Word: twang
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Slip the new pop single, A Song of Joy, on the turntable. Surprise. There, for everyone to hear, is the famous unison recitative for cellos and double basses that opens the Ode to Joy from the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Pause. Then comes the languorous twang of a guitar, and a voice begins to sing in accented English...
...retention of Chapman was most important. His voice's range is comparable to that of Stevie Winwood, late of Traffic and Blind Faith. Chapman draws at will on a nasal, resonant, almost English country twang that rolls words and phrases in a wholly distinctive way. Chapman's voice is important because, in Family's disconnected lyrics full of pauses and doubled over phrases-this quality provides a means of converting lapses and repetitions into an air of powerful expectation. This, in turn, transmits a particular excitement...
With a Jagger-like twang and a positive repulsion against pronouncing any word in its entirety. Morrison sings, shouts, croons and yodels his way through the album. Some lines immediately imprint themselves on your memory, but they are often juxtaposed with utter banality or nonsense syllables to finish out the lines he never quite wrote. Somehow he manages to make this unoffensive, and even likeable...
...Country rock is also a symptom of a general cultural reaction to the most unsettling decade the U.S. has yet endured. The yen to escape the corrupt present by returning to the virtuous past ?real or imagined?has haunted Americans, never more' so than today. A nostalgic country twang resounds all up and down the pop charts. Glen Campbell and Johnny Cash, two singers once chained to the old country circuit, are now national figures with coast-to-coast network shows. Commercialized even further, the country strain runs into advertising?most egregiously in Salem cigarettes' unwittingly ironic paean...
...step, plunkety-plunk-banjo. You could always imagine a stiff collar behind it. Country music was played by white people, and blues was played by black people. And when it interchanged, it became something else, which is what Levon's father sings like. He sings blues with a twang, with that different accent, with a different bump on a different place. The new Rolling Stones album sounds like a bunch of blues-oriented cowboys, man, no doubt about...