Okay as more and more singers\groups from abroad are making it into mainstream music, I find it odd that they all seem to lose there accents when they sing.
Is this intentional? I dont care how strong there accents may be, they always sound like an American when they sing. The group Oasis is a prime example. You can tell they have a slight accent when they sing, but its hard at times for a yankee like me to understand them during an interview. Could all this be from American influenced music?
Speech and song seem to be very distinct vocalization phenomena. Accents are patterns imposed by the speech centers, and are superceded by melodic patterns in singing. American singers who sing in a foreign language generally lose their own distinctive accents. In essence, a singer manipulates words simply as patterns of sound; just as a singer learns to mimic a melody with her voice, she learns to mimic a word-sound.
It’s sort of parallel to sight-reading with an instrument: You look at a symbol (a note) that represents a certain sound–but you generally don’t think about that sound. Instead, you do perform a set of seemingly unrelated actions (reposition fingers, blow into a mouthpiece, etc). None of these actions have anything to do with your conscious interpretation of the symbol, but they do interpret it for the audience.
The answer is a lot of people have accents when singing. For example, you can hear a German accent when someone from Germany sings. It is just toned down a lot. You can even hear English accents when they sing. It really is muted.
The act of singing forces annunctiation (sp?) to flow within the music. Vowel sounds are where you can hear the most derivations. My “ah” sound isn’t the same as someone from France, although it is probably close.
The reason you don’t hear much of that in mainstream music is probably because they have been working on their diction. Most chorale groups work on diction pretty extensively before they perform to make sure that all their vowel sounds match and that their consonants also line up.
As for pretty boy bands and the like from foreign countries, I can’t really think of one of hand. Was Bjork foriegn? I seem to recall that even though her English was good you could tell the difference with her vowel sounds albiet difficult to an untrained ear.
A classically trained singer would be able to tell even quicker than I could since my instrument was guitar.
To conclude, there is a regional singing accent but the nature of singing makes it more difficult to hear it because music is written with very specific accents and vowel sounds. It is more evident in folk/untrained singers than in trained singers. (If you still doubt the existence of an accent in music listen to some country.)
HUGS!
Sqrl
Bjork was foreign, and her accent was obvious. A better example is Nena (99 Luftballons). She sounds even more German in the German version 
“Hast du etwas Zeit für mich?
Dann singe ich ein Lied für dich
Auf neunundneunzig Luftballons
Auf ihrem Weg zum Horizont…”
LL
Johnny Rotten was always pretty obviously from the UK. Celine Dion’s accent is noticeable, although not abdundantly so. I think Oasis sounds noticeably British, at least on “Live Forever.”
When the Beatles first came to America, the men from the press said: “Why do you speak like Englishmen and sing like Americans?”
They answered, “It sells better.”