Sing vs. Spoken Word and Accents
Awhile back Tavish and I were listening to the radio - I believe it was Oasis or some other British band. Tavish made the observation that all English speaking singers sound the same(or American if you will) - their British accents were gone. The same seems to be true for bands like Green Day, Silver Chair, Pink Floyd... Of course we got to wondering why that is. Are they trying to sing w/o their accent? Does the act of the melody remove the accent? The best we were able to come up with is that how the vowels and consonants are drawn out or shortened by putting them to an unnatural cantor removed the inflection. But then yesterday I was listening to Country music (please, don't stone me!!) and I realized that the southern drawl was very much present in their singing. So now I'm wondering if the original hypothesis was off base, or if country singers intentionally include their accent. I'm thinking the later is probably true since when I here younger country singers (Taylor Swift) the drawl seems almost completely removed. Thoughts anyone? Jack, I'd love to hear you perspective as you are both a linguist by major and a singer by passion.