![]() “I was basically screaming.All my shows were so loud and intense, and was like ‘Chill out.’ And I was like, ‘You chill out!’” It’s a poignant anecdote when you consider that Grohl himself is a big fan of wildly oversinging, and frequently praised for it: in 2005, MTV ran the headline Tireless Dave Grohl Screams Twice As Hard On Double LP. “There were times when I would sing from the felt sense in my throat,” Morissette remembered, in Entertainment Weekly, last year. David Browne, writing in Entertainment Weekly in 1995, noted her tendency to “wildly oversing”-an accusation that was repeated in a retrospective 20 year anniversary review of the album in the Irish Times, alongside an review that stated, “Alanis isn’t a particularly good singer.” Morrisette sold over 33 million copies of that album worldwide, but her voice occasionally made her the butt of jokes and critique. Instinctively, to my bubblegum-tuned ears, it was ugly later, it got under my skin, and I would rewind this live recording of her bellowing the infamous line are you thinking of me/ when youuuu fuck her of “You Oughta Know” again and again. Voices like Kate Bush’s are worlds away from the more smoothed-out edges of (for example) Britney, Beyoncé, Adele, Katy Perry-the cleaner female vocals we’re used to hearing on power-pop anthems like “Titanium” in the ‘00s and ‘10s (and in fact, the types of voices that were originally considered for the track).Īs a kid raised on chart pop (and whose first concert was Spice Girls), my world changed when I first encountered a less-than-perfect female vocal on Alanis Morrisette’s seminal 1995 album Jagged Little Pill. Rock has known boundary-testing female vocalists like Tina Turner, PJ Harvey, and Sinead O’Connor, who once told the NME, “I like the idea of being able to wipe the floor with people because I open my mouth and scream.” But for a female singer making commercial pop music, screaming, or any kind of perceived imperfection, is undesirable. Sure, there’s a long history of female voices that challenge the listener in similar ways to Sia’s, and even some whose belting made it to the top of the charts: see the ragged new precedent that was set by 1970s punks Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bjork’s catalogue of extreme pitches and screams, Yoko Ono’s much-ridiculed, unrestrained moans, and Kate Bush’s rocketing vocal. In the Billboard Hot 100 landscape, Sia’s songwriting voice, which deals with depression and addiction, is singular-her actual voice even moreso. ![]() ![]() Sia’s latest album This Is Acting self-consciously plays with this unique space she occupies: it’s full of straightforward, super-catchy pop songs she initially wrote for other people, but sung in her own idiosyncratic style. One review at the time of the song’s release claimed Sia’s “square-peg vocals elevate ‘Titanium,’” while another enthused, “Teaming up with Sia was probably the smartest move has done in recent memory.” Sia had been a successful indie solo artist and a behind-the-scenes songwriter long before she appeared on “Titanium” in 2011, but it could be pinpointed as the moment-along with Flo Rida’s “Wild Ones,” which was released the following month and featured her voice on the hook-when her uniquely unwieldy vocal spilled over into the realm of chart pop. Sia herself has commented that she was initially “really upset” to learn her vocal was used on the song, as she only ever intended it to exist as a demo that she supplied to Guetta as guidance for the final vocalist (Katy Perry and Mary J. Because “Titanium” itself is far from strange-it’s a cheesily uplifting EDM-pop banger. It’s not the intensity of Sia’s voice alone in this video that grabs me, but its strangeness in the context of the song she’s using it to sing.
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