#phrasing

There are songs that become substantially more inappropriate when you sing them correctly.

Not musically correctly.

Diction correctly.

This was something I somehow managed not to notice for years.

Take “679” by Fetty Wap.

It is, unmistakably, a party song. Put it on a Bluetooth speaker during a Saturday morning volunteer event and probably nobody is diving across the room to turn it off. People are carrying boxes. Somebody is organizing canned vegetables. Somebody else is trying to figure out where the folding tables are supposed to go.

Meanwhile, the song is describing a nightclub, alcohol, attraction, and, among other things, looking at women’s asses.

Nobody seems particularly troubled by this.

But try singing those same ideas yourself with immaculate diction.

Suddenly you are no longer providing music for the food pantry. You are a man standing beside a pallet of kidney beans making a series of extremely specific observations about the female anatomy.

The problem, I eventually realized, was not necessarily the song.

It was how I was treating every word as if it needed to be understood perfectly.

I was enunciating.

The voice does not have to choose between words and music

When people learn songs, it is natural to think of the lyrics as information that needs to be transmitted accurately.

There are words. Your job is to sing the words.

But listen closely to many original recordings and that is not quite what the singer is doing.