birth of the flattened cool: the origins of the indie voice?

this comment way way upthread confused me. i'm wondering how you think lennon was distanced from either of the two songs you mentioned, or from other songs of that era. "rain" sounds to me like a sincere delivery of a rather straightforward lyric. "norwegian wood" is a slightly more puzzling lyric, but what is it in the vocal that you read as distancing?

i'd argue quite the opposite -- that paul was the one who was distanced from a lot of his beatles material. he was often great, but at his worst, on something like "rocky raccoon," he comes across to me like he thinks his own songs are jokes, and he's just trying to put one over on us.

but i wouldn't put either john or paul into the "flattened cool" category, whatever we're trying to make it mean. they both had considerable vocal gifts, and they used them to full effect most of the time. they were singing!

i do think he's forebear to this kind of thing which i think spittle was getting at, but maybe just in attitude/appearance.

Yeah, of course the Beatles were singing. I never meant to imply that anybody wasn't "singing", it's more the how of it. (It's true that several of the people referenced had limited ranges, but that's not exactly a requirement.) I think mid-period-Beatles is when Lennon starts to get arch and disaffected -- it's his moodiest, most mysterious phase (and my favorite Beatles stretch). And I think his singing changed -- partly under Dylan's influence, which he acknowledged, but more generally in what he was conveying with his voice. His sneer on "Rain" is almost punkish ("they might as well be dead"), and "Norwegian Wood" and "Girl" in particular operate from a sort of jaded, knowing vantagepoint -- again, not just in the lyrics but in the vocal approach -- that I think does connect to this other (at that time, emerging) style.

By the way, am I the only one who thinks he burns the house down at the end of "Norwegian Wood"? People always look at me weird when I ask that.

but for flat, affectless singing, noodle vague nailed it by bringing up nico.

Magnetic Fields are obviously a motherlode of flattened indie affect.

yes, totally, and what i meant to refer to specifically before. he even put on a few pounds then, right? he got to be a bored 'bad boy', still probably looking for the next inspiration, but:
"oh, i guess i write really good songs, guess i'm making history, zzzzzzz"
and then yes, orbit, on to heroin eventually.

the "flat, cool" sound was not an accident, imho. i mean the examples of flat and cool given here are so obvious, i mean nico for god's sake....

Yeah but the indie singing we're talking about is a limited voice NOT stretched to its limits through the application of ingenuity and craft. I don't think the typical indie singing style sounds anything like Billie Holiday.

I suspect Orbit is right about the importance of heroin.

Amen.

"clipped diction" = good name for pop punk band

they couldn't sing; or they were too blissed out to have intonation (the pudding theory) and that is what became "cool", emulated, repeated, associated with hip--and now we have the result: flat indie voice[tm]

I hear the same quality in the Left Banke--"She May Call You Up Tonight." A bit too in Colin Blunstone. And Alex Chilton, too.

also, some classic country recordings could be easily mentioned as precursors - "ragged but right", tons of stuff on the anthology box.

but i don't think you can get anywhere with this because essentially they're all pretty different at what they do. if you stop overthinking and just compare julian stroke with stuart murdoch and with laetitia sadier, three huge velvets fans, any common ground is tenuous.

if you listen to a new wave hits of the 80s cd, what you notice is that the singers aren't lacking in dynamic attack or even pipes, what unites them is just weirdness. some singers have really weird voices, or they yelp in an overexcited way, or they drawl, etc. it's analogous to when bop took over big band jazz - quite apart from the strange songs and solos, people talked about bird's harsh tone, dizzy's squeaks, to say nothing of monk or [late 40s] miles.

so if new wave hits have weird singers [of course disco and garage rock had plenty of odd singing voices too, but i think new wave was more about dressing and sounding different], deeper into indie and true punk [people who don't chart] you have further diversity. some of them do indeed sing off key quite a bit - both mark e smith and his erstwhile copycat steve malkmus have claimed they are a bit tone deaf, but the rest of their bands were often out of tune as well, so this must be a bit of a pose and they are going offkey on purpose - when people first hear stuart murdoch, his occasional wanderings offkey leap out and smack them. such a pretty song, why can't the singer sing?

you can't say it comes from lou reed or chet baker or any one guy; it's not as if feedback guitar noise wouldn't exist if not for jimi hendrix. there's always been people in folk music who drawl their songs. and it's not as if all singers in indie rock sound do what you're talking about. the key is: nonconformity. they are all trying to sound a little bit unique. as opposed to a metal band or a pop group, whose songwriting guitarists or keyboard players look for singers who will sound right, correct, normal.

he also had the proto-"devo yelp" as I like to call it.

"With a little historical distance, it's clear that what Chet Baker did with Chet Baker Sings is not unlike what the Ramones did with their first album: simply turned every contemporary expectation on its head. ... He sang those great sentimental lyrics by Larry Hart, Johnny Mercer, and Ira Gershwin (previously considered suitable only for female vocalists), but he sang them at one remove, cool and plain, acknowledging the sentiment without buying into it -- glancing at it over his shoulder, as through the window of a door closed behind him -- so that what we get is not the feeling but the memory of it. In contemporary terms, Baker does not so much "perform" these songs as "simulate" them...

...There is no vibrato, no "beautiful" singing, and no "strong" statement. There are no extended solos, no range dynamics, no volume dynamics, no tempo dynamics, no expressive timbre shifts, no suppression of extant melodies, no harmonic meandering, no virtuoso high-speed scales, and, in fact, very few sixteenth-notes -- none of the stuff, in short, that told jazz critics of the time what the player was doing and how "good" he was at it. All you got was the song -- dispassionately articulated with lots of spaces..."

Skeeter Davis?

I'll grant that this comes down to how much a given indie band/singer draws from the irksome, tedious, limply-sung Velvet Underground lineage, but I do think it's weird to paint all indie singing ("the indie voice") with that brush.