everybody's talkin' - is spoken word a legit new threat in current music?

Charlotte Adigéry (& Bolis Pupul) on some of the stuff on her (their) new album, if it counts? it’s one reason I’m quite ambivalent about their current direction

Plonk IX on the new Huerco S. album

There are many very, very, very different sorts of spoken word. The Leanover and LWB in general is high-level performance poetry. What rob is (correctly imo) sideeyeing is diaristic on-the-nose musing, which is fuckin everywhere yes

(Adigery gets away with it cos she's extremely witty obv)

I agree that "Hard Drive" sounds a little like an NPR-style podcast, or the way they talk on something like This American Life (...I'm a Jenkins fan, but this isn't meant as a compliment! lol)

I don't really hear podcasts in the other "first-person interlude" pop album traxx, though

― Please don’t take / My time change away (morrisp), Thursday, March 31, 2022 2:18 PM (two hours ago)

My podcast theory is admittedly quarter-baked, but to flesh it out slightly: I had more in mind the possibility that the popularity of podcasts has amplified/normalized passively listening to spoken or recited speech, rather than that the specific style of podcast speech was an influence. tbc I am not sold on this theory myself, as I suspect it fatally puts the cart before the horse

There are many very, very, very different sorts of spoken word

absolutely! I would actually love it if someone attempted a taxonomy; I dimly recall some chat on the EOY rollout in that direction. I think the only thing I would exclude is samples; that kind of decontextualization strikes me as qualitatively different (i.e, Reich's Come Out does not strike me as an influence on this stuff), though there are likely edge cases, as there are of course on the border between singing monotonously and speaking rhythmically.

tbh, I had forgotten until breastcrawl mentioned it, but the Adigery was one of the projects I did sort of have in mind—it's something I should like on paper but whose appeal eludes me, at least in part due to that declamatory delivery. That said, I'm not sure it counts either!

We kind of got into it a bit here: SONGS WHERE/SONGS THAT/SONGS WITH/SONGS IN WHICH

ah thanks, I hadn't thought about "What's He Building in There" in a while, that's a good one. For some reason that reminded me that PJ Harvey has a couple of these too iirc

To imago's point though, yeah, I think there's something zeitgeisty about the way most of the current uses I can think of are non-narrative, sometimes first-person, sometimes more like a manifesto. clemenza mentioned VU's "The Gift" at the start, and I couldn't put my finger on why I didn't quite buy that as the origin, and I think it's because it's too clearly a literary short story

sleaford mods, noname