Poppycock.
Cite!
Cite!
Australia has an even smaller population over a comparable area, and Australia is geographically isolated, being surrounded by non English speaking neighbours (not including the 7th state). So Australian Englsh must be even more generic.:rolleyes:
Cite!
Cite!
Cite!.
This whole post smells of cowplop.
Yeah. What he said.
I always thought Joe Cocker sang American-sounding gibberish, and was really surprised to hear him speaking with a Brit accent at the end of the clip. So enunciation doesn’t seem to be the driving factor, at least in Joe’s case 
7th State?
I thought it was North Island, South Island, & West Island…
When I was a kid hearing Styx’s Dennis DeYoung singing Lorelei I would have sworn he was English. I was surprised to find out later he was from Chicago.
Guess it goes both ways.
I always have to chuckle when I hear Keith Urban singing like a good ol’ country boy. Well, not chuckle so much as stick a shrimp fork in my ear. I’m also tempted to mock his clever use of the name “Urban” but I see that it’s just a shortened version of his birth name Urbanski so I’ll just have to settle for laughing at his ridiculous, affected accent.
I have an interview with Joe Elliott and Phil Collen of Def Leppard where the interviewers asked them why they sing in an American accent and both of them agreed it’s because they were imitating the Rolling Stones and other English bands who were imitating American singers they liked.
Joe says at one point it would sound silly to sing Pour Some Sugar On Me in his English accent. He then sings a bit in his natural accent to illustrate the point. It was pretty funny. Phil, being funny, said he liked it and should try it at the next gig…
Basically, in their case, it just sounds cooler to them to sing with an American accent as opposed to English accent.
And what a coincidence that you yourself happen to be Canadian, eh?
Do you really think that you could walk into a pub in England or Australia or where-have-you and have the locals agree that you’re the one speaking most “neutrally” and understandably, while they’re all the ones speaking in bizarrely affected manner? Of course not.
I thought Smash The Statewas saying that there is indeed a generic / neutral accent in American English which I would agree with. If he does indeed include all English speaking places then yeah, he’s a a bit of a nuttuh:)
My information comes from a dead-tree book, the name of which I no longer remember, as I read it some 20-odd years ago. I just did a quick Google search on “neutral accents” and this is what I found:
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The “purest” accent is that which is phonetically closest to the written language.
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In English, the largest recent transformation in pronounciation occured in the 17th century, when in England, Ireland, and Scotland it became customary not to pronounce the ‘r’ unless a vowel followed it. This means the “purest” English accents are those belonging to English-speaking communities which were cut off from mainstream English society before this point: Australia and Canada.
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The difference between Australian and Canadian English is largely one of class: Canada was settled largely by the middle and working class, while Australia was settled largely by lower-class criminals. Therefore Canadian English was the result of a higher educational standard and conforms more closely to the written language.
:. Canadian English is the most neutral English accent.
Not that this means anything, but, fine, let’s take this as our criteria:
Do you pronounce “metal” and “medal” the same or differently? Canadians typically pronounce both with a voiced alveolar flap in the middle, removing the contrast present in the written language. In contrast, most Britons, for example, do not.
Do you use the same vowel in “lout” and “loud” or different ones? Canadians typically use a diphthong which starts more centered in the first one, despite both using the same spelling for their vowel. In contrast, most Americans, for example, do not.
Do you pronounce “Mary”, “marry”, and “merry” the same or differently? Do you pronounce “cot” and “caught” the same or differently? You may preserve the distinctions here, but most Canadians do not.
There’s no great reason to say Canadian English conforms more closely to the written language than any other major variety of English. Not that there’s even any particular reason to focus on such correspondence in the first place as some arbiter of accent “purity”; so far as human language goes, spoken language is naturally developed and primary, while written language is highly artificial and subject in its standardized orthography to any number of factors of historical caprice.
