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

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.

And then, as that becomes more of a usual style, you get little things coming out of it. There's the singer who can't pull off the fancy stuff but tries anyway, and we enjoy hearing the everyday-person really strain and work to emote. Or you have the slackery thing people are associating with Malkmus here, where the singer half-tries to do something fancy, mostly misses it, and there's some vague irony in the "oh, whatever" brush-off it gets. Malkmus actually runs the gamut on this -- on songs like "Here" you get the plain-voice "honesty," on a lot of Wowee Zowee you get the straining-to-emote thing, and obviously a lot of elsewhere you get the slacking.

Plenty of other things in here, too. The Reed/Dylan thing comes out in a cool-guy drawl, which might be the "rootsy" American equivalent to the French arched-eyebrow cool. And that cedes over into rock yowling. Also don't forget Neil Young. Also don't forget kind of jokey indie voices.

In terms of plain-voice stuff, there's one version of it that really interests me: UK post-punk women and the high choirgirl voice! A lot of them did odd things with it (Ari Up or Lora Logic's flutters), but there was a big long streak of singing flat and sweet like kids in school. (See Girls at Our Best, maybe?)

But the root of most of these seems to be "I am not a fancy singer" -- whether it's slackery or sincere, the idea seems to be to sing in the ways you would when you were alone and not really "performing" to other people. The version of this I like is maybe the one that runs from Joao Gilberto (less "cool" than Astrud) to Stuart Murdoch, this microphone-enabled voice that's almost like humming, simple and unornamented.

pomo fiction for sure. i don't know poetry. who are some poets in that camp?

I certainly wasn't arguing for affectation - that conversation seems to be an offshoot of the original question - but rather for their arguable influence on a certain subsect of the indie population in the "anyone can sing" stakes.

Where did it start? In recorded music, I would say with the very first known recording, that of T.A. Edison reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb. Only his voice was cylindrical cool.

Good point, although I'd argue it goes back to Cheever and Carver.

-- gypsy mothra (meetm...), March 12th, 2006.

John Ashbery is one of the founders of that style in poetry, and I know Malkmus is/was a fan of his.

honestly, though, this exists in the western genre.

I personally feel the word "indie" needs to go though as it just confuses the whole lineage of rock. Indie-rock has always seemed to me to be just another name for underground rock or college rock from the 1960s through today. I think if we stopped changing the word around every fifteen years to describe the music scenes we could avoid all kinds of problems with where trends come from.

I think the "indie voice" can be be traced back to earlier ideas in 20th-century art. The way the voice is linked with both irony and earnestness is probably more directly influenced from another rock artist, though. I think the indie-rock voice and persona has two main godfathers. The first one would have to be the Velvet Underground. When one of the guys in Kraftwerk was asked what drew him to the band I remember him specifically talking about the Dada influence. Dada was a sort of anti-art movement in the 20th century that (from Wikipedia) "...was characterized by absurdism, nihilism, deliberate irrationality, disillusionment, cynicism, chance, randomness, and the rejection of the prevailing standards in art." Both the anti-singing style defined by Lou Reed and general punk rock or the superficially clever and fragmented lyrics by Stephen Malkmus and general indie-rock come to my mind. The idea behind anti-singing, anti-music and many other counter-culture ideas that we sometimes act as though just "popped up" in rock come from Dada.

*Another group Kraftwerk loves, The Ramones, are mentioned upthread as well for the indie-voice. Perhaps Kraftwerk saw the influences in both groups?

The second act that I think defines indie rock, and indirectly, the weak indie-voice, is different from the VU. While the Velvets might represent the Dark Side of Indie-Rock I think that Paul Simon epitomizes the lighter, collegiate side and a lot of the clever irony that bands aim for. It is no coincidence that Simon and Garfunkel was able to soundtrack one of the defining counter-culture films of the 1960s (The Graduate) and can still appear seamlessly in films with indie-rock soundtracks like the The Garden State.

Paul Simon is as much the godfather of indie-rock as Lou Reed is IMO. One of the biggest traits Paul Simon shares with indie-rock is the chief importance they both place on being clever.

It's not just Belle and Sebastian's dark irony about religion that comes to mind but also name dropping other pop stars and famous authors in songs (Donovan and Robert Frost) and the idea of "cleverly" sampling other songs (the way Simon samples the outro to Strawberry Fields Forever for the intro and outro to Fakin' It is the type of clever "get it?" reference that is a staple of indie-rock) comes from Simon. The type of humor Simon employs in songs like Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard also strike me as being almost indie-like.

Still, irony is just one part of indie-rock. Another side of it is to be embarrassingly open i.e. emo, Bright Eyes, etc. Simon goes this route just as often of course (Only Living Boy in New York, Bridge Over Troubled Water, etc). Placing a high importance on cleverness and irony and mixing it up with embarrassing earnestness at other times is something that a lot of kids understandably do in college. I think Paul Simon was one of the first "modern" college kids to really have a voice in pop music and that indie-rock (being the music of choice for college kids) is naturally drawn to many of the same traits Simon had as a young man and popularized.

There are probably dozens of other influences but I feel these two are more immediate.

I think a lot of the personas have to do with the self-consciousness that comes with being a teenager/young adult and specifically in post-1950s America. Institutions like the family and the church and business were no longer places where collegiate intellectuals were going or wanted to go and so new personas were naturally going to be made by these kids.

Reed seems like more of a descendent of the Beats and their culture but Simon is interesting as he was one of the first people from that generation's pop music to popularize the now common way of hiding your genuine feelings (MASSIVE irony and sarcasm). But when Simon didn't use irony to hide any feelings he would be almost proto-emo ('I Am A Rock' for goodness sake).

Indie "heroes" like Dean Wareham are always tagged as Reed-followers but I think we see just as much of Simon's legacy in their work as we do a VU influence.

I mean, obviously he could belt it when he wanted to, and maybe for people who know him only by the somewhat grandiose "New York, New York", it might seem strange to think of him as understated, but that was, I think, the essence of his genius: that tough street-smart Hoboken wise-guy voice, always holding something back, the master of the off-the-cuff gesture, cosmopolitan and urbane - he could make any wide-eyed and innocent '50s love-song sound complex, grown-up and sexual - always in control, ironic, self-aware - in a word, cool.