Everyone does this. Yes it is very normal and very common. There are plenty of examples of British singers singing in their own accent too again, more on this later. Do British people have to make a special effort to sing in an American accent? In fact, in many cases it would take a lot of effort to sing some songs in a British accent even if that is your native accent. Various things! One thing that can help is to listen to some samples of music and also it might help if I try and sing in different accents myself and we can see what happens.
Therefore, when singing pop songs an American accent is the standard and is therefore easier, more normal and more natural. Singing those songs with an obvious RP accent or other just ends up being weird, unnatural and wrong sounding, mainly because it would be unconventional. Lyrics: tabs. It would be weird, different, unconventional. Most people in the USA would think it was weird and wrong, I reckon. Some British musicians make an effort not to sound American.
This article from thrillist. Hello, welcome back to the podcast. I saw something on Twitter which made me laugh and I retweeted it. If you follow me on Twitter you might have seen that. My Twitter handle is EnglishPodcast by the way. This is part 2. Part 1 contains loads of context and details which I think you should hear before listening to this.
This is a common mistake made by English people affecting an American accent. Classical music is not usually given the American treatment, as it is not part of pop culture. Well I am reading this article because of Begin Again, I mean the movie. The same phenomenon seems to happen in Spanish. There are a lot of regional accents probably more than in English , but once they start singing, they all start sounding vaguely Mexican a more neutral variety than any particular region. That is if we ignore some phonetic differences the z of the spaniards, the y of the argentinians, some different conjugations etc.
It also depends on the genre of the music though. Yea thats not true at all. Ive never heard a person singing in spanish sound like a mexican unless thats their backround. My dadis puerto rican cuban and russian and speaks ruspanol. IF he would sing he would sound puerto rican and speak like a cuban does mexicans speak basic spanish so i doubt anyone who comes from south america or from the caribbean would sound the same.
As a Scotsman living in Canada, this phenomenon is something that bothers me. The easiest way that I can refute this article is to say — listen to English-speaking singers before the world was influenced by the United States. This explanation does not match up with the facts. In any language, there is a dominant accent in the music field, be it English, German or French.
In all these, singers tend to sing in the accent most widely spoken in the international music industry, or at least gravitate towards it many singers, but not all. Of course, there are shades of grey. Often you might here a thing or two in their songs that gives them away as Quebecois, Austrian, or British, but it will be hard to tell for the untrained ear. Thanks to US dominance Hollywood movies, rock and pop etc.
Both vowel sounds are available to singers, and both US-American and RP use both vowel sounds, just in different words. Not a very good excuse. Bands sound american because Americans were the first to make the sound of rock and pop music popular.
Any other band after that copied the sound and vocal style. Hence everyone sounds American. Come on. Well, simple. When you sing, you pronounce the words the way they are spelled, which in my opinion is correct, of course with the exception of the few linguistic rules, i.
English is simply not a phonetic language. Your hypothesis seems prima facie implausible. Besides which, British speakers who are singing outside of a pop context will use their own native pronunciations.
They simply effect an American accent for most pop songs, because it has become a cultural expectation. The same kind of cultural expectation that means most fantasy films feature characters speaking with British accents even if the story is not set on Earth and even if the actors are American.
This is absolute nonsense. The specific context is when singing pop songs. But British people would not sing this way in other contexts. Consider Sting. The Police started out singing a lot of reggae-style songs. Sting adopted a cod-Jamaican accent because it seemed to fit the material better; somehow reggae sung in a Newcastle accent would have seemed too odd to audiences. It seems more offensive appropriate the accent of a poor predominantly black country than that of a wealthy predominantly white country.
There are actually hundreds of British accents. People have generally stayed where they are for centuries. So accents can develop separately from each other. The USA experienced a massive expansion in the 19th and 20th Centuries. So they all sort of averaged out.
Generally places with the strongest history, the oldest established populations, have the strongest accents. In Britain this is everywhere. America was also dominated by Native Americans, the Spanish, and the French, which have all influenced the American accents and dialect in the southeast.
