ROLLING STONE has decided: These are the 100 greatest singers of all time.
The voting process: Around 200 musicians, critics and experts appointed by the US editorial team voted. Some favorites were added by the German editorial team.
The jury texts come from, among others, Mary J. Blige, Billy Joel, Robert Plant, Van Morrison, Jackson Browne, Alicia Keys, Bono, Lenny Kravitz and Iggy Pop.
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Among others on the jury:
Alice Cooper, Chris Cornell, David Crosby, Cameron Crowe, Clive Davis, Steve Earle, Melissa Etheridge, Mick Fleetwood, Liam Gallagher, Art Garfunkel, Beth Gibbons, Merle Haggard, Albert Hammond Jr., James Hetfield, Robert Hilburn, Jimmy Iovine, Chris Isaak, Yusuf Islam, Jim James, Billy Joel, Norah Jones, Rickie Lee Jones, Alicia Keys, BB King, Carole King, Lenny Kravitz, Jon Landau, Jerry Leiber, Kurt Loder, Courtney Love, Mike Love, Loretta Lynn, Shelby Lynne, Ray Manzarek, Chris Martin, Paul McGuinness, John Mellencamp, George Michael, Mike Mills, Sinead O’Connor, Yoko Ono, Ozzy Osbourne, Iggy Pop, Keith Richards, Robbie Robertson, Chris Robinson, Mark Ronson, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr, Seymour Stein, Rod Stewart, Justin Timberlake, Steven Van Zandt, Roger Waters, Scott Weiland, Paul Westerberg, Ann Wilson, Brian Wilson, Nancy Wilson.
The US writer Jonathan Lethem answers