The Poetry of Pop by Adam Bradley

Author:Adam Bradley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

WEIRD VOICES

Consider the case of Joanna Newsom, the indie-folk singer and harpist whose voice prompts such strong visceral responses that it would seem more is at stake than her singing. In 2010 Vanity Fair published an article provocatively titled “The Virile Man’s Guide to Liking Joanna Newsom.” The article was staged as a debate between the journalist Bill Bradley, who thinks that Newsom sings “like a teething infant,” and the design-magazine editor, “manly man,” and avowed Newsom fan Andrew Wagner. Though Wagner is putatively there to defend Newsom’s voice and music—and to give other men license to listen—the article soon devolves into a series of sardonic jibes against Newsom from both sides. “What’s with that voice?” Bradley asks. “I’ve heard the voice described as everything from a ‘dying cat’ to a ‘prepubescent teen whining about the mall,’” Wagner responds. “Both seem apt descriptors. . . . But it is different. It is unique. And in my book, that’s worth something.” Finally, Wagner’s defense of Newsom is that she’s weird, and that weird sounds interesting. It’s hard to imagine a similar article, playfully intended or not, being written about a male singer—say, the equally strange Tom Waits. This particular brand of dismissal and derision is reserved for women’s voices whose “shrillness” and “caterwauling” provide no easy defense.

Listening to others listening to Newsom’s voice, one encounters an unresolvable tension: To some ears her voice is precious and affected, to others it is mystical and ethereal. Her voice is in part conditioned by her song craft, its stylized registers of diction, its imbedded rhythms and rhymes drawn from as far back as medieval times. Her voice is also an audible record of a body in pain and recovery, bearing scars of the injury that prompted her 2009 surgery to remove vocal nodules threatening to silence her singing for good. Her voice is equally an instrument in evolution, the product of conscious craft and cultivated control that one can hear in progress from her earliest recordings to now. Newsom herself is perhaps her own best critic. “When I listen back to those first EP’s, I’m like, well, that voice does sound fucking crazy,” she remarks. “There is no way around it. But I know exactly what space I was in. I was so sure that I didn’t know how to sing that I was just going balls out. I was like: I am going to sing my heart out, as crazy as it sounds, and I’m not going to care because there’s no hope of sounding anything like what people consider beautiful. I sure as hell wasn’t affecting anything. I mean, the institution of singing is inherently an affectation!”

Maybe the best way to write about Newsom’s voice is not to describe its sound at all, but rather to chart its history and record its effects on us. Try writing about Newsom’s voice without using adjectives and adverbs. Try writing about it without comparing it to another sound or another singer only to resort to using adjectives and adverbs again to mark the difference.

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