Spitball Army

Who says you need to be able to carry a tune in order to get a song across to an audience?  It certainly wasn’t a necessary prerequisite for 93-year-old Eileen Hall, who delivered The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” in the film Young @ Heart.  In fact, her British-accented rendition of the lyrics leans more toward the “spoken” than toward the “sung.”

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“Should I Stay Or Should I Go” by the Young @ Heart Chorus, from Mostly Live (2006)

Her performance made me think immediately of actor Rex Harrison who, in the stage musical My Fair Lady, had to struggle to speak in key when his character was ideally meant to sing.  Here was another Brit, and he admittedly was not a singer.  Nonetheless, his declamatory delivery style was perfectly in keeping with his character’s priggish attitudes about the loftiness of the English language.

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“I’m An Ordinary Man” by Rex Harrison, from the cast recording of My Fair Lady (1956)

I remember seeing a TV show when I was a kid – it was most likely either The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour or Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In – where a very proper English gentleman, in tuxedo and bowtie, strode to the podium and recited the lyrics to Johnnie Taylor’s “Disco Lady,” a popular radio hit at the time:

Shake it up, shake it down
Move it in, move it around
Disco Lady
Move it in, move it around
Move it in, around about
Disco Lady

Shake it up, shake it down
Move it in, move it around
Disco Lady
Hey sexy Lady
Said I like the way you move your thing
Lord have mercy girl
You dance so fine and you’re right on time
Girl you ought to be on TV on Soul Train
When you get the groove, it ain’t no stopping
Just can’t help it, I’m finger popping

Shake it up,
shake it down, etc.

The results were hilarious, poking fun at hyper-proper British mannerisms and Disco-era inanity, both at the same time.

Not long after that, the Punk and New Wave music movements trampled Disco into the ground.  One of the oddest New Wave bands was Ian Dury and the Blockheads, and they created a blip on the radio playlist radar with “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick.”  Frontman Dury brought his own brand of Sprechstimme straight down to earth, by inserting his working class Cockney accent into the songs.  It was entirely appropriate, as it matched the suggestive double entendres in many of the band’s lyrics, and didn’t seem concerned with sounding “proper.”

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“Razzle In My Pocket” (1977) by Ian Dury & The Blockheads

In the three intervening decades since, declamatory singing has taken a backseat to non-singing, exemplified best in what is arguably today’s dominant musical form: rap.  I can think of only one hip-hop artist today who comes close at all to the spirit of Rex Harrison and Ian Dury, spewing all variety of social observations into the mic with a Cockney accent.  Mike Skinner of The Streets can be, by turn, angry and polemical or tender and questioning, but he is most often very, very funny, and he’s got the deadpan down cold.  Can you imagine what might have transpired if he and Ms. Eileen Hall (who, sadly, passed away in 2007) had had the chance to duet?

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“I Love You More (Than You Like Me)” by The Streets, from Everything Is Borrowed (2008)