Sometimes it's really cool being a linguist, because you get to read things like this:
"A good example is provided by Bob Dylan, who is from Minnesota, in the American Mid-West, and who has /ai/ = [ai] and non-prevocalic /r/ in his speech. His singing style incorporates frequent use of [a] and r-loss."
This is from Trudgill's article "Acts of Conflicting Identity: The Sociolinguistics of British Pop-song Pronunciation" (written in 1983). It's basically an article about how 'rock and roll voice' changed with The Beatles. Before them the voice was basically Black and Southern American, although apparently British singers got confused about what to do about their /r/ sounds, because, although most American accents have them, rock and roll voice doesn't really. So you have all these British singers who sound like American singers, except that they put /r/ in words like "girl" and "letter" (and then they put in their British /r/ too, so you have Paul McCartney singing "I never sawr them at all" in 'Till there was you' as Trudgill points out). But studies show that there is this drop in non-prevocalic /r/ (that's like in "girl", as opposed to the /r/ in "really", which is before a vowel) in The Beatles' music around the time Sergeant Pepper came out. Trudgill says that this is probably because of the British Invasion, British singers didn't have to try as hard to sound like Americans because they had become something of a standard themselves. He also points out that, although The Beatles weren't trying as hard to sound American, they weren't trying to sound British either, in fact, they had more of the Liverpudlian (that is just a great word) features on their early albums: rhyming "gone" with "one" (on With The Beatles), rhyming "aware" and "her" (on Rubber Soul, which song is that, though, I can't remember?).
Trudgill also talks about the rise of punk and how the punk bands were setting their standard as British working-class music. He analyses several artists here, The Clash, Sham '69, The Stranglers, and Ian Drury. He adds this nice comment after remarking that The Stranglers were more American in that they are more like the mainstream groups linguistically, "This is probably of more interest to rock musicologists than to linguists, but it is interesting to note that The Stranglers have been one of the groups accused of having 'sold out' and of not being 'really punk'. Perhaps giving your records Latin titles [like Rattus Norvegicus] does not help here either."
I love this stuff, just makes me want to be a rock musicologist. Funke, do you study stuff like this? What about Radiohead? What about Belle and Sebastian, who are Scottish, but sound English when they sing? Man, this is just what I needed now, school encouraging me to spend less time on my homework.
Posted by linnea at December 5, 2006 10:11 AMOh yeah, we definitely talked about the British rockers trying to imitate the Afro-American voice b/c it was "more authentic" but that the British Invasion gave them more confidence to do their own thing. We only ever barely skim the surface when it comes to digging into linguistic issues in voice, though, focusing instead on stuff like timbre and vocal line (i.e., Bob Dylan comes across as more "authoritative" b/c he frequently ends on a downshift in voice--the exact opposite of teenage girls who always end with an up-note and the therefore an implied question mark). I wonder if this is just lack of inter-disciplinary work or whether it is a suspicion within the music community of language and the sort of free for all invasion that literary criticism exerted over the discipline around the 70s-ish or so.
My prof mentioned how she thought Thom Yorke (and Sigor Ros' and Coldplay's lead singers for that matter) project an "alternative" version of masculinity, b/c they all have rather high, but intensely anguished and somewhat distorted voices.
Belle and Sebastian might be an example of how more metropolitan Scots tone down their accent; perhaps it is a marketability thing. Perhaps it a class-based thing. Or maybe it's just the result of metropolitan merging/diminishing of individual accents.
Yeah, Linnea, quit linguistics and come study musicology. :)
Maybe we could trade places for a day, at least.
Posted by: funke at December 5, 2006 10:51 AMwell, what makes me wonder about Belle and Sebastian is that they have certain spoken tracks "A Space Boy Dream" on Boy With the Arab Strap and that one on Tigermilk with the girl talking about the headmaster, can't remember what it's called, where they have very Scottish accents, but when they sing they don't.
Posted by: linnea at December 5, 2006 12:30 PMI'm surprised, Sarah, you didn't help Linnea and me with the title of that song from Rubber Soul.
Posted by: Evan Donovan at December 5, 2006 7:06 PMIt's because that particular rhyme doesn't exist on that album. I am telling you. It doesn't. Linnea, make Trudgill prove this.
Linnea, can you tell me which journal the article came in? I failed to find it through a JSTOR search...
Posted by: funke at December 5, 2006 8:14 PMHa! Linnea, I found Sociolinguistics: A Reader and Coursebook in my library!!
Too bad it has nothing to do with my current topic, but I don't care. As I would often tell everyone during finals weeks past, "I can't wait to be done with school so I can finally learn again..." But sometimes I don't wait to be done with school to learn. I just learn anyway.
Ah...have you read this Ph.D comic? I particularly felt for the girl who was hoping the hurricane would wipe out her research lab..."And that's when I realized that perhaps I was unhappy in grad school."
Well, okay, it's not that bad. Being dramatic is what makes life less stressful...
Posted by: funke at December 7, 2006 2:26 PMI would like the blogging world in general to know that Trungill is wrong about Rubber Soul. He meant to say Help!
Perhaps he just needs help...
Posted by: your friendly neighbourhood musicologist at December 8, 2006 1:31 PMfunke, yeah, I read that PhD strip and have thought about it often this past week as I keep trying to think of what could get destroyed that would keep me from having to turn things in.
Posted by: linnea at December 8, 2006 6:16 PM