Mauro
Senior Member.
It has no lyrics, it's just a jumble of sounds meant to look like English, with no meaning at all.
As a song, it offends my musical sensibility, but it's just me (maybe).
As a song, it offends my musical sensibility, but it's just me (maybe).
Mendel
Senior Member.
Well, technically, it's not a song; it's rhythmic spoken word, called "Sprechgesang" in German, in the tradition of opera's "recitative", talking blues, and pre-dating rap.
Ann K
Senior Member.
I'm (approximately) older than dirt. Eight or ten years ago I had the opportunity to meet almost every day of the week with friends from various art groups, either plein air sessions (often followed by lunch together), open studio sessions, or evening meetings. But then along came Covid. I never got it, although I knew several people who died of it, but all the community activities came to an abrupt end. That was when my computer became my main connection with friends and with the world. The pandemic was an unexpected life-changer, but it was so much better WITH computer access than it might have been. Now I'm seriously old and creaky I wouldn't be without it.
FatPhil
Senior Member.
Sprechgesang is a new word to me - thanks for that! To me recitatives come on a spectrum of which I'm only familiar with one end - when I sang them I was told specifically to lean on the rhythm of (dramatic, so you might call it operatic) speech rather than be bound by the strict rhythm of the underlying music. That song, however, seemed to be the opposite end of the spectrum, it was closer to scat - getting the metrical feet in place almost as accurately as the podial ones.
Not my style, I describe myself primarily as a metaller (prog, thrash, shred, and doom mainly) who dabbles with baroque/romantic (not the "classical" stage that came in between), folk, and funk ... but, heck, you've got to like it if you like any music with real verve to it.
John J.
Senior Member.
Arguably features in a surprising range of rock and pop stuff.
Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side, Kraftwerk, Black Grape, Wet Leg's Chaise Longue.
FatPhil
Senior Member.
I wouldn't say it's surprising, it's all over the blues and everything derived from it: I guess I first encountered it in Hendrix and early Deep Purple. Just not under that name.
Mauro
Senior Member.
So it's the same as scat singing (Wiki)?
Mendel
Senior Member.
It's the exact opposite.
"Sprechgesang" is songs where the singer is not bound to a melody, and it can be very loose with the rhythm; the words resemble normal speaking.
In this example, Johnny Cash tells the story more than he sings it:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOHPuY88Ry4
Scat is songs where the singer follows rhythm and melody musically, but the words are meaningless syllables.
Scatman John combines scatting and Sprechgesang in this example:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVHKp6ffURY
A precursor of scatting is the traditional Irish lilting, sometimes referred to as diddling (generally in England and Scotland), mouth music, jigging, chin music or cheek music:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS4klFyB7RE
(It's amazing to be able to share music without first copying it to a tape.)
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FatPhil
Senior Member.
Wonderful!
I presume a precursor to that is the Indain tradition of knowing how to sing your instrumental part before ever picking up the instrument - especially a percussion instrument, as espoused amazingly by Sheila Chandra:
This was the first example of hers that I heard, /Speaking in Tongues III/ on /The Zen Kiss/ from 1994:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_N1SWAT6L4
Also on that album is another track /Speaking in Tongues IV/, which seems have to been invaded by Laurie Anderson (/Oh, Superman/ being a Sprachgesang example) and The Art of Noise. It's less listenable an example, even if it's more technically impressive in places, so I'll not take up the screen real-estate with it, versions are findable easily on youtube, such as yt id: 8vF7L15nU9U
I and II are new to me today, and are more back-to-basics:
https://sheilachandra.bandcamp.com/track/speaking-in-tongues-i
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-iWhYRp49o
MonkeeSage
Senior Member.
Apparently the similar style is known as lallatus in Finnish as used in the middle section of "Ievan polkka" by Loituma.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqthspSKZV8
Mendel
Senior Member.
Ann K
Senior Member.
Both are suitable for dancing when the fiddler is too drunk to perform.
FatPhil
Senior Member.
I see no similarity at all. The irish pair were clearly, to me, mimicking instruments, but that finnish ensemble were not at all. I can't say I'm familiar with Loituma, it doesn't stand out particularly from other middle-of-the-road northern-european folk apart from its occasional deviation into, well, for want of a better word, babbling. "Lallatus" screams "lallation" to me, an english term about cradle speech:
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LallationExternal Quote:
FatPhil
Senior Member.
This turns out to be a falsity.
In 2006, I was working at a [EDIT: finnish] company that sold ringtones. I was brought into that company specifically for one task. Mistyping the codes for ordering the ringtones was a big problem, as it cost the company a few cents in order to respond "code not recognised", and there would be tens of thousands of those every day, and way more at weekends. My job was to work out what they probably meant: shipping them the content they probably requested was no more expensive than the error message. Ievan polkka was one of the ringtones that was most requested, and very frequently mistyped (is it an "I", a "1", an "l"? these errors and many more were possible). That little 2-week contract contract saved them more than my fees by the first weekend after shipping it. Which was nice, I left a good impression and the CEO dragged me back into another one of his companies a decade or so later.External Quote:
@Landru - is it worth pulling out these singing-related posts into a separate chit-chat thread, as the humour content has always been quite low, while the informative content is quite dense.
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Mauro
Senior Member.
Ah, I could not decide if to tag your post with 'Funny' or 'Informative'
, I went with 'Funny' 
Mendel
Senior Member.
you yourself just added 2 posts without an objoke, after the thread had moved on from the topic.
New secret government video proof of alien visitors just dropped a year ago
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72TISl1_LPo
Todd Feinman
Senior Member
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