Italian, Irish, Russian, Dutch, and Scottish accents influenced the northeast. And all traveled westward. Some of the English-speaking white people in the USA have accents from various parts of Europe as well. Also, those early American singers that those early British pop singers were supposedly imitating were often blacks and southerners, who had a southern or black accent.
The Beatles were imitating the likes of Elvis and Eddie Cochran. You are probably correct about the accent adopted being unconscious, but wrong about the details. As I say, there is a very easy way to demonstrate this: listen to any Brit singing in a choir, or singing Christmas carols, singing in school etc. Growing up in Australia then England I sometimes wondered why it was often hard to tell where singers were from even though their speaking voices were so different.
I came to the conclusion that they were accentless like me when they sang — which at first meant Australian and later Southern English. If this was true, the L and R sounds would not be affected.
This naive article is absolutely shocking coming from an established linguist. At the very least, people sing with an American English accent because it is considered acceptable and attractive in the pop world, whereas a British accent is associated with folk music, older people and traditions, stiff uncoolness, besides which obviously people change their accent to market to wider audiences. I sing every day in a what people have called a neutral British accent, because I have one after living in Spain.
Some of them are bad because the singing is bad, but this is so often coupled with a non-American accent to make it extra embarrassing. Something I would like to see change! I have to disagree with you. I grew up in a very rural area and had what an American would call quite a powerful accent.
I just grew up singing, many of the pub songs and classics that were taught to me by my grandfather and such. It makes sense about the neutrality of English and pronunciation. The thing about most accents is they are achieved by closing off sounds more than opening them, So when a singer sings to Open, like most singers, especially classical and Rock Singers, it will change the accent.
Poppycock, to use a UK colloquialism. Ramones, anyone? I will float my theory thus: The majority of commercial and far reaching popular music is generatedin the states, and performers default to what thier environment influences them to sound like. If anything it backs up the articles statement because they actually sound like they are trying to overcome the neutrality of the pronunciation to be edgy and raw. Yeah, except if your Iggy Azalea aka Amethyst Kelly. When she sings, she loses her Aussie accent and gains one that would imply that she is a Hood Rat from the Ghetto.
Most black people have spoken with the same accents since the s. Most black people lived in the Southern part of the USA. They started moving into the Northern cities during the Great Migration of the s, but they brought their accents and manner of speaking with them. As they migrated to the north and other parts of the US, they carried the accent with them. A dialect was also developed. Black people sometimes call it ebonics or they simply see it as their manner of speaking developed from their grandparents.
Tom Jones has no American accent he sings from the heart and many say he sounds more like a Black American than most of his American Peers.
Most of the Lennon Mc Cartney songs can only sound right sung with the Liverpudlian accent so they cant be used as an example for the writers question. Did Joe Cocker sing with a yankey accent???
Funny enough, I hear all of you in perfectly Midwestern American English. For all of the dissenters to this post — start your own blog and do what these people do. Knowledge — which I believe is what this blog is about — is constantly in flux. I got here the strangest of ways. I googled to see if that was a thing. It was explained to me that the accents of Brits, Aussies, etc. That is basically what this article is saying. I think there is an identifiable Standard American Manner of Speaking.
Tens of millions of Americans speak it, many more are a little off from it or have drifted from it, but have a complete and total understanding of what it sounds like and how to speak it. I think singing is a totally different thing that evolved in a totally different way that comes from a completely different part of our brain. I think anyone who sings popular music or non-traditional music in general in anything but this accent is doing so intentionally.
But, I think that it very quickly becomes easy and natural to sing with whatever inflection or accent you initially put on. Being a fan of the British accent myself, this article made me rage, but I take it it was written to get attention, same reason singers put on the american accent. I just saw Mick Jagger singing a blues song in his faux American accent. I often wonder why he sings like that. Then it got me thinking the American type accents have become the norm in all music including Rap and country music.
