Voice inside my yed5/31/2023 ![]() Johnny Rotten performing with the Sex Pistols in Amsterdam, 1977 (Photo: Dutch National Archives/ANEFO/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0 NL) The three-minute pop-punk song, one of the dumbest forms of music ever conceived (in a good way, I’d say), maybe isn’t so dumb, after all. Pop-punk vocals are on the forefront of shifting regional dialects and, especially, a major vocal change happening in California in the past few decades. But it turns out that when you make a linguist listen to a Blink-182 song, you get more than you expected. I called up a few linguists and music historians to try to get at the heart of the pop-punk voice. What’s going on here? How did that linguistic pattern take hold? From its start, punk has played with accents, with Americans sounding like Brits and vice versa, but this voice is different. By the early-2000s, with pop-punk nearing the apex of its popularity, singers from all over California had influenced singers from as far afield as Minnesota, Ontario, Maryland, and South Florida, all of whom sung pretty much just like DeLonge, who grew up just outside San Diego. (Photo: Daniel D’Auria/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)ĭeLonge is an extreme example but far from the only singer in the genre to adopt a very particular accent, usually described as sneering, whining, bratty, or snotty. WILL YEW COME HOME AND STOP THIS PAIN TUHNYTEīlink-182 at the Whiskey in Los Angeles in 1996. An example, transliterating the song “I Miss You”:ĬATCHEENG THEENGS AND EATING THEIR INSYDES There’s a whole Tumblr called Tom DeLonge Lyrics, dedicated to transliterating the spectacularly strange and exaggerated accent used by DeLonge, one of the singers of pop-punk band Blink-182. Their accents are a relic as strong as the Valley Girl voice. The very specific accent used in the mega-hits of the genre seems to still have a hold over anyone who was a teenager between 19: On Twitter you’ll see jokes made about the “ pop punk voice” used by bands like the Offspring, New Found Glory, Avril Lavigne, and, especially, Blink-182. Of all the elements of the Clinton-era mutation of punk music that embraced skate and surf culture, mild angst, goofiness, and incredibly hooky, catchy music, it’s the vocals that we remember. Two decades have passed since pop-punk exploded in the American music scene, yet the quintessentially suburban, teen-centric music still seems to bounce around our collective skulls.
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