Singing is easy (and no one does it right)

Anyone can sing. Even the deaf. Go on. Do it. Inflate the lungs. Sing along with me. Even this guy can sing too.



Not like that. Too sharp. Too flat. Too pitchy. Too loud. Too quiet. You sound like a grieving horse. A shot sparrow. A misfiring car. Just fucking stop, ok? You make the birds sick. You make Jeremy Irons cry. Children don't want to follow their dreams. Man will cease to procreate. You killed the world.

Broadly speaking, singing holds a special place in human society. It's social, a ritual, a way of reaching God, a comfort, an accent to grief, communication; its functions too broad and bountiful to name comfortably here.

Within the popular or common idiom, it is a representative device used to 'humanise' the song. As 'lyrical' and 'poetic' as instrumental music can be, sane and rational people prefer music with vocals because they can imitate a specific strategy of the music themselves without any specialist training (unless you're some kind of twat who takes a guitar to a gig).



Turn on your TV. People, on shows like X Factor and the musical casting shows are constantly being told that they can't sing. And when people are being told they can sing, they're being told by people who couldn't possibly understand what good singing is and where it comes from.

I blame Stevie Wonder and his melismatic ways. Melismatic singing is that where a syllable is sung as more than one note. This accounts for the 'oooouuuuuewwooooaaoaooaooaoooh' over-enunciating from pretty much every singer since 1966. That said, Stevie's songs were complex and demanded such endeavours. 'She's The One' by Robbie Williams does not.

The voice, even when acting in a representative medium such as song, is capable of sleights of emotion so jarring that the lump in your throat feels like you swallowed a housebrick whole. It can catch you in your most extreme mindsets - of joy and pain - like a mirror and show you back in the most naked state; vulnerable and inexorably human. It's more than simply 'recognising yourself' in song. It's how at once we can elevate ourselves to be more than we've been and yet be isolated, adrift, aware of how futile it can all be. And yet still understand that things matter; that you matter - that this, whatever 'this' is, matters.* Ahem.

Take this example. The second chorus. Two simple words: 'forgive me'. It's one of very few times I have heard an enunciation of a lyric which equates to the sentiment it expresses in reality (ie. not in song).



Think about it. Let's examine some lyrics while you do.

Take a look around
At what technology has found
Is it what we need?
Or are we killing the seed?
Dictated by the screen
No more following your dreams
The world's become a difficult place to be

Fuck. This dude is angry, frustrated, confused. He might even be right. Technology man, all these wasted words and instant communications - but at what cost? The media does act dictatorially; its influence upon the behaviours and motives of individuals and groups is as proveable as almost any cause and effect in science, from race riots to eating disorders. The human voice has ways of expressing the layers of hurt, anger, sadness and nihilism inherent in this lyric. Who is this sage?






Extreme example. Or is it?

Bad singing is not an inability to hit notes in a timely fashion. The Shaggs couldn't do either and yet their songs retain a magical quality.

Bad singing is an inability to analogue appropriate sentiment and real emotion in the vocal medium. Every word in this sentence is a link to examples of bad singing.

It's true that I have a suspicion of professional singers. I've been told that I can't sing by my own parents: I was born with a cleft palete, so that may have had something to do with it - I am lucky to be understood even when simply speaking. I later went on to front a couple of bands anyway. As long as the conviction was there, what did it matter? Professionality has so many negative connotations bound up in; mercenary, slick. What can they care about content? It's also true that I adore unconventional singers such as Mark E. Smith, Damo Suzuki and Marion Coutts.

The point is that you can sing, even if you've been told that you can't - or that you have been told you can but you've been doing it wrong all your life - hitting those notes, coming in at the right time and always looking presentable. You just have to be there, understanding exactly what the fuck you are going on about, and showing it back to us: no matter how fragile and small or bellicose and triumphant that is.

You don't even have to look good doing it or even look comfortable.




*smug preening wankers who laugh their sickly laugh and say 'why don't you study something useful?' in their shirt-and-tie, phone-in-a-room lifestyle who have their head up their arse so far they can't see these are the reasons we bother to keep ourselves alive.

A chance to cure is a chance to psychologically damage forever

PART ONE
Could music be contributing to our own ill-health?

Music is a healer. This isn't a soggy liberal notion: the NHS employ music and play therapists. It is science. Music performance as a rehabilitative therapy aids motor skills, cognition and enables a communication form for those who lack verbal skills. Read some of Oliver Sacks' work on musicophilia. Music helps people suffering a range of ailments from Down's Syndrome to cancer to autism. If you need a real-life example - Neil Young's Trans. His son Zeke was born with cerebral palsy and the Synclavier enabled the two to finally communicate in a meaningful sense.



Music can also cause and induce pain. Some artists base their career upon it; Masonna, Whitehouse, Merzbow - to name just three. Some remain at the level of situationist joke: there's a semi-legendary tale about Extreme Noise Terror staging an intervention at Roskilde by playing 'the brown note' through gigantic speakers facing the floor, causing dozens to shit their pants or throw up spontaneously.

