Reading Comprehension: “To accent or not to accent?”

Good morning!

Today we are going to learn about accents in singing and speaking with an article from mentalfloss.

Ready?

Reader Jared wrote in with this question: “Why do singers I perceive as having accents (i.e. Adele, Bono, etc.) have those accents when they talk, but not when they sing?”

I hear what Jared is saying. Or, rather, I don’t hear it. While there are certainly exceptions, I’ve heard a thick accent on many European singers when they give interviews, but they sound as American as apple pie – which, to American ears, means “no” accent – when belting out their songs.  If I’d only heard Eric Clapton or Bono sing instead of speak, I’d believe you if you said they were from the States.

There are two main reasons, from what I can tell, for this perceived loss of accent.

One is technical. As Billy Bragg — a guy who’s never had difficulty letting his accent shine through — explains, “You can’t sing something like ‘Tracks of Your Tears’ in a London accent. The cadences are all wrong.” Different accents are often defined by their rhythms, intonation and vowel quality and length. For many accents, the tune and the rhythm of a song can constrain these qualities to the point where the accent seemingly disappears.

This is true even for certain qualities of the General American accent and regional American accents related to it. GenAm is a rhotic accent, which means speakers pronounce the letter r at the end of words like car and lover. But if most Americans sang those words the same way they said them, they’d sound like pirates. Instead, many songs force American singers to push the r more towards a vowel ah sound, the same way many Brits might pronounce it. (See Jackie Wilson’s “Higher and Higher” for examples of both sounds. In some performances he pronounces the r fully, and in others he holds back on it.)

Of course, it is possible for a variety of accents to maintain their unique characteristics within the constraints of song. There’s no mistaking where The Beatles, The Proclaimers or The Pogues were from. So, if you can sing with your accent, why wouldn’t you?

There also seems to be a social factor to the Incredible Disappearing Accent. I’m just speculating here, but if they have a very thick regional or working-class accent, some singers may want to drop it on their way to music superstardom in favor of a more fashionable or mainstream accent. Still others might have masked their accent’s particular eccentricities in an effort to imitate the sound of their musical idols. This might help explain why the “British Invasion” bands, whose appeal to Americans was their very Britishness, largely kept their accents in their songs, but acts like Led Zeppelin, Cream and the Rolling Stones, heavily influence by African American blues musicians, had more American-sounding vocals.

Vocabulary

Perceive – to notice or become aware of (something).difficult to understand.

Thick – difficult to understand.

American as apple pie – very or typically American.

Belting out – sing very loudly.

Shine through – to be seen, expressed, or shown clearly.

Cadences – the way a person’s voice changes by gently rising and falling while he or she is speaking.

Intonation – the rise and fall in the sound of your voice when you speak.

Constrain – to limit or restrict (something or someone)

Rhotic – an accent that generally has /r/ more or less whenever if appears in the spelling.

Speculating – to think about something and make guesses about it : to form ideas or theories about something usually when there are many things not known about it.

Drop it – to stop doing or continuing with (something).

Mainstream – the thoughts, beliefs, and choices that are accepted by the largest number of people.

Eccentricities – the quality of being strange or unusual in behavior.

Masked – wearing a mask figuratively.