Twist and shout
Harry Harris reads between the lines of some of the most explosive moments in pop music.
Illustration by Bea Shireen.
The best bit of a rollercoaster isn’t the first drop, it’s the climb to the top. All that tension and excitement, a sea of people getting steadily smaller beneath you while the horizon expands out to fill your field of vision. Whirring wheels and hissing pneumatics and muffled, nervy conversations from the accompanying carriages. A brief silence. Then, shouting. Lots and lots of shouting.
Rilo Kiley’s A Better Son/Daughter follows this exact same trajectory. Quiet and dreamy at first, a nursery-rhymish melody sounding like it’s being sung through a telephone, the fade-up of drums. Then everything cuts out, bar Jenny Lewis' vocal, and it all kicks in. “And sometimes when you’re on, you’re really fucking on!” All the potential energy that’s built up in the opening minute of the song is immediately converted to something hot, bright, and loud. Very loud.
Lewis is the Queen of Shouting. A Better Son/Daughter is the clearest example of the way she can use it, but it jumps up elsewhere too. On ‘Does He Love You?’, in which she sings from the point of view of the mistress of a married man, she crescendos into a shout by the end of the song when the wreckage of the situation is laid bare in front of each of the characters. In ‘Spectacular Views’, an otherwise straight-down-the-line indie rock song, she vividly describes scenes and vistas in a kind of reflective, philosophical way. “Ages pass, shells and bits of bone, forming new limestone to give things their turn.” Vocally, she’s actually pretty restrained throughout, but in the very final verse she breaks and spits out: “It’s so fucking beautiful!”
Shouting and singing are often seen as uncomfortable companions, with the latter often being used to decry someone who should be doing the former. Despite the vast array of sounds, ticks and inflections present in contemporary music, our idea of what makes ‘a good singer’ is still quite narrow. Good singers have impressive vocal ranges. Good singers can deftly and cleanly move up and down their octaves. Good singers can belt out a note to the back of a crowded room. Good singers don’t shout.
There’s perhaps a technical reason that’s conditioned people into taking this stance. Vocal cords are actually pretty flimsy things. They don’t take stress particularly well. When you sing, they vibrate to create different tones and different notes – the higher the note, the more the vocal cords stretch. When you shout, your vocal cords vibrate against each other more, which can cause inflammation – which is why you may feel like you’ve got a sore throat after going to a gig, football match or live taping of Question Time. So, yes, technically shouting makes you a bad singer, because you’re doing more damage to your instrument. But that’s a bit like saying Keith Moon’s a bad drummer because he hammers the shit out of his drums. Shouting is about control. Knowing how far to go, how far you can go and when to pull back.
It’s about highlighting moments. Sometimes you can do this with a whisper, or with a key change, or whatever. But sometimes you need to shout, in life as much as music. There’s a cathartic element to it, and while catharsis as a motivation to create art can lead to didactic, ill-considered pieces, catharsis as a motivation to perform can tap into something you may have been previously unable to access. Writing in Psychology Today, psychologist Stephen A Diamond says: “When it comes to dealing effectively with anger, catharsis is not merely a matter of ‘letting off steam,’ the verbalization must be directly connected to and rooted in the true source of the anger. When such anger is acknowledged and verbally expressed, it can clear the way to discovering that which caused it in the first place.”
The other best bit of a rollercoaster is when you put your hands in the air. When I was a kid this was sold to me as a way to make the cart go faster, which with the calculated and cynical hindsight that 29 years of life will give you now seems incredibly suspect. However nothing exemplifies the shared experience of a rollercoaster ride like the image of dozens of people careening down a big drop with their hands up. It’s the same in music. Live music is so electric and fun and life-affirming because of the connection between audience and stage, and nothing builds that connection quite like shouting.
Pop music has embraced this idea wholesale. There are dozens of reasons why Little Mix’s ‘Shout Out To My Ex’ is such an addictive, satisfying song, but chief among them is the anthemic group-sing of the chorus line. See also the repeated background “Hey's” in Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Run Away With Me’ or the moment in ‘Hey Ya!’ when Andre 3000 asks the listener what’s cooler than being cool (answer: “ICE COLD”). Punk, another genre that thrives on audience connection, employs the same techniques – think of The Ramones’ iconic rallying cry of “Hey! Ho! Let’s go!” on ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’, or The Runaways' provocative shouts of “I’m a ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-CHERRY BOMB!”
These cues are there to invite us to shout back, to join in in something collective and good. Musicians are trying to do that more than ever now. Maybe that’s because social media has broken down the barriers between artist and audience off stage so much that it becomes easier to foster that connection on stage. Or maybe it comes back to catharsis, the need to release, to try and process what’s going on around us. Yes, it’s good when music can be socially progressive. And yes, it’s good when music can be politically engaged. But music is best when it makes you feel heard – and to feel heard, sometimes you have to shout.
