The Voice

When I consider my obsession with song, I think of it as a triangle of music, words, and voice. I have enjoyed many a spirited debate with my nerdier acquaintances about the relative importance of these components.

When listening to rap, does the beat trump the lyrics? Would the best lyrics you've ever heard be irrelevant if delivered over a subpar beat? Conversely, can great production artificially inflate the quality of subpar lyrics?

Rap seems to me to be dominated by music and words. Voice is extremely important as well, but not as important as it is in rock. I attribute this to the fact that the demography and perspective and life experiences of most rappers is far narrower than the corresponding characteristics of rockers. I attribute this mostly to rap's relative youth as a genre; it will evolve.

There are some rappers, however, who seduce and convince me entirely with their voices. The two greatest voices in rap today are Ghostface Killah and Lil' Wayne. Their insipid insistence on misspelling their names belies the genius of these men. Yes, Ghostface Killah and Lil' Wayne are geniuses, poets of singular skill, who are only seen as inferior poets to long-rotted Englishmen by those are who are far too clever for their own good.

But these men are not just surreal poets. They are VOICES. And when I consider what makes their voices so great, I realize how this whole thing (as with so many "whole things") started with Bob Dylan. The voices of Ghost and Wayne are so great precisely because they are so flawed, as it was (and is) with Dylan.

When Ghost says "why's the sky blue? why is water wet? why did Judas rap to Romans while Jesus slept?", he's not just delivering a stunning bit of verbiage. When you hear him say it, he sounds like he MEANS it. He's not singing it; he's living it. It doesn't sound as "good", but it sounds more "real". And that's what I prefer.

When he says "why did Judas rap to Romans while Jesus slept?", he says it like someone just walked into his house and killed his dog in front of him. He's living it, and he's angry, as any "real" person would be if they were "really" talking about Judas.

Wayne's voice does the same thing. When he says "you know what they say, when you're great, its not murder, its "assassinate", so assassinate me, bitch!", it may not be the sort of thing most eggheads would describe as "poetry", but when you hear him say it, you can almost hear him pulling off his vest and walking out onto a balcony circled by snipers.

And here's where Dylan comes in. Dylan is like Obama; he changed the game...no, REDEFINED the game so drastically that it is impossible to count the ways, as the song says. I'll try to stick to the script here, though, and just talk about the Voice.

Dylan's voice was not a "singer's" voice. He sounded more like a farmer than a singer, like a man who ritualistically abused his throat, and like the sort of person who was a good writer but perhaps too stubborn to let "singers" deliver his songs and insisted upon doing it himself. But he was REAL.

And this is where the standard of singing shifted. The standard used to be Frank Sinatra. Sinatra had a perfect voice, but as we all know, perfect is not real when it comes to voices, since voices are human and therefore imperfect. It is the imperfections, in fact, which make voices so human.

Sinatra sought to sing songs as technically flawlessly as the human condition would allow. And, from what I know, he was great at it. And that's fine. But Dylan, and his successors, sought to sing songs to make them seem REAL rather than flawless.

So when Dylan's voice cracked, it was not a defeat, but a triumphal necessity. After all, how can one deliver a line like "you don't count the dead when God's on your side" or "I'm in love with a woman that don't even appeal to me" or "ring them bells for the time that flies, for that child that cries when his innocence dies" in a singsong voice? How could a REAL person's voice NOT crack when voicing such words?

And there it is: do we want pure voices, or do we want real voices? There are virtues to both, of course, but I would side with the latter more often than not. The only singers with nearly "pure" voices that I enjoy are Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, and Jack Johnson, and they lent their unreal voices to some very "real" songs.

It's true that people should strive for greatness. For example, I want a president that's smarter than me. I want athletes than are bigger and stronger than me. And I want poets who are better than me. But I want VOICES that I know belong to people just like me.