It is hilarious to listen to a born and bred Irish person, putting on a nasal accent to sound like they are from Tennessee! That is how you have to sing country music?!!! When you take elocution lessons in England, they teach you this. They teach it this way in the USA, too. The article has got it all wrong. When we sing we unconsciously mimic the accent associated with the style of music were singing.
The same is true with country, folk, etc etc…. Sorry over patriotic americans, the cart comes before the horse. Why do they sing in American accents? There are the occasional singers whose British accents come through loud and clear in their songs. One in case is Ian Hunter leader singer of Mott the Hoople who has a strong British accent while singing — which happens to be part of his appeal. Good point. Ehh what? I think Brits singing without an accent is a way to admit their accent is shit and is ugly as fuck.
American and international English is the standard norm for me. S, my favorite country is Poland! Reading through, I see a lot of hatred towards the American accent. I wish some people could keep this about the actual subject of the article and not personal jabs at the country itself.
Thanks for reading and have a swell day! They are singing like black Americans.. Rock and Roll is really a black American sourced music.
Again this theory is, if unconsciously, racist. Refusing to give credit to black Americans is wrong no matter dressed in academic BS.
One can say that singers, like Adele, are exhibiting accent reduction because they are vocalizing English in a way that is different than how they would normally speak, but also in a way that is potentially more original to the language.
I think this is where a big debate comes in, the idea is that because language usage changes as well as the enunciation so we now have new accents. So when the author draws the conclusion that the American accent is neutral she obviously is then over generalizing. It also might have been better if she used the term Standard American English, which is to mean all of North America, not simply the States. However this becomes another debate. Since one can argue that at a certain point new standards are established.
So then an accent reduction would mean different things to different people. It is still a very interesting topic to see why specific genres end up singing with a particular accent. I remember watching the US version of The Voice and the country singer coach was giving tips to the other country singers and one of the common bits of advice was that they had to be careful with their country accent because he stressed in country music the story is most important and sometimes the accent can make it difficult to hear what the singer is saying.
In short he wanted them to try and dial back their accent, effectively making it more neutral. That is a textbook example of accent reduction. A topic for another time about our unusual state nick name probably already been done. Funny you should mention Lily Allen.
I was just listening to some of her songs 2 days ago. Realized she was singing with her accent! Of course accents are in the ear of the beholder. I was talking to a woman from Georgia several years ago and she said she had a sexy voice. I asked why she thought that and she said she was from Georgia!
My mom was a mimic. If her and dad were around someone with an accent for the evening, by the end she would be talking with that accent. I think I am that way also, but no one has ever mentioned it. Maybe I think with an accent!! I bet America has more accents than England does. It is just theirs is more prominent to us.
Rod Stewart is one of the most evident cases. When he sings it seems he comes from a remote land between Arizona and Nevada. I ask myself why? Our pure English accent is soooooo musical and sweet! Actually, there are also good examples. I mean Brit singers who have never forgotten the place they come or came from. The past David Bowie and Mick Jagger just to cite the most famous. Currently young Jasmine Thompson that delights my ears with her very remarkable Londoner accent.
I adore her! Thumbs up for singers who refuse to turn their accent from English into cacophonous American. The same holds true for spanish speaking singers…. A neutral accent is I believe like the one in central Mexico, but of course others will think I am biased since I live in Mexico. I listen to old recordings of myself and I sound thoroughly American.
From Bowie onwards, other accents crept into the rock idiom, but I still mainly hear bands, even young ones, using at least an edge of American twang. I studied philology and dialectology. Your email address will not be published. Chris Martin from Coldplay incorporates his Devon-native accent into his singing voice.
Nor is it an essential thing to do. The choice whether conscious or subconscious for a British artist to Americanize their singing voice is unique in every case. If you enjoyed this article and would like to learn more about the stylistic choices that singers make, why not check out our article on why singers use autotune next? I'm George; the founder of Indie Panda. I'm passionate about helping independent musicians realize the full potential of their talents and abilities through a strong work ethic, coherent project identity and a strong logistical foundation.
Have you ever wondered why some British singers sound American when they sing? So, what gives?
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