The Human Voice as an Instrument

or: pop as abstraction

mason lindroth “beach business”

Of course, the human voice is an instrument, there’s no disputing its inherent melodic and harmonic qualities. But as a musical tool, its instrumentality largely comes from being at the forefront or as a complement of a song, whether sung gloriously, angrily, plainly, or woundedly. As music became more and more digitized, so too did the Voice, divorced from its original contexts like a head from a body, reanimated. But vocals, however gruff or inaudible, oftentimes subsume themselves into a pop aesthetic, even in the most outre of genres. Within this, the inverse has happened, with some of the most forward-thinking artists of our time subverting what the human voice can offer us, crafting new pathways of musical lineage in the process.

The most straightforward example of this phenomena comes to us from Playboi Carti. Like his brother-in-arms Young Thug, he limit tests his vocality, ever-curious as to how he can push his sounds further, not necessarily within his raps, but the vocals that inhabit his tracks. See: Sunik Kim on Whole Lotta Red:

There is still a concrete human basis in these performances—despite the freeform nature, they aren’t distorted beyond all measure. But they serve as a metric by which we can analyze the rich dynamics of vocality influences music without being saturated in a pop sensibility. Because while Carti and Thug make pop, they also sidestep the very subject-audience predication that expects a thorough intelligibility, using a vocal deviation and genuflection that is outright avant in its subversion.

I’m grasping at a very loose definition of vocality here, I know. It is not scientific; it is a vibe, a cosmology of how we interact with inscrutable interpretations of people evocating. How we morph a voice catalyzes a desire to be more than human; to transcend our mortality and become uncanny. It’s what unites all these artists, even if their art is on the opposite sides of the vocality spectrum.

You could say MIKE would be on the opposite side as Carti and Thug but that belies an understanding of his work. Rather than flex his vocal capabilities he opts for his sampling to do the harmonics for him, creating a holistic longing befitting of the soul crooners gone past, yet also of the linguistically dexterous MCs I mentioned. “weight of the word*” in particular being a stunning feat of ingenuity, with Moraes Moreira’s “Carro Alegórico” delivering a moment of sheer catharsis intertwined with MIKE’s pallid bars.

If anyone fully embodies vocality, it’s the God himself, Todd Edwards. The prodigal son’s steadfast Christianity is most apparent in his breakdowns, brief respites from the pulsating speed garage he’s known for, in which he gets the listener as close to the Lord as possible. His manipulations of the human voice feel familiar yet evoke a distance from that familiarity, as if our brains can’t quite process what we’re hearing. The augmented loops wire directly into the raphe nuclei, producing serotonin you didn’t know you had.

Where Todd excels in giving pleasure, Daniel Lopatin excels in interrogating that pleasure and returning it slightly off. Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1’s dizzying array of tricks utilize choruses and bridges as disorientation, revealing the human voice’s guile and deception. In this, vocality becomes a means to an end, its omnipresence in the original context stripped and turned unwieldy, as if a domesticated animal became feral.

Splitting the difference, DJ Rashad was an intrepid force in how he calculated his vocal samples. “Everything She Wants” takes George Michael’s silky vocals more or less as they were, whereas “Only One” absolutely slaughters Case’s “Touch Me Tease Me”, leaving it a cadaver when Rashad is done with the sample. Rashad clearly has reverence for the samples, but rather than simply being content with distorting them, he links the beats and samples together in a way that transgresses the usual production, making it feel the sample was never lifted at all, an organic extension of the beat.

Vocality is an extension of hyperreality, our natural interactions becoming warped and unrecognizable from their origins. The Baudrillardian impulse to produce that which we can comprehend but understand is unreal leads to the most affecting art, in its insistence to both stretch the human physicality and bend what we hear as a result. By way of DJ Screw, John Oswald, Sicko Mobb, Vektroid, Grouper, and more, we see now vocality is more influential than ever, with leroy, carbine, lostrushi, and others actualizing simulacra foreign to those who came before them. We are just now realizing the potential of vocality, it’s only a matter of time before something we struggle to perceive comes in its wake.