All My Favorite Singers Can’t Sing

If you made it past the first round of American Idol, I'll never buy your record. I rarely go back to a restaurant where the cooks can't cook. TK. I hope I never get operated on by a surgeon who can't operate. So why is it that I love singers who can't sing?

I guess it's because there are so many ways to get a note wrong. Of course, there are also many ways to get a note right, and this is what separates virtuosos like Frank Sinatra or Sinead O'connor from those who can merely carry a tune.

I like singers like that too, but reserve my deepest passion for the underdogs.

On one end of the spectrum, you have monotonous grumbler/talkers like Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed. They know their limitations and proceed accordingly, and how can you not admire that? On the other end, there's the helium-voiced heavy metal shriekers. Most of these I find pretty forgettable, perhaps because while they might never get accepted into The Julliard School of Music, they seem to display the consistency of someone who might. They're bad, but bad in a completely predictable way. And if you're going to be completely predictable, you might as well be good. One notable exception from the metal camp: AC/DC's late, great Bon Scott. Who else could pack so much leer and swagger into a lyric while simultaneously sounding as if he were getting repeatedly kicked in the balls?
More than the monotonous grumblers, more than the heavy metal shriekers, the singers who can't sing that really capture my attention are the melodramatic troubadours, the ones whose inability to stay on key, or near key, or even ten blocks from key, never stops them from trying to belt out a lyric with all the soaring authority and wide-ranging emotionality of Elvis or Janis Joplin,or some other singer who can actually sing. Nick Cave falls into this camp. The Hold Steady's Craig Finn, when he's in arena-rock mode rather than talky barfly mode does too. But my all-time favorite is Chris D., founder of The Flesh Eaters , The Divine Horsemen, and Stone by Stone. What distinguishes Chris D. is that he doesn't just have one bad voice, he has at least three, and he pretty much uses them on every song he sings, switching from one to another from verse to verse, then on to the third, then back to the second, etc. He's like a boxer trying to attack the song in multiple ways, jab, hook, uppercut, jab hoping one will sound all right. There's the almost melodic, sort of yelpy tenor. The strangled, hissing snarl of a noir gangster. The baroque, blood-curdling scream, which kind of sounds like what Vincent Price might sound like if he fronted a gothic metal band. Technically, they're all deficient. Dramatically, they're all magnificent. It also helps that he tries to jam an album's worth of lyrics into a single song, so that he's always speeding things up and slow them down in his attempt to at least stay loosely affiliated with the accompanying music. Ultimately, it's almost as if his voice has been thrown into a blender now it's on Frappe, now it's Puree, now it's on Pulverize. Chris D. did most of his best work between 1980 and 1990, but just like the work of the most technically proficient singers, his voice is always riveting, always revelatory, timeless.