College Reading and Writing - Jim O'Loughlin

This webpage is designed to accompany classroom discussion of Simon Frith's "The Voice" in Ways of Reading. 6th edition.  Eds. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2002.  274 - 303.  Text and music on this page are compiled for educational purposes only and should not be used for any other reason.

Using this page: when appropriate, I've included complete copies of lyrics and songs mentioned in Simon Frith's "The Voice."  That said, I do not recommend reading the essay next to the computer and clicking on every link below.  Read the essay first, then come to this page to get a flavor for the songs he cites in the course of the essay.

Hope you find some of the songs interesting both in themselves and for how Frith uses them in the course of his argument.  The Aaron Neville tune is a favorite of mine, but that Meatloaf song goes on and on and on.

Jim

Simon Frith - "The Voice"

(I think it would be impossible to read Bob Dylan's "Positively 4th Street" as if we were the "you" at issue--and this is a song positively obsessed with the word. The pleasure of these lines is as a means of sounding our own feelings of contempt and hauteur.)

     Read the lyrics to "Positively 4th Street"

Even in this case, though, the voices can't be purely sound effects; at the very least they also indicate gender, and therefore gender relations (the aggressive-submissive attitude of the Raelettes to Ray Charles; the butch male choral support for Neil Tennant on the Pet Shop Boys' "Go West"), and it is notable that while rock conventionally uses other male voices, other members of the band, to sing close harmonies, backup singers are almost always female--and remarkably often black female at that. [footnote 14: see below]

     Listen to "Go West"

Pg. 280 - 4th full paragraph, footnote 14

Footnote 14 (pg. 295)

As was parodied by Lou Reed in "Walk on the Wild Side."

     Read the lyrics to "Walk on the Wild Side"

Gregory Sandow on Alex Strodahl's arrangements for Frank Sinatra.

And Glenn Gould on Barbra Streisand:

One way in which we hear the body in the voice, to put this more positively, is in the sheer physical pleasure of singing itself, in the enjoyment a singer takes in particular movements of muscles, whether as a sense of oneness between mind and body, will and action (a singer may experience something of the joy of an athlete) or through the exploration of physical sensations and muscular powers one didn't know one had (and the listener, like the sports spectator, enjoys the experience partly by proxy, but also aesthetically, with awe at the sheer grace of say, Aaron Neville not exactly singing "Tell It Like It Is," but holding its notes, turning them over for our admiration).

What, then, is the significance of mainstream rock's generic preference for high-pitched male voices like Robert Plant's, for the articulation of a "hard" rock sound as a man straining to reach higher?  In the spring of 1994 Canada's Crash Test Dummies had a worldwide hit with "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm," and no one doubted that a major reason for its success was the novelty of Brad Roberts' bass voice, his swollen vowels, the noise rumbling back down in this throat.

     Listen to "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm"

It's easy enough to spot the "unnatural" and "effeminate" rock use of the falsetto too: Frankie Valli's delirious high-pitched recollection of his father's advice in "Walk Like a Man"; Jimmy Sommerville's appearance as a cherub in Sally Potter's Orlando.

     Read the lyrics to "Walk Like A Man"

The possibilities for confusion here between "natural" and "conventional" voices of desire are well realized in X-Ray Spex's "Oh Bondage Up Yours"

     optional website link

     Read the lyrics to "Oh Bondage Up Yours"

What becomes clear in David Brackett's detailed comparison of Billie Holiday's and Bing Crosby's versions of "I'll Be Seeing You," for example, is that it is almost impossible to hear both of them as sincere: the assumptions that lie behind a reading of Holiday's voice as "witheringly" sad entail our hearing Crosby's voice as "shallow."  If Holiday sings "for real," then Crosby, as Brackett puts it, gives "the impression of someone playing a role in a film"; while someone hearing Crosby as reassuringly direct and friendly could only hear Holiday as mannered.

     Listen to Bing Crosby's "I'll Be Seeing You"

This is most obvious in the white use of black voices in rock and roll history, from Jerry Lee Lewis's "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On," which as Gendron says, "presents itself as white-boy-wildly-singing-and-playing-black," to Mick Jagger's "I'm a King Bee," which, we might say, presents itself as white-boy-lasciviously-slurring-and-playing-black-sex.

     Listen to "I'm a King Bee"

Such a multiplicity of voices can be heard in all pop forms, whatever the generic differences in how they are registered--whether by Tom T. Hall or Johnny Rotten always "being themselves," by Dory Previn being "The Lady with the Braids" (complete with nervous laughter), or by Frank Sinatra being himself being a late-night melancholic in "One for My Baby"; whether, to be more dramatic, in Patti Smith's rock and roll chronicle, "Horses," in the Chi-Lites' strip cartoon, "Have You Seen Her," or in Meat Loaf's big brother act, "Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are."

     Listen to Patti Smith's "Land" from Horses

     Listen to Meatloaf's "Objects in the Rear View..."

What we take for granted, listening to all these songs, is that they involve layers of interpretation, and that in pop it is therefore all but impossible to disentangle vocal realism, on the one hand, from vocal irony, on the other.  How does one read, for example, Randy Newman's concert performance of "Lonely at the Top"?  Here have not just a cult singer/songwriter pretending to be a superstar (listen to the audience laugh with him) but also a highly successful writer/composer pretending to be a failure (listen to him laugh at his audience).  Or take Michelle Shocked's "Anchorage," the meaning of which, as Dai Griffiths argues, depends on "whether you hear in Anchorage, a place in Alaska, the natural voice of the letter writer, or in 'Anchorage,' a song by Michelle Shocked, the crafted voice of the songwriter."  And the pleasure of this lies in the fact that we actually hear both Anchorage and "Anchorage" at once.

      Listen to "Lonely at the Top"

     (sorry, not the live version)

     Listen to "Anchorage"

     Read the lyrics to "Anchorage"

The voices on tracks like the Shangri-Las' "Leader of the Pack" or the Angels' "My Boyfriend's Back" function as each other's audience; the chorus, dramatically, comments on the story and the action, encouraging the lead singer, disbelieving her, egging her on.  Here "corporate identity" is indicated less by harmony singing than by the sharing out of the lead voice itself, and there is a direct continuity between the Shirelles' 1958 "I Met Him on a Sunday" and Salt-n-Pepa's 1991 "Let's Talk About Sex."

     Listen to "My Boyfriend's Back"

     Listen to "I Met Him on a Sunday"

     Listen to "Let's Talk About Sex" (partial song only)

--and I defy anyone to listen to [Sinead O'Connor's] first entry on [Willie Nelson's "Don't Give Up"] without a shiver of recognition that this person (with all we know about her) should be telling Willie Nelson (with all we know about him), should be telling him, so surely, so sweetly, to survive.

Song and lyrics to go with sample student paper 

Read the lyrics to "Poison Well"

Listen to Insolence's "Poison Well" (not currently working)