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There's something about a voice that's personal, not unlike the particular odor or shape of a given human body. Summoned through belly, hammered into form by the throat, given propulsion by bellows of lungs, teased into final form by tongue and lips, a vocal is a kind of audible kiss, a blurted confession, a soul-burp you really can't keep from issuing as you make your way through the material world. How helplessly candid! How appalling!
Contrary to anything you've heard, the ability to actually carry a tune is in no regard a disability in becoming a rock & roll singer, only a mild disadvantage. Conversely, nothing in the vocal limitations of a Lou Reed guarantees a "Pale Blue Eyes" every time out, any more than singing as crazy-clumsy as Tom Waits guarantees a "Downtown Train." Yet there's a certain time-tested sturdiness to the low-chops approach forged by touchstone figures like Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison and Jonathan Richman, one that helps define rock & roll singing.
For me, Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, just to mention two, are superb singers by any measure I could ever care about — expressivity, surprise, soul, grain, interpretive wit, angle of vision. Those two folks, a handful of others: their soul-burps are, for me, the soul-burps of the gods. The beauty of the singer's voice touches us in a place that's as personal as the place from which that voice has issued. If one of the weird things about singers is the ecstasy of surrender they inspire, another weird thing is the debunking response a singer can arouse once we've recovered our senses. It's as if they've fooled us into loving them, diddled our hard-wiring, located a vulnerability we thought we'd long ago armored over. Falling in love with a singer is like being a teenager every time it happens.
Singers are tricksters. Sometimes we'll wonder if they're more like movie actors than musicians per se — we'll decide that the "real" R.E.M. are embodied by Buck, Berry and Mills, not that kooky frontman Stipe, or the "real" Rolling Stones are Richards-Wood-Watts-Wyman, rather than that irritating capitalist Jagger. But beware — go down this route and soon you'll find yourself wondering how the Doors sound sans "Mr. Mojo Risin' " or imagining someone can better put across Dylan's gnarled syllables than Dylan himself. Firm evidence is on the table against both those lines of inquiry. In truth, so often what makes a band like the Stones or R.E.M. (or the band Dylan transformed from the Hawks into the Band) so truly unique and powerful is in how the instrumentalists rise to the challenge of creating a home for the vocalist's less-than-purely-musical approach to a song: the braggadocio or mumbling, the spoken asides or too many syllables crowded into a line that destroy traditional rhythm or measure, those movie-star flourishes that compel us to adore and resent the singer at once.
The funny thing about this kind of imposter anxiety is that it infects singers themselves, to the extent that certain well-known vocalists have been known to decorate themselves onstage with a carefully unplugged guitar (I know of a couple, but I'm not telling). And it certainly explains the "rockist" bias in favor of singers who are also the writers of the songs they sing. If a vocal performance that tenderizes our hearts is a kind of high-wire walk, an act breathtaking and preposterous at once, we can reassure ourselves that Neil Young or Gillian Welch or Joe Strummer have at least dug the foundations for the poles and strung the wire themselves. Singers reliant on existing or made-to-fit material, like Janis Joplin, Rod Stewart, Whitney Houston — or, for that matter, a band's pure vocal instrument, like Roger Daltrey — might just be birds alighting on someone else's wire. Listening to singers who are like magnificent animals wandering through a karaoke machine, we may derive a certain thrill from wondering if they find the same meaning in the lyrics they're putting across that the lyrics' writer intended, or any meaning at all — as opposed to dwelling in a realm of pure sound-as-emotion.
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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?