Rab C. Nesbitt

Leo

Well-known member
wait, there's a huge difference between billy Mackenzie's vocals and Robert smith's.
 

luka

Well-known member
I've mentioned the various kinds of funny 80s voices a lot here. It's a decade of camp comic theatrical affected artificial voices. Across almost all genres. Both sides of the Atlantic.
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
All the processing comes down to it being a major time for studio experimentation. Some things became fads. Specific settings on specific bits of gear. Gated snare the obvious example. The singing sounds kind of lost and twisted. Post apocalyptic. Haunted, wailing. Cold War, home computers. Retro crooning hinting at simpler times. The sound of losing grip and innocence. The world rushing forward into uncharted territory. Digitisation. Is this the future we were promised? Escape into fantasy.
 

Simon silverdollarcircle

Well-known member
The Cure, Associates, The Human League, The Chameleons, Japan and a bunch of others. How would you describe the voice? I know it when I hear it, but all I can come up with is that it's an 80s thing or just listing people or bands that have it; even Ricky Gervais had it.


Something a bit arch to it? At one remove somehow. Even at the most committed moments there's something they're not quite letting us see.

I reckon art schools are partly to blame
 

luka

Well-known member
Something a bit arch to it? At one remove somehow. Even at the most committed moments there's something they're not quite letting us see.

I reckon art schools are partly to blame

But what's interesting about it is its in black pop too. It's in cameo and Rick James and etc etc etc. Absolutely its arch. It's not naturalistic. It's fascinating.
 

luka

Well-known member
we keep butting up against these notions of the theatrical and the camp and so on. The anti-naturalistic side of performance and music, particularly in the 1980s. It's been a recurring theme for a while now. Distance as opposed to,intimacy. The mask. All this stuff
 

the ig

Well-known member
thing is with bill though, you can't really say it's emotionless

it's hyper-emotional perhaps, a sort of positive hysteria, unleashed billowing clouds of feeling, taking on shape and style, showing out like stacked cumulus.

or 'feeling' as a born strangeness now clothed and heavy, dustily pungent and real, strutting and tottering like a beaked and bewigged figure out of max ernst.

theatrical sure, mannered yes, but certainly not artificial as preternaturally poised/abstracted/machinic.

the voice balloons, stretches and warps almost to delineate and make space for a new affective (dis)order.

i always think of it as a sort of breakthrough for the real and barely-suppressed roiling melodrama of the interior life, now producing and freely improvising its own dominion, and deployed against an arbitrarily imposed, well-tempered rule of 'objective' feeling, which no one can locate to any authority, but everyone just warily assumes is hegemonic.

in that sense it's beyond the idea of camp as a sort of 'failed seriousness' or mere revel in the play of artifice-as-surface.




 
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luka

Well-known member
I agree. It conveys emotion but one of the emotions it conveys is the difficulty of expressing emotion and the discomfort of it. That emotions aren't necessarily simple obvious things which grab the heart.
 

luka

Well-known member
Its a curious thing. Ive not heard the associates before but you could mistake that voice for David Byrnes.
 

the ig

Well-known member
emotions aren't necessarily simple obvious things which grab the heart.

deff to that but it's just too exultant to denote something like simple awkwardness or discomfort for me.

perhaps discomfort as a sort of strain to warp and weld new forms of feeling. i really hear it like that, a sort of transformative/transcendent thing, a 'psychedelia of the emotions' (i might have nicked that from SR, not sure now..), ie one focused on rewriting the 'law of the heart' by freaking it so thoroughly (u could of course say queering it), make it so freakishly eccentric and outlandish, that anyone may paradoxically recognise themselves in it, their own suppressed too-muchness, rather than be put off by its sheer overbearing presence.

but peculiarly it doesn't seem like it's coming merely 'from inside', it has occupied space and now invents within its own self-created parameters, as if from, yes, a stage.
 
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