The Big Can't Sing List

M

moresound

Loud Sun Studios
This is inspired by the thread under recording technique titled "what if your vocals suck.
Sooooo my number one choice is Geddy Lee .... great bass player but very monotone.
Don't hate or kill me it's just my opinion.

Who do you think should be one this list?






:cool:
 
Bob Dylan would have to take the Grand Prize, Willie my vote for runner up.

Funny thing is that I find more magic in guys like that than in Michael Bolton "Hey, you've got a great voice!" types.

I've always liked Ringo type voices. Love Neil Young's singing.
 
dintymoore said:
Love Neil Young's singing.
Click to expand...

I can't STAND Young's voice. Nasial, whining, fingers-on-a-chalkboard caterwauling. The man's lost his ability to write, too- his last album was NOTHING but a string of cliche'ed phrases unabashedly stolen from other songs and other songwriters, fostered on a fan base that has equally lost the ability to reject dreck when Young's machine spoon-feeds it to them. It's as if Young heard about Warren Zevon's farewell album, and thought, "Hey, I'm not dying, but I can jump on that gravy train! My fans will slop that up like a bunch of southerners slopping gravy with buttermilk biscuits!" Which they did, like the sheeple they have become.

(I was gonna say Hendrix, whom I like otherwise, but then dinty reminded me of Young...)
 
moresound said:
This is inspired by the thread under recording technique titled "what if your vocals suck.
Sooooo my number one choice is Geddy Lee .... great bass player but very monotone.
Don't hate or kill me it's just my opinion.

Who do you think should be one this list?
Click to expand...

Geddy Lee a monotone? You've obviously never actually listened to any Rush tunes. You may not care for his voice but the guy is extremely talented.

Examples of really terrible singers: Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jager, Peter Garrett, David Byrne, Frank Sinatra..... There are just so many that the list would be huge.
 
ocnor said:
Geddy Lee a monotone? You've obviously never actually listened to any Rush tunes. You may not care for his voice but the guy is extremely talented.

Examples of really terrible singers: Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jager, Peter Garrett, David Byrne, Frank Sinatra..... There are just so many that the list would be huge.
Click to expand...

I never thought Geddy sucked... Tom Waits is great...

Springsteen always sounded like he was yelling... Mick is Mick and who would want to change that?

I always loved Jimi's vocals, which to me were very Bob Dylan inspired (Purple Haze, the way his voice dive bombs)...

But Sinatra - there's two Franks: the later Frank needed some throat lozenges, but early Frank had beautiful tone. He sounded like a trombone, fantastic. Jaco Pastorious said he got his tone from trombone and early Frank... he really sounded like early Frank in Weather Report. But as much as I love Jaco I'm still not sure it was bass... it was "kinda bass".
 
Connor Oberst (Bright Eyes) has very shaky pitch, but he can write.
(He does acknowledge his vocal shortcomings in one of his songs.)

(I know, shooting fish in a barrel, but of course Justin Biber has to be on the list. Then again, I imagine this list is about real singers to begin with :p)

I love Dave Alvin's solo work, but he is barely passable as a vocalist, and I am sure he would be the first to admit it.

For me the award for the one who does the most with the least goes to Tom Waits. The man is a genius, and he does have a lot of singing technique, but it's in the service of that trainwreck of a voice.
 
Geddy Monotone? He might not have any variety but he has a great range.
He can really sing. I like variety in the voice tone, so he's not one of my favs.

When it gets to who can't sing...Lou Reed. Can't sing. They should not let him.
Who do I hate? Bruce Springsteen. Sounds like a guy with miners throat.
 
The guy from Linkin Park.
Me
That rapper who sings through that filter all the time
Labrie from Dream Theater
Kurt Cobain
 
Always loved Geddy Lee's voice, one of the pieces of music that still makes me laugh is when he sings
"DON'T ANNOY US FURTHER !". Great expression and capable of surprizing tenderness {'Madrigal', 'Tears', Lakeside Park'}, wildness {'as every nerve is torn apaaaaaart !'} and unbridled joy {'A passage to Bankok'}.
Ditto Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan. I'm often surprized when people say they can't sing. They can. And John Lydon in his Pistols days, not a particularly tuneful singer but he could sing. Most of the punk singers could, actually.
It's quite difficult to find a singer who genuinely cannot sing. Even Lou Reed could sing once in a while although his voice, to my ears is genuinely awful.
If you were to put a gun to my head though, the award of 'chief voice suckatiousness' would have to go to the late Tony Williams. His drum playing was revolutionary, he helped move jazz into uncharted waters. He could play straight bop, he was at home playing free jazz, he was one of the figures instrumental in the evolution of jazz rock fusion with his band Lifetime (that at one point included John McLaughlin, Jack Bruce and later, Alan Holdsworth) but he absolutely wrecked some of Lifetime's revolutionary music with his ^%£$"!!++&^ awful singing. If his singing could've sucked more, he'd have been a hoover.
 
stevieb said:
I was gonna say Hendrix, whom I like otherwise, but then dinty reminded me of Young...
Click to expand...
Hendrix didn't much care for his voice. But I think he had one of the best voices in rock. He even sounded tuneful and funky talking.
As dumb as this will sound, Ringo had the most distinctive singing voice of the Beatles. He couldn't sound like anyone else and his chirpy drone was always unmistakable. Sometimes early on, George could be a little 'John'~ish. Early on John and Paul could be rather Americanized. But not Ringo. And a good thing too.
 
The unfortunate truth is that 99.99999999999% of all band singers can't sing fort their life. It would be much easier to make a short list of the ones that actually can sing.
There are so many bands that would be incredible if they just got a good singer. I was thinking this the other day about the original Yardbirds, before they became Zeppelin and snagged arguably the best singer in rock history.
 
Here are 2 more for the list: Eddie Vedder sings like a drunken billy goat that is straining to take a big dump while holding a mic.
Chris Robinson is just god awful. He sings so flat that Aunt Jemima would be "jealous". And his voice constantly cracks as he tries to hit notes well beyond his range.
 
Bands that I love with traditionally bad lead singers:
Smashing Pumpkins,
They Might Be Giants,
Our Lady Peace (Raine used to destroy his voice early in a show with falsetto then limp through to the end),
I Set My Friends on Fire, Sky Eats Airplane, and the two or three other metalcore bands I can stand.

Bands I'd like to see die in a fire who have traditionally bad lead vocalists
Ke$ha and her auto-tuned dance pop ilk.
Every metalcore band not mentioned above. :D
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top