"guoid" and other diphthongizations in popular music

the way she says "boulevard" is extremely this thread

Billie Holiday's "God Bless the Child" feels like the oldest precedent to me.

This woman is one of my favorite YouTube music people and she's got a long video about this phenomenon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNtonlvglu8

maybe not directly related to this but folk singers and buskers who overemphasise that sort of Irish/West Country olde worlde accent feels like a sort of precursor to this

I feel like Karen Dalton is at the root of the folkier side of indie voice, also like Rickie Lee Jones she is amazing

(I think partially she was really on drugs bad and lost her teeth early on)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsYHN7eCCtU

I know Newsome is a big fan

one of the most irritating things in the recent bad film VOX LUX is that the main character is depicted as singing like this as a rising teen star circa 1999-2001, when absolutely nobody was singing like this iirc. the songs were all written by sia but they didn't have to be sung that way, surely!

one of the most irritating things in the recent bad film VOX LUX is that the main character is depicted as singing like this as a rising teen star circa 1999-2001, when absolutely nobody was singing like this iirc. the songs were all written by sia but they didn't have to be sung that way, surely!

― |Restore| |Restart| |Quit| (Doctor Casino), Tuesday, December 11, 2018 10:38 AM (thirty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol I haven't seen it (probably won't) but if I do now this is going to bug me

Immediately thought of the way Carly Rae Jepsen sings the word "got" in the line "I've got 'em too" in Boy Problems.

i really don't recommend the film though i know some people are viewing it as an interesting/ambitious failure. for me it was just a mess. i would also put some heavy trigger warnings re: gun violence and trauma on the front end of it fwiw. but this inability to show any verisimilitude re: turn-of-the-00s pop was what drove my ILMy brain batty.

Immediately thought of the way Carly Rae Jepsen sings the word "got" in the line "I've got 'em too" in Boy Problems.

― J. Sam, Tuesday, December 11, 2018 11:25 AM (eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's a Sia vocalization I think -- I wrote a piece for NPR about this but a lot of this can be traced to Sia writing a lot of pop songs, enough that people emulate her

Tori Amos definitely an early vector for this, though - I remember being baffled by her pronunciation of "watchword" as "wyechword" in "Cornflake Girl" in 1994.

Lol, yes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DD7VIKZnGA

Leave Ellen Greene the hell out of this

A lot of the examples given I couldn't hear what the big deal was tbh. Anyway try listening to Mick Jagger - diphthongs, triphthongs, bizarre phrasing, outlandish accent etc etc.

― Monica Kindle (Tom D.), Thursday, 6 December 2018 17:38 (five days ago) Permalink

I always just took this to be a cartoonishly bad (and slightly offensive) attempt at sounding african american

(...)if you were singing 'good' over two notes it's easy to naturally change the second sound as you lift the pitch?

This is basically all I hear happening in the Selena G. song (which is not to deny the existence of this "indie girl singer" affectation, or whatever it may be).

I'm no singer; but just trying it out here in my quiet office, I don't know how I would stretch "go-od" into two syllables and not change the pitch on the 2nd one.

xp ^^ yeah the chorussy bit of that is what I was referring to. But earlier on (around 25s in) there are more grating 'guoid's (and 'toech')

Immediately thought of the way Carly Rae Jepsen sings the word "got" in the line "I've got 'em too" in Boy Problems.

― J. Sam, Tuesday, December 11, 2018 10:25 AM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

me too! she makes it three syllables long in the part at the end!!

It is completely possible to sing a melisma without changing the vowel sound wtf.

I am completely able to sing two pitches on "good" without turning it into "goo-yid".

You are very likely a better singer than me!

Not that I'm a singer but xp ha

Eyyyem ah veyrr guoid singehhhh

Hah this thread has set me off on a Rickie Lee Jones voyage of discovery, and damn - how the fuck did I miss her for 36 years?

she's the greatest :)