What Makes a Great Singer?

This points to what defines great singing in the rock-and-soul era: that some underlying tension exists in the space between singer and song. A bridge is being built across a void, and it's a bridge we're never sure the singer's going to manage to cross. The gulf may reside between vocal texture and the actual meaning of the words, or between the singer and band, musical genre, style of production or the audience's expectations. In any case, there's something beautifully uncomfortable at the root of the vocal style that defines the pop era. The simplest example comes at the moment of the style's inception, i.e. Elvis Presley: at first, listeners thought that the white guy was a black guy. It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that when Ed Sullivan's television show tossed this disjunction into everyone's living rooms, American culture was thrilled by it but also a little deranged, in ways we haven't gotten over yet. If few vocal styles since have had the same revolutionary potential, it wasn't for want of trying. When the Doors experimented with how rock & roll sounded fronted by sulky bombast, or the Ramones or Modern Lovers offered the sound of infantile twitching, a listener's first response may have been to regard their approaches as a joke. Yet that joke is the sound of something changing in the way a song can make us feel. In the cafe where I write this, Morrissey just came over the speakers, and it's pretty unmistakable that he came through the Doors Jim Morrison opened. Janis Joplin's voice howled in the wilderness for decades before Lucinda Williams came along to claim its tattered and glorious implications. In doing so, she deepened them.

Ultimately, the nature of the vocals in post-Elvis, post-Sam Cooke, post-Ray Charles popular music is the same as the role of the instrumental soloist in jazz. That's to say, if it isn't pushing against the boundaries of its form, at least slightly, it isn't doing anything at all. Whether putting across lines that happen to be written by the singer, or are instead concocted in a Brill Building or Motown-type laboratory, or covering a song pulled in from another genre, from the blues or bluegrass, or a show tune, the singer in rock, soul and pop has to be doing something ineffable that pulls against its given context. Etta James, Ray Davies, Mama Cass, Mark Kozelek, Levi Stubbs Jr. — these singers might not all seem like protest singers, but they are always singing against something; whether in themselves, in the band that's backing them, in the world they've been given to live in or the material they've been given to sing, or all at once. We judge pre-rock singing by how perfectly the lyric is served. That's the standard Frank Sinatra exemplifies. We judge popular vocals since 1956 by what the singer unearths that the song itself could never quite. It explains why voices such as Joan Baez or Emmylou Harris or Billy Joel never really seem to be singing in the contemporary idiom, no matter how much they roughen up their material or accompaniment, and why Elvis — or Dylan — is always rock, even singing "Blue Moon." It also explains precisely why such virtuosic pipes as Aretha Franklin's or, yes, Karen Carpenter's function in the new tradition. No lyric written by them or anyone else could ever express what their voices needed to, and they weren't going to wait for the instrumental solo, or for the flourish of strings, to put it across for them. They got it into their voice, and their voices got it out into the air, and from there it passed into our bodies. How can we possibly thank them enough?