A long absence, and now I am going to ramble. Well, I
finally connected an observation in real life with my feelings toward damsels
in distress and, as my thoughts are still a little inchoate, I might meander.
Off and on I’ve mentioned how sensitive I am to auditory signals, maybe even
more than visual ones. Most straight guys focus on how a girl looks; my reactions are driven at least
as much by how she sounds. A bad
speaking voice and, sorry, forget it, I lose interest immediately. Accents in
speaking voice matter to me, and not in a snobbish way.
So I am more annoyed than most by a general trend in the US
over the past few years – the rise of what is called vocal fry among women,
especially young women. It’s this irritating elongation of some vowels
accompanied by a slight rasping of the voice, as if the speaker just got out of
bed. Unlike upspeak, which even Americans understand makes them sound idiotic,
vocal fry is seen as an affectation among the upwardly mobile.
To me it sounds upwardly mobile in the most slovenly, lazy
way possible – a vocal reification of a huge sense of entitlement. I blame
Disney – their stable of young female vocalists tend to accentuate vocal fry,
and as we now aspire to little more than mundane celebrity, their creaky voices begin to
represent aspirational values. Also, Disney has its wildly successful princess
franchises, and although the expressed message is all right-on girl power and
you-can-do-it-without-really-working-to-achieve-it, we all know the hypocrisy
of all that ( I have a 5 yr old daughter, so I am exposed to all this to toxic levels).
I hate the mix. It’s redolent of the expectation of
pampering, or the nearest psychological equivalent, bestowing respect for no
particular reason or accomplishment. Don’t get me wrong: I embrace aspirational
values, I fully support women in real life being not merely allowed but
encouraged to maximize their potential, etc etc. But this poisonous Disneyfied
mix of reward for no apparent effort or sacrifice reinforces a mistake that tends to afflict girls more than boys, at least here: the notion
that respect is transferred from others rather than emanating from within. It’s
a horribly complacent, conformist formula for all the lip service to girl
power. It’s just bullshit.
So how does this connect to DiD? Well, on a few levels.
First, the obvious: a girl with vocal fry just rubs me the wrong way – any
fantasy I might have about DiD excludes anyone speaking this way, It’s so
irritating and non-threatening that I can’t even imagine a villainess with it –
as a vocal register it’s a complete waste.
But onto a more intricate point. I got so bloody annoyed by tha
fry a few days ago that I looked for a remedy in music, as I will do. And I
found it. For those of you who don’t recognize the name Corinne Drewery, she is
the girl with the bob hairdo from 80s sophistipop group Swing Out Sister (yep,
the “Breakout ” (1987) people). For a long time I considered that song a sort
of guilty pleasure, but as I age and sink slowly into senility mellow I
am revisiting them. They’re still around, producing, yes, easy listening music,
but at least good easy listening. No,
I do not make this style of music a habit, so for me to like them is quite an
outlier.
Part of the reason for their appeal is the luscious
mezzo-soprano of singer Corinne Drewery. I have seen interviews with her, and
she comes across as an absolute sweetheart, still retaining her thick East
Midlands accent. Her looks are striking but polarizing, I bet, and the bob ‘do amplifies
that. I found her gorgeous. God I had a crush on her back when “Breakout” came
out. (Digression before we leave the dreary topic of my starf***ery from
yesteryear: if you watch the video for the song, wait until the very end, after
she’s doing the modeling thing with the 80s airblowers, just before the end,
before the cute little OK wink. You’ll see a moment where she takes a little
bow, and is overcome by the adulation in the video scene. It’s a split second,
and shows a little charming vulnerability. That split second is all it takes for
me to develop an infatuation that to my recent surprise is still there over a
quarter century later.)
It also helps that Corinne is (a) tall, (b) from sort-of
Northern England, (c) with straight black hair, (d) a mezzo-soprano voice and
(e) has a signature bob hairdo. She reminded me of a fantastic online damsel in
distress (it’s not that hard to guess whom), and thinking of both of them is a
powerful tonic to dispel the taste ofmy little pet hate of vocal fry. Anyway,
thanks Corinne, for making me think of a gorgeous voice and bringing back happy
thoughts of a very special damsel.
