Mind the Gap

Recent news stories show us that not much has changed since the days of old, when women’s voices led grizzled old mariners’ boats onto the rocks. These days, we’re such a bunch of wreckers that we need only expose the mysterious, dark space between our mammary glands to send motorists careering into the nearest (ever so phallic) lamp-post. However, your voice still holds other feminine powers and mysteries: it can soothe, comfort, entice, hypnotise, persuade, and pratice a whole variety of other devious arts. Conversely, it can nag, scream, whine, and do a whole lot of other irritating things. All of these, of course, are excuses, variously, to murder women, or employ them in call centres (which is the worse fate? It’s debatable).

The voice is a wonderful thing: it’s the easiest musical instrument to control. Everyone can learn to sing in tune. Whenever football supporters chant, it’s always the same two notes, over and over. It might all go tits up when they break into a chorus of “run, rabbit, run”, but as long as it’s that two-note chant, they sing it in tune and in exactly the same key each time, like they have perfect pitch, and that’s without any training. You can also tell, by the sound of someone’s voice, whether they’re lying to you over the phone. Hell, you can make a variety of sounds and arrange them into “language”, with all different kinds of intonation, the subtlest of which can change the whole meaning of your sentence.

As such, the voice is intimately linked with things like gender, sexuality, and social class, and it strikes me that there are a number of roles that get assigned to women that come across in our voices. This is quite apparent in movies: the ditzy one has a high-pitched, slightly lispy voice, and the cynical, coffee-loving divorcee has a lower, more manly voice. The seductress will have a voice as deep as her cleavage, yet there will be nothing “manly” about it, as she goes about her business of wearing red nail polish, having long side-parted hair, and shipwrecking men. The first example that comes to mind, for me, is the movie Chasing Amy: they tried to give her a voice that indicated a femme lesbian who’d had sex with just about everything and everyone. She had this high-pitched, husky, girly thing going on that made me want to gouge my own eyes out with a plastic spoon. Of course, I would still have been able to hear her, I just would have bumped into things more. There are a number of assumptions people will make about women based on their voices, and as a result, a limited number of voices that women are supposed to speak with.

This is particularly apparent in music. Although it might be useful, first, to look at male singers. In opera, the lead vocalist will often be a proud, ringing tenor, and there will be mellow baritones, and if the Lord of the Flies Himself shows up he’ll sing in a lovely basso profundo. In rock music, the majority of male voices are quite a bit higher, something that goes with the other attitudes of early rock’n roll that challenged the dominant ideal of masculinity (or as Grandpa Simpson said in his youth: “Look at those sideburns! He looks like a girl!”) In the 50s and 60s, doo wop, surf pop and rock’n roll brought in the kind of male vocals hitherto associated with painful surgical procedures. Then there was Robert Plant and his ilk, oozing testosterone all over the place, but in a voice that suggested his big toe was caught in a bear trap. And there’s Prince, who has such an impressive falsetto that he was going to release a whole album under the name Camilla. And of course, Tim and Jeff Buckley. Many times I listened to some of these in the kitchen at home as a teenager, only to have a male member of the family wander in and say “I was about to say she had a nice voice” or “Is he gay???!”. This says quite a lot about our idea of masculinity, since, of course, quite a lot of men sing naturally in quite a high voice without needing to resort to helium, the vice-like jaw-grip of a bandmate’s angry Yorkshire terrier, or a miniature guillotine. But they’re expected, at least by the more stern, conservative types, to steer well clear of any voice that might make them sound, you know, like they might be a little freakish or malformed Down There.

Female voices come in quite a range of frequencies. There’s the impressively high-pitched squeal of Kate Bush on Wuthering Heights, and there’s the low purr of Nina Simone, both excellent singers, and both highly respected. Then there’s the Tina Turner rasp, the girly alt-rock singer-songwriter voice, and the rock-chick growl. So you know, you’d think all was well there. But then you start to notice the kind of comments aimed at someone like Kim Gordon: can’t sing in tune, ruins Sonic Youth records, etc., etc. I can honestly say that when I first heard her, she was exactly what I always wanted a female vocalist to sound like. Of course, there’s no accounting for taste, but Thurston Moore doesn’t sing in tune either, and no one tells him to just shut up and play guitar. Then you notice the stuff aimed at Bjork, who’s a highly professional singer who’s learned to do a whole range of things with her voice, even if she usually, like, just layers it up and gets some human beatbox guys and some hip producers. But whatever. How often have I heard her voice described as “weird”. Yet no one whinges about Blixa Bargeld’s accent on Einsturzende Neubauten records, for instance. And, actually, much as Kate Bush is highly respected, I’ve heard some pretty hateful stuff said about her, on account of the way she goes very high without going whispery. Hateful, as in “I never wanted anything to do with that woman!”, and there is a feeling that singing that high makes her kooky, mad, and shrill. But the revelation for me wasn’t so much these criticisms as my own reaction the first time I heard the Raincoats. Bear in mind, I was quite used to listening to virtually unproduced punk rock, the haranguing voice of Mark E. Smith (and his attempts at tuneful singing), the chicken-like vocal stylings of Pere Ubu’s David Thomas. But when I heard the Raincoats, my reaction was “Eeew, completely untrained female voices!”. I’d never heard such a thing before. And add to this that the first Raincoats song I ever heard was their cover of the Kinks’ Lola. Perfect. Women’s voices have to be aurally photoshopped before being put on records, unless they’re Nico or Brigitte Bardot and they’re supposed to be childlike and incompetent beauty icons anyway: six foot tall, six years old, with six-inch gold blades for cheekbones. And women have to fit into one of the roles assigned to them. Men can just let rip with their own voices, but women must put on their roaring shirt first. I’ve seen rock fans complain that Sandy Denny or Linda Thompson couldn’t sing. Sleater-Kinney also knock a lot of rock fan noses out of joint, or else they did when they were still together (boo).

And attitudes to female singing are only an small part of the roles we’re supposed to fulfil: traditionally female jobs are mostly the ones where we have to put on a variety of voices for different situations: reassuring and professional for the phone, joyous and girlishly enthusiastic for retail and advertising, soothing and reassuring for nurses, not to mention the range of voices we use within the workplace. And those voices do keep us in our place. For instance, I find myself with a perpetual half-smile, using my secretarial voice, all the damn time, and if there’s an awkward silence I switch to the “what did you do at the weekend?” voice, all of which are variations on the “how can I help you?” voice. And I’m lucky, switchboard operators have to do that all damn day, with a phone in each ear. They’re a marvel to behold, and I don’t know how they do it. It gets more complicated when women get to higher places professionally: men have a sense of entitlement to be there, but women feel they have to maintain their place at all costs, and I’ve known many a female solicitor whose every other word was “fuck”, “shit” or “bastard”, and who had the “cynical coffee-guzzling divorcee” voice just because it was an uphill struggle, even for a high-powered partner in an international law firm, to not slip into the “how can I help you?” voice, which won’t do for staff or clients, and of course to prove that she wouldn’t rather be shopping or dressing wounds. And also, let’s face it, that kind of gender stereotype is quite inappropriate for dressing wounds, which certainly requires at least as much skill and as much of a strong stomach as drawing up a lease for a chip shop. This shows exactly how much voice affects our ideas of how high-powered, sane, or competent someone is, how much they should be paid, and how seriously we should take them.

So yeah, time to liberate our vocal folds from the chains of oppression, maybe.