At my high school—Taft High, in Woodland Hills, Calif., also the alma mater of Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s, whom I sat next to in senior honors English; Joan Jett (who probably was never in honors anything); and later Everlast (House of Pain) and Ice Cube (N.W.A.)—you could like Bob Dylan or Neil Young. Certainly it was possible to like neither, but you couldn’t like them both. Even though I’ve just finished editing a book on Dylan, if I had to choose, I’d put myself in Neil’s camp. His electric-guitar playing always seemed to me more unpredictable and frightening—more frighteningly unpredictable—and his harmonica playing far more dynamic than Bob’s.
When it comes to songwriting, of course, there’s no contest; for that reason alone, a Cambridge Companion to Neil Young is unthinkable. But the great shared gift Bob Dylan and Neil Young have given to contemporary popular music is an appreciation for the sublimity of the bad voice. Really bad.
By the traditional tenets of art song and even popular song, neither of these men can sing a lick. And though some would protest that no one in contemporary popular music can really sing—not like in the old days—in fact, the airwaves are populated with an impressive roster of sweet and/or powerful voices. Think, for all their histrionics, of our American Idols, or Susan Boyle, the unlikely Scottish chanteuse from Britain’s Got Talent; think of Beyoncé and Mary J. Blige; think of the arrogant and irritating Sinatra-wannabe whose punk-rock moniker was Bono Vox; think of the Decemberists’ Colin Meloy, with a voice so beautiful it’s practically Welsh.
And yet the vocal productions of some of pop’s worst singers—Elvis Costello, Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, even, dare I say it, Bruce Springsteen—also produce some incredibly powerful moments, moments the sweet-voiced can’t seem to touch. What might explain our fascination with, and emotional connection to, these bad voices?
When I speak of “bad voices,” I don’t mean mediocre voices, voices not strong enough on their own to support the careers they’ve launched. The usual suspects here would be folks like Britney Spears, Madonna, or John Mayer. At the same time, I do mean something different than just the tone-deaf or tone-indifferent singing that I associate with Stephen Malkmus (former lead singer of Pavement)—what was called for a while “slacker rock.” To put it more concretely, I think there’s an important distinction to be made between Bob Dylan and Neil Young, on the one side, and the can’t-be-bothered tunelessness of Lou Reed, Liz Phair, and Beck, on the other. Let’s also bracket the question of the bad punk-rock voice, in part because it was in some sense all of a piece with the bad punk guitar, bad punk drums, and bad punk production: the vaunted DIY (“do it yourself”) ethos of punk. Sid Vicious’s version of “My Way” is a good example of the punk bad voice. Finally, my sense is that the notion of a bad voice varies according to pop genre; I think, for instance, that the rules are rather different in country music.
Neil Young’s 1975 album Tonight’s the Night is the middle of three albums known as “the ditch trilogy,” made when Young drove himself into a deep, dark emotional ditch after the huge commercial success of Harvest and the heroin-overdose deaths of backing guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry. It’s an incredibly raw album, both musically and vocally; on the closing track of Side One, “Mellow My Mind,” for instance—a somewhat ironic title, given the anything-but-mellow tones of his ravaged voice—Young can’t hit, can’t nearly hit, the highest notes of the tune he’s written for himself.
I love the album mostly because I’m a guy. Tonight’s the Night was released during the summer between my junior and senior years at Taft; and Neil Young means something different, I’d venture to say, to an adolescent male whose voice is breaking than he does to a girl of the same age. I suppose that Young’s music played for me the role that hair-metal played for high-school-student-turned-journalist Chuck Klosterman, which he documents so deftly in his book Fargo Rock City. That is to say, part of the reason Young’s bad voice first appealed to me, I now realize, was that he sounded like me: While I couldn’t sing along convincingly with Peter Gabriel, I could do a creditable Neil Young impression. It’s pretty easy.
Thus there’s something welcoming, even karaoke-inviting, about the bad voices of singers like Dylan and Young. Indeed, I’d go a step further. Last summer, my extended family took a weeklong Carnival Cruise to Cabo San Lucas: “a supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again,” as the late David Foster Wallace once said. One night in the ship’s theater, I watched my brother Scott perform a note-perfect karaoke rendition of “Like a Rolling Stone.” Scott’s not a gifted singer. But listening to him, I had an epiphany: that, to use the no-longer fashionable language of deconstruction, Bob Dylan was always already karaoke. His vocal incompetence, and Young’s, actively invites our participation.
In some of their most popular tracks—Young’s “Heart of Gold,” for instance, or Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm"—there’s a kind of harmonic pairing of the bad voice and bad harmonica, such that the harp almost sounds like another bad voice in the mix. I’ve written about a related phenomenon that bloomed in the late 1980s and early 90s: the uncanny explosion of cellos in pop hits, with the instrument coming to serve as a guarantor of authenticity and sincerity during a period of unprecedented musical irony. Both Dylan and Young use their harmonicas to double the thin, strained vulnerability of their singing voices; the sociologist Lee Marshall suggested to me recently that Dylan’s preference for the high range of the harp might be the objective correlative for “that thin, that wild mercury sound … metallic and bright gold” of his early records.
The timbre of the harmonica seems almost to require the adjective “plaintive”; and if we uncritically hear its voice as “authentic,” its trustworthiness seems guaranteed by its unadorned simplicity. That’s a tempting formulation, but it’s wrong. It is not the case that “simple” is necessarily true and “complex” is bad; that “artlessness” is trustworthy and “artistry” suspect. The blues harp’s special brand of “truth” is to a large degree historically and culturally constructed because of its association with the blues and folk traditions, their values and ideology. A harmonica in a modern recording studio is never naïve or innocent. And neither are those frail human voices the harp impersonates.
I’ve already suggested that for some of us, the appeal of the bad voice is that it could be ours; more generally, we respond to bad voices because they sound so vulnerable, so human. There’s something intimidating about a great set of pipes—say, Aretha Franklin’s or Frank Sinatra’s—but a bad voice is approachable; it invites us into a human drama that could be ours. A bad voice aches. Surely that is part of the appeal of Dylan and Young; and even more of the thin, frail voice of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, especially when it’s made to do sonic battle with the cacophonous guitars of Jonny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien in songs like “Fake Plastic Trees” and “Paranoid Android.”
Dylan and Young more often turn that dynamic on its head, pitting their sandpaper voices against the velvety tones of someone like Emmylou Harris; the heartbreaking moments of Dylan’s “One More Cup of Coffee” and Young’s “Star of Bethlehem,” for instance, owe everything to the stark juxtaposition of those Beasts with her Beauty. It takes a big man to sing a duet with a woman who makes him sound like crap.
It’s important to historicize the bad voice to some extent; it’s no coincidence that Young’s technically worst vocal performances played out against the backdrop of overproduced 70s pop-rock, like that of Kansas and Foreigner, which caused fans to become cynical about vocal artistry. Punk, of course, was partly a reaction to all that slickness. In the mid-70s, circa Tonight’s the Night and Blood on the Tracks (albums about, respectively, the death of friends and the death of a marriage), a bad voice was a voice crying out in the wilderness of what quickly became caricatured as soulless pop. Dylan’s and Young’s music is real, we are tempted to think, because it sounds real: These guys obviously aren’t trying to con me.
The album cover for Young’s first “ditch trilogy” album, On the Beach (1974), famously features a newspaper nearly buried in the sand, with just its headline, “Senator Buckley Calls on Nixon to Resign,” visible; by the time Tonight’s the Night was released, Nixon had of course resigned, and our most cynical and “professional” president was shortly to be replaced, after an interval of benign incompetent caretaking, with the White House’s greatest outsider. Amateurism equals authenticity: It’s a formulation that is intellectually insufficient, as viscerally appealing as it might be. We all realize, consciously, that a bad voice doesn’t guarantee a good heart, nor does the voice of an angel always conceal the soul of the devil. But we want to believe it anyway.
The most significant reason for our love of those bad voices, I believe, has something to do with what Roland Barthes has called “the grain of the voice.” On one level, Barthes means by this phrase just something like the distinctiveness of each individual human voice—the voiceprint, which we seem genetically programmed to listen for and respond to in others. For Barthes, the “grainy” voice always calls our attention to the body of its singer: The grain of the voice insists on the song as sung, and sung by a frail, fallible human being.
To be sure, we don’t want all grain, all the time; there’s a place for velvety smooth, too, in the vast tapestry of contemporary popular music, and places in our individual and collective psyches that only a bonavox can reach. But in the age of ProTools, it’s worth thinking about what we really want in the vox populi. And to realize, of course, that authenticity is just the name we give to the voices that resonate with those in our heads, be they bestial or angelic.