Some go farther. Here in the UK, shops which have a continued issue with loitering teenagers have installed The Mosquito, a device which emits a pulse only audible by teenagers. We are also familiar with the US military's predilection for subjecting prisoners to mental disintegration by looping Metallica, Limp Bizkit and, err, Barney The Dinosaur at preposterously loud volumes. What you may be less familiar with are special weapons designed to emit violently loud and continued bursts of high-frequency noise, such as the Long Range Acoustic Device. This has domestic uses, such as breaking up crowds of rioters, but has been used in wartime situations to:

draw out enemy snipers who are subsequently destroyed by our own snipers.
Neil Davison and Nick Lewer
Bradford Non-Lethal Weapons Research Project

The greatest crimes of musical torture, however, are self-inflicted. Chunklet ran an excellent piece of deliberate self-sabotage as the two editors made each other a C-90 tape stuffed with the worst music they could find and subjected themselves to their 'gifts' for 24 hours. You can read the piece here, but here is a quote from the exasperated Brian Teasley after the experiment.

"After a complete 17 insufferable listens of this barbaric, ass-melting retardo music, I’m beyond fucked up. Music is stupid. I can finally understand people who say they don’t listen to it."

Adults, typical adults, everyday working adults - the sort who do not 'get into' music - prefer happy-sounding music. The radio does not knowingly, not least in its more popular slots, play depressing music. The singing contests on the television favour the upbeat, the popular, the universal and the familiar - the inclusive, the people together in harmony. Shops and public places pipe in upbeat, nominally 'happy' music. You can't escape the idea that happiness is supposed to be the norm, and yet it feels desperate, like an attempt to divert you from feeling anything else.

This state of constant beatification is apparent and yet one in three suffer from some kind of mental illness (often depressive or anxiety-related, a worry or acknowledgment that the tenuous balance between the state of fun suggested at in the atmosphere (in visual media also) and the reality of things has been transgressed) at some point in life. Whilst no scientific correlation exists between the prevalence of mental disorders and a society which consensus agrees is overwhelming, rapid, intangible, complex and multi-layered, popular art presents itself as nothing more than a whore, a cultural wallpaper at the cheer-up clinic of retail therapy.


PART TWO
Remniscences of a nu-metal teenhood

This morning, my housemate reminded me about nu-metal also-rans Stain'd. Let me jog your memory.


(key moment: 3.24. Durst highlights the lyric via the medium of gesture - if you don't punch your screen through in rage before that moment, that is)

Without question, they run the A to Z of horror. Stain'd are artless, bland, cringeworthy and despicable. They're also egregious, flimsy, ghastly, hateable, insipid & jerkish killjoys - lamentably making nothing new. Ordinary powershite, quite rubbish. Simply toss. Uniquely vile. Wank. Insults beginning with X, Y or Z please post as a comment.

I always hated Stain'd. I never warmed to their grey middle-class frustration, their endlessly dreary songs or their designer angst at a time when I was an angsty, dreary middle-class kid. At least all my friends hated them too and we'd take collective joy in switching their videos off.

My friends did like nu-metal though. It was a genre to which I struggled to adjust; the fashions didn't suit me (based as they were around facial hair which I couldn't grow, tattoos which I couldn't afford and baggy denim which rendered my lower half wider than my top half, like a medieval chess piece) and the music seemed a bit silly. For a few years, at least when the music was on, I felt like a tourist.

One of music's greatest strengths is its ability to bond people, to cement a memory that will remain even when priorities and postcodes change.

Another method of sealing the future of a group's collective memory is to expose them to a period of tumult. Terry Waite and John McCarthy may not now be best friends, but their names are inextricable. They will never forget each other.

If music and tumult can force people together, the two combined must be the greatest adhesive ever. Had my friendships with these people not been as long-lasting, there is no doubt that I would always remember them after one week in 2000 that changed us forever.

Stephen's parents were away, so we spent a week off college playing Athlete Kings on the Sega Saturn, getting stoned, eating Canadian steaks and listening to the same two songs by Disturbed over and over again.

Oh, and by that last part I don't mean 'four or five times'. I mean 'over and over again'. The songs ('Down With The Sickness' and their cover of 'Shout' by Tears For Fears) on repeat. Every eight minutes or so, someone would put down their joypad, get up, walk across the room, skip back to the songs and press play. I estimate I heard each song around seventy times each.

It's difficult to explain the sensations experienced ten years removed. We live in and enjoy a culture where something that displeases us can be excised, ignored or switched off. Sometimes you might have to experience something bad a couple of times, maybe even half-a-dozen at worst.

At first it was mildly irritating, as ever it is when a song you dislike will not be turned off - no matter how much you protest. After a few listens, it became funny.



After a dozen, the humour seemed distant, eventually replaced by anger. A dozen more and it became full-blown apoplexy. The anger fatigued me so that my body became a giant raft of shit afloat in a turgid sea of piss.

There I was: drowning in the living room, the curtains closed for days, flaking away. Everyone else seemed rather buoyed by the songs instead of being terminally stricken by them. Nobody else wanted to give up all scheduled bodily functions and become a puddle of enzymes. When I emerged into the light after those three days, I was broken and have never since recovered. Take a listen for yourself. Perhaps even give it 70 spins. See what happens.


(is that not the worst song intro ever?)

Episodes such as these help teach why criticism is important and why the well-meaning rejoinder 'if you don't like it, ignore it' is knuckleheadedly reductive.

To be continued.