May 18, 2003

The State of American Singing as Heard on 'I-I-I-I-I-I-Idol'

HE cover of the new CD "American Idol Season 2: All-Time Classic American Love Songs" features grinning head shots of 11 of the television talent show's 12 finalists — an attractive, amiable-looking group that could be a high school glee club. Don't be fooled. Competitive karaoke is not for the fainthearted; "American Idol" contestants do not sing songs so much as attack them. In nearly every verse of every number on "All-Time Classic American Love Songs," the young singers pursue a strategy of violent Mariah Carey emulation. Their credo is clear: never hesitate to warble seven notes where one would suffice.

Vocal showboating is to be expected in a high-stakes singing contest with a repertory that leans toward florid pop ballads. (Among the "all-time classics" covered by "American Idol" competitors on the CD are breast-beating staples of lite radio like Journey's "Open Arms" and Jeffrey Osborne's "On the Wings of Love.") But what is noteworthy about "American Idol," whose new winner will be crowned on Wednesday, is the similarity between its young hopefuls and the reigning royalty of Billboard's pop and rhythm and blues charts. "American Idol" offers a telling glimpse of the state of American popular singing, an art which has in the last decade been dominated not just by a single style — a kind of watered-down gospel-soul — but by a particular vocal mannerism: melisma.

A melisma is a passage of several notes sung to a single syllable. It is a nearly universal musical gesture — heard in everything from Gregorian chant to Indian raga to the Muslim muezzin's trilling call to prayer — and a fixture of many of the genres that nourished American pop, in particular the gospel music that Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin and others carried out of the black church and recast as secular soul and R & B.

It is this gospel-style melisma that is rampant on "American Idol" and the top-40 airwaves. Turn on the radio: Christina Aguilera hurtles across octaves, distending the "I" in "I am beautiful" into a fluttering "I-I-I-I-I-I"; R & B stars like Destiny's Child and R. Kelly pile melismas atop a skeletal backdrop of beats and backing vocals. Singers of R & B "slow jams" are particularly prone to melismatic flights — Stevie Wonder impersonations gone terribly wrong. "How You Gonna Act Like That," the current hit ballad by the R & B lothario Tyrese, is typical, packing more than a hundred melismas into its 4 minutes 54 seconds. There is scarcely a vowel sound in the song that Tyrese does not use as an occasion for vocal embroidery.

Even singers physically incapable of melisma have gone to extremes to include it in songs. Cher's huge 1998 hit "Believe" was built around a feat of studio trickery — the singer's voice was manipulated to produce gasping grace notes in the song's chorus — and Madonna has also dabbled in computer-generated melisma on recent records. These days, a machine-made warble is better than no warble at all.

On the one hand, the quavering voices of today's singers tell us something meaningful about music history. The sanctified sound that migrated from the church to the charts a half-century ago has proven unusually resilient. Listening to hit radio, it is clear that the enduring music of the 1960's is not post-Beatles guitar rock but post-gospel soul.

But that grand tradition has been largely reduced to a signature trick; through sheer overuse, singers are sapping melisma of its expressive power. Soul innovators like Mr. Charles and Ms. Franklin were capable of melisma that could singe the false eyelashes of divas like Ms. Carey and Whitney Houston, but they used the technique more sparingly, and more meaningfully — as fevered expressions of emotions beyond words. Listen to Mr. Charles's "Come Back Baby" (1954). He employs all kinds of vocal flourishes, whooping and growling, lagging teasingly behind the beat and sliding into an unearthly falsetto. When he does break into melisma, he does so in the service of his song: in his vocal hiccups we hear the pain of a spurned lover.

Ms. Carey and Ms. Houston are technical virtuosos, but their overwrought melismas communicate nothing but ego. The difference between "Come Back Baby" and Ms. Carey's melisma-saturated "Hero," between Ms. Franklin's transcendent 1972 recording of "Amazing Grace" and Ms. Houston's showpiece ballad "I Will Always Love You," is the difference between a musical performance and an athletic exhibition — the difference between soul and "soul."

If "American Idol" is any indication, few of today's young singers are aware of such distinctions. The show's early audition rounds were a tragicomic spectacle of tone-deaf singers attempting melismatic runs — wild musical embellishments in search of a melody. The winner of the first "American Idol," Kelly Clarkson, is a full-on melisma specialist; her hit debut album, "Thankful," is full of her bland mastery of the craft.

It is worth remembering that good popular singing is less about technical polish than personality amplification. Many of the greatest pop singers are freaks, cranks and technical ill-adepts; the bona fide American idols who would likely flop on "American Idol" include not just vocal eccentrics like Bob Dylan, Chet Baker and Billie Holiday, but even the definitive modern soul diva, Mary J. Blige, whose occasionally imperfect pitch is more than compensated for by her charisma and large lungs.

There are signs that a melisma backlash may be stirring. Millions of record buyers are gravitating to Norah Jones, whose vibratoless croon completely eschews melisma. The neo-soul movement, which enshrines the sounds and production values of 1970's black pop, has also revived that era's less histrionic approach to singing. Stars like D'Angelo, Erykah Badu and Macy Gray remind listeners that the great soul singers of the 70's were distinguished by the grain of their voices and their stylish syncopations rather than by cramming songs with hundreds of gratuitous notes.

But don't look to this week's television

Who will win that grudge match is anybody's guess, but musical subtlety will not carry the day. In melisma-mad 2003, more — as any would-be American idol will tell you — is mo-oo-oo-oo-re.