My wife used to teach at a small Lutheran elementary school; she would sometimes have students who stayed late after school, to wait for their parents to pick them up. Wife would play music off of her iPhone as they were all hanging out and doing homework/grades.
AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” came on, and one of her students looked at the speaker, wide-eyed. “Who’s singing?? He sounds like Angry Elmo!”
Can’t really think of any particularly annoying vocalist, but this reminds me of an argument I heard on my first boat: One ET saying that Stevie Nicks was a great singer, and the other insisting that “she bleats like a goat.”
Neil Young. As a small child I was forced to endure my older sister’s incessant playing of “Heart of Gold,” listening to a guy singing through his nose.
Believe me, Lynrd Skynrd made the world’s greatest diss track with “Sweet Home Alabama.” Nobody needs Mr. Young around, anyhow.
(About Dylan)
Erm… fairly confident there have been some high profile covers. Although one of those was sung by Axel Rose who has also caught some flack here!!
Heresy!!
Amen.
I couldn’t even tell you what Lee sounds like (had to google who he was), but yeh, Yorke’s voice is… not as good as his song writing, let’s just say that.
My nomination is Chris Martin. And I loved Coldplay up until about 2010. Just… no. Sounds like a pub singer doing bad karaoke.
Piling on Natalie Merchant. Sings like her tongue was stung by wasps and swelled to over 4 times normal size. Kinda like Charlie Brown’s teachers.
Billy Corgan. Dave Mustain. That Serg guy. I heard him and thought it was some kind of joke.
Just remembered another one that some will probably consider blasphemy - can’t handle Janis Joplin’s screaming into a microphone after her vocal cords have had sandpaper applied. At all.
Also very inclined to change channels very quickly if Joe Cocker puts in an appearance.
Serj Tankian from System of a Down, or someone else?
My nightmare duet:
Cyndi Lauper & Stevie Nicks.
Who told either of them they could sing?
That’s interesting. I think vocal fry is good for singing voices. I don’t like it much in speaking voices though.
Vedder himself doesn’t grate on me quite so much as the fact that nearly half of the alternative/grunge/post-grunge rock bands that followed after Pearl Jam in the following decade decided to try to imitate his weird “Dylan on uppers” groaning vocal style. I’ve heard the sound that he and those who follow him make described as “hunger dunger dang”, because you could pretty much just replace most of the lyrics in any song sung in that style with those five syllables and it would be just as intelligible.
Take Alex Band, of the Calling. “Wherever You Will Go” was a hit for them in 2001, and if you read the lyrics and hear the story that inspired them, it’s a REALLY moving work of art about how love can transcend death - but it’s absolutely ruined by the fact that he sounds like Jim Morrison having a stroke.
Me too.
I mean, he can sing in tune, his phrasing is OK, he did a lot of backing vocals for Steely Dan, etc…
But it’s just something about the timbre.
What I always find fascinating about threads like this is the squealy voiced 70s singers like Robert Plant, Geddy Lee, and Jon Anderson are always at the top of the list. Nobody ever mentions Roger Hodgson from Supertramp.
Yes. I think I’d have liked a lot more music in the 90s if the singers weren’t trying so hard to sound interesting.
Those are my top two most annoying rock/pop singers. And there would be a long list of operatic type singers from the past. Maybe half of the female singers in the B&W movie musicals.
Not a vocalist, but a singing style: how women typically sing in many Indian (South Asian) styles. My wife (of South Asian roots) hates it more than I do.
We even invented an adjective for it: “eee.” Several times a year, we’ll walk into an Indian restaurant with such music playing, and she’ll say to me “Uh oh, the music is too eee — let’s find a table in the other room.”
Closely related: that 90s-era singing style where the word “I” always comes out as “LoooAHHHH.”
Just think of him singing his own songs as kind of demos, a rough idea of how the song goes. Then other artists can run with it.
I wouldn’t say his mumbling annoys me, but I’m always kind of perplexed by his super-fans. He’s like a mumblier version of John Cougar Mellencamp (with more sax solos).
Absolutely. But she was being deliberately obnoxious. It was part of her “I’m an artist” schtick.
In the category of vocalists who were/are annoying within normal parameters, I always thought Roger Daltry was an absurdly overrated microphone swinger.
…oh but what he and Freddie did with mic-stands. 