) to spend his early years singing like a Dust Bowl balladeer whose nose was packed with dust. Or Tom Waits, who turned the somewhat gritty croon of his youth into a low-down growl (with the help of cigarettes). And all the way from David Byrne, who sings like a robot on acid, to the guy from momentary indie success story Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, which, I mean—that was taking the whole thing too far.
Exhibit B: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Masquerading as "difficult"?
While watching Jolie Holland mumble her phrases in that stirring voice, I came to reflect on my own music. (Forgive me for a moment.) Just as Holland is guilty of singing with a leaden tongue, I’m guilty of mumbling my words, burying them deep in the mix—something I picked up while listening to My Bloody Valentine as an impressionable youth. But when I’m singing in my particular way, what feels "authentic" to me likely comes across as put-on.
So it seems, as in so often the case with art, the concept of "authenticity" is a chimera. It struck me not as strange or annoying when the Washington indie rocker Arrington de Dionyso brought his throat singing act (a style apparently indigenous to the Tuva people of Siberia) Malaikat dan Singa to the Tea Bazaar last year. Instead, it struck me as awesome.
Maybe the human voice doesn’t sound any one way. People sing in their vernacular. Maybe Holland listened to a lot of folk music underwater.
Exhibit C: Arrington de Dionyso’s Malaikat dan Singa "Mani Malaikat," brutally dismantling sentimental notions about authentic vocal stylings.
Who else adopts a strong vocal affect?