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ivan@stellysee.de
| From | Mark London <mrl@psfc.mit.edu> |
| Subject | The Darkness, explained? |
| Date | Thu, 5 Feb 2004 13:10:53 -0500 |
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My theory is, that the difference between UK and US fans regarding
the Darkness, is due to the voices we are used to listening to. I.e,
IMHO, UK accents are much more musical and expressive, compared to
the "average" US accent. So if you want humorous UK vocals that
overexpressive, you really need to go way over the top. This may be
too far for the average US listener, and ends up sounding silly and
annnoying to us, rather than humorous.
And this leads into one of my pet peeves regarding present day
vocals. Compare pop vocalists with, let's say, 1960s pop vocalists.
Where are the great unique and expressive vocalists? US rock and
pop vocalists from that era were often expressive with distinct
accents, i.e. southern or countryish. Even if they had weak songs,
you always had the vocals to listen to. And look at what started the
New Wave era. UK vocalists, and US vocalists that had distrinctive
vocals (i.e. strong NY accents, such as the Ramones). However,
nowadays, I turn on any radio station playing modern music, and no
vocalist catches my ear at all.
And this leads to my present situation. After 40 years of listening
to music, I've finally gotten to the stage where it's very rare for
me to find a new album, that has something distinctive enough for me
to want to pay money for. It's seems like I've heard it all. Same
vocals, same guitar sound, same lyrics, etc. Which leads me to
wonder, has pop music reached the limit as to be able to create
different sounding music? Unless you had a unique vocalist, the only
other possibility would be to spend a ton of effort in production, to
create different sounds for each song. In other words, it would be
the equivalent of a movie that had a huge budget to spend on special
effects. Unfortunately, few people seem to have the time and money
to do that. And why spend the money to do that, when you have a host
of novice music listeners that still are willing to send money on
generic sounding music,
On the other hand, I do feel great that I now have more money
available to spend on other interests. so I guess I shouldn't be
complaining.
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