I tell you what: it’s the Danish with the purest accent. Ever since the Anglo-Frisians split off from their better-speaking peers, they’ve so thoroughly failed to preserve the proper historical pronunciations that they even had to reinterpret their whole spelling system to try and cover it up. I mean, really; the Great English Vowel Shift? What kind of bullshit is that?
I believe this is the source of the American stereotype of Canadian’s pronunciation of “aboot” in which the Americans fail to hear the diphthong that characterizes the Canadian pronunciation of “about” because the Americans do not pronounce the two vowels separately.
Also, I believe Canadians pronounce “sorry” as if the word “story” was missing the ‘t’ whereas Americans pronounce it such the ‘t’ is missing from “starry”. The same is true for the “orr” in “tomorrow”. Americans might say that’s how “orr” is supposed to be pronounced, since “sorey” would be how to spell what Canadians pronounce “sorry” as. That is, it’s a reflection of the poor state of English spelling that Canadians pronounce how things are apparently spelled.
Incidentally, I was born in Ohio and raised by locals even though my parents were Michiganders and I’ve lived in the latter most of my life. I tend to pronounce “milk” and “pillow” as if the first vowels in each is an ‘e’, something that is incredibly natural to me but apparently not the standard. A small amount of research shows that while the standard is standard for a reason, there is definitely regional variation in how that vowel is pronounced - one site even said that my pronunciation was “wrong”! It clearly did not understand what legitimate regional variation was; while I can clearly sympathize with folks that believe “axing a question” to be wrong, just how a vowel is pronounced can easily vary.
There is variation in pronunciation all over the place, some easier to notice than others. It’s when others have a wildly different way of saying the same printed words you wonder which one is “right” when really they both slowly diverged from each other.
If purest had to be defined, that is how I would define it. And in my choral training, at least, that is exactly the accent we were striving for. In every other language, we were supposed to try and sound a like a native of that time period, but not English. I still have an IPA book that basically says that.
Still the accent we were trying for was Standard American English, not Canadian. From what I can tell, SAE is basically the same as the “Midwestern Accent.”
I don’t find this explanation satisfactory for pop music, however, as it breaks all the other choral music “rules”. Trying to sound like their favorite singers makes sense, as does the stuff about elongated vowels hiding the accent, as the longer vowels can be more deliberate. I also want to add that pitch and word choice play a role in accents, too, and obviously those would be covered up.
This has been informative and interesting, thanks to all. Was always curious about this issue.
I’ve heard the OP’s question asked, discussed, and answered a lot of times.
But how is it from the other side? If you are from an English-speaking country outside the U.S., do most of your singers “sound American” to you, or do you not notice it? Do non-famous, non-popular British singers sound less “British” because of something that happens naturally in singing? As for the Beatles, the usual example, it’s not as if they didn’t have accents to American ears when speaking. You could cut that Scouse with a shovel! 
Yes, they sound American to me. I’ve assumed either that they do so unconsciously to emulate the prevailing style (which is generally set by Americans), or that they’ve been requested to do so specifically by their management and producers. When my choir has done film score recordings, we’ve been explicity asked to ‘Americanise’ our pronunciation, supposedly to make it more acceptable to American audiences.
If you listen to British Rock/Pop singers or even Australian ones they do change the way they sing. Just look at British people prononunce the world “Sure” as “shore.” When they talk they say “SHORE.” But when they sing they say “SURE,” as if it rhymes with purr or fur.
Vera Lynn an older British singer sounds British.
Petula Clark, Olivia Newton-John, Kim Wilde do not. Add Lulu, Bonnie Tyler and even Sheena Easton who was very Scottish when she first arrived on the scene in the early 80s. Go to YouTube and listen to Sheena talk in the early 80s and now she barely has any accent when she talks. But Ms Easton still never sounded Scottish or English when she sang “Morning Train (Nine To Five)”
I sing folk stuff and put on an accent (of varying quality) appropriate to the song. If it’s C&W I do Texan, if it’s Irish folk I do it in an Irish accent. If I sing the Beatles I put on a fake American accent because that’s how they sang it. And yeah, it is obvious to me that others do it too.