SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Lauren Elkin studied singing as a youngster in Long Island - on Saturday mornings, as a matter of fact - and it made her dispirited.
LAUREN ELKIN: (Reading) I spent hours working to make my voice nearly featureless like a mask. No breaks or wrinkles or scars or pimples. I tried to make as homogenous and mellifluous a sound as possible, uninterrupted throughout the length of my range. Much as I wanted to please my teacher, to be a good and obedient singer, a part of me rebelled.
SIMON: Her new book is both memoir and exploration. It's called "Vocal Break: On Women, Music & Power." And Lauren Elkin, an award-winning writer and translator whose previous books include "Art Monsters," joins us now from studios of the BBC in London. Thanks so much for being with us.
ELKIN: Oh, thanks for having me.
SIMON: And why did part of you rebel?
ELKIN: I think that I instinctively have a sort of skepticism of authority and dogma and ideology. And I found it very difficult to make my voice fit the sort of mold that was being cast for it. I just couldn't make these two parts of my voice - the chest voice and the head voice - the same the way that my teacher was asking me to, and it just felt like I was betraying the sort of natural topography of my voice.
SIMON: And that's the vocal break.
ELKIN: Yeah, that's the vocal break. There's a kind of a realignment of the muscles that your voice just does sort of automatically, but it makes a kind of a hitch in your voice. In Italian, they call it the passaggio. It's like a passage that your voice has to travel through from one voice to the next.
SIMON: Can you give us a personal demonstration?
ELKIN: I can try. I'll try not to blow out the microphone. So it's (vocalizing). Did you hear that?
SIMON: Yes. You tell a story (laughter) - years ago singing in a pub in London, I believe, as a matter of fact, Lana Del Rey song with an indie singer, and she paid you what I think is a compliment, but...
ELKIN: (Laughter) she told me that I sounded like the Little Mermaid. And I was mortified because I heard in it - I heard a put-down. I mean, she was this cool, you know, legit singer who had made a career out of singing, and I had given it up, you know, long ago. I had to sort of spend some time thinking about why what she had said had bothered me so much. And that led me to thinking about, you know, women's voices and the way that they're sort of heard socially or politically, I was thinking about Celine Dion or Billie Eilish or, you know, Beyonce and why some singers come across as important or authentic or legitimate, and other singers, like Celine Dion, for instance, are sort of brushed off as singing kind of inauthentic - there to sell a lot of records and not to make real art.
SIMON: Let me ask you about some of the other singers you name. Edith Piaf.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HYMNE A L'AMOUR")
EDITH PIAF: (Singing in French).
ELKIN: Edith Piaf is one of my absolute favorite singers of all time. I'm so glad that you asked me about her. I studied her as a high school student on Long Island. And listening to her music was the first time that French really became a language that you would use for - you know, to communicate and tell people how you felt and tell a story, rather than just this, like, set of grammar exercises that I had to do to get a good grade.
Edith Piaf is often sort of compared to Celine Dion in a way that's unfavorable towards Celine Dion and is very favorable toward Piaf. Piaf is seen as, like, this really gritty kind of gutter rat of a singer who's known real hardship, and you can hear it in the texture and the timbre and the sort of brokenness of her voice.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HYMNE A L'AMOUR")
PIAF: (Singing in French).
ELKIN: Whereas, you know, Celine Dion, although she did have a very difficult childhood...
SIMON: Yeah.
ELKIN: ...With not a lot of money, her voice, you can't hear any of that struggle. All you hear is, like, triumph.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HYMNE A L'AMOUR")
CELINE DION: (Singing in French).
SIMON: Let me ask you about Beyonce.
ELKIN: Yeah, Beyonce. She's a really interesting example - to come back to the notion of the vocal break, there is a really key vocal break moment in her song "Sandcastles" on the "Lemonade" album.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SANDCASTLES")
BEYONCE: (Singing) Dishes smashed on my counter.
ELKIN: The song "Sandcastles," there's a moment where her voice breaks, and she shifts from her chest voice into her head voice. She, like, purposefully moves over the vocal break in a way that you hear it audibly. You hear that break, and it's at exactly the sort of emotional climax of the song.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SANDCASTLES")
BEYONCE: (Singing) What is it about you that I can't erase?
ELKIN: Most listeners hear that and comment on her - like, you know, the YouTube video for that song and say, like, oh, my God, you can hear the emotion and how difficult it was for her to take Jay-Z back, but she worked through it, you hear that in her voice. And it's like, no, she is a trained singer. She knows what she's doing. She made a decision as an artist to have her voice break on that line. It didn't have to. That's sort of a choice to amplify the emotional situation of the song.
SIMON: You write that singing for women can be a form of resistance.
ELKIN: It certainly can. It is not always. Certainly, for some of the singers that I look at in the book, for instance, everyone coming from, like, the punk through the post-punk tradition up into riot grrrl are really thinking about the voice as - the female voice, specifically - as not something that has to be pretty, but actually something that can be downright ugly and difficult to listen to and sort of strident and grating and dissonant.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "REBEL GIRL")
BIKINI KILL: (Singing) Rebel girl, rebel girl. Rebel girl you are the queen of my world.
ELKIN: There's this kind of lineage of female singers who aren't trying to be pretty, who were just trying to, like, take up space and make some noise and make themselves heard.
BIKINI KILL: (Singing) When she talks, I hear the revolution. In her hips is revolution.
SIMON: But, I mean, what's wrong with Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, Billie Holiday? What's wrong with just having a beautiful voice?
ELKIN: Oh, nothing. I absolutely love singers like Doris Day or - oh, my God, I love Billie Holiday. I think that that's exactly what I'm interrogating in the book. I'm not saying that there's a good way to sing or a bad way to sing. I'm saying that in this sort of overcorrection, while I appreciate that sort of punk corrective to the imperative to be good, to be a good little singer, good little pianist, you know, at the same time, I worry that technique then and the idea of craft and actually being good at what you're doing for its own sake, rather than to please, you know, your teachers or your parents - that idea of people who are good singers as being uninteresting singers really bothers me. I think that lots of different kinds of voices can be interesting to listen to.
What I wanted to think about in the book is voices that invite us in, voices that make room for us, maybe that's what we gravitate towards. Maybe what we warm to less is voices that feel too processed or too perfect, that don't have, like, as Roland Barthes calls it, the grain of the voice in them. You sort of can't hear that it is a person in a body making this voice. It's too perfect.
SIMON: Lauren Elkin, her new book, "Vocal Break: On Women, Music & Power." Thank you so much for being with us. Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DOUBLE DARE YA")
BIKINI KILL: (Singing) Hey, girlfriend. I got a proposition goes something like this. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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