On the Popularity of the Whiny Emo Vocal Style

Today I was thinking about the whiny high pitched emo vocal style and how disproportionate the ratio of how much I hate is to how popular it became. I was trying to do some research into where it came from and why so many people just accepted it as the de facto way you're supposed to sing.... when luckily, I found this article that did most of the work for me.

http://www.spin.com/articles/whine-times

I've never been able to get into this vocal style. The farthest I can go is Cedric Bixler-Zavala from Mars Volta or Tom Delonge from Blink 182. I guess I can tolerate high, and I can tolerate nasally.. but I can't tolerate whiny. It's always stood out to me from the beginning as being a bit odd. I remember things slowly going downhill after blink 182 became popular in the early 2000's. Slowly, it seemed like every pop punk band that came out was a little bit more nasally, a little bit higher pitched, a little bit more whiny. It started to bother me at New Found Glory... but I knew something was wrong when I first heard A Simple Plan. "Ok", I thought. "This vocal style is just an extreme version of Tom Delonge, surely they will be relagated to the margins of this genre where they belong, this will just be a one off thing." Little did I know it was going to get worse. Much worse.

After I got to college in 2003 or so... whiny was in. Cartel, Yellowcard, Hawthorne Heights, All American Rejects, Story of the Year, the Used, Taking Back Sunday. At first I thought it was just trendy but it just kept going. What really didn't make sense to me was how little reaction there was against it. I pointed it out one day to some people... "hey, what's with all these whiny high pitch vocals lately?" and people would just stare at me funny. As if they couldn't hear it. As if that was the way it had always been. I knew it was really bad when I would see frat guys listening to it. That really blew my mind. Those are supposed to be the most macho douche guys right? And here they were listening to the cutest, innocent high pitched boy vocals on the planet, that was often pretty flamingly homosexual sounding as well. Weren't they supposed to be beating up kids that listened to this music? It made no sense. I still wonder why today it's not listed as part of the "gay agenda" that's out there to poison our youth.


The article linked above actually interviews many bands that have this style, and you get to see what their thoughts are on it, and attempts to summarize a bit of how it became a part of the cultural zeitgeist of the 2000's. Here are some highlights...

• rejection of overly masculine vocal styling of the 90 alt rock and metal (and although not mentioned probly nu metal as well)

• continuation of the punk DIY, where people who aren't classically trained should try to make their own music.

• high pitched = more emotional / more tense - which fits in well with the point of emo... taking emotions to the extreme

• appeals to teen girls/ teenage emotions
  

• is a natural range for many men, but has not been explored very often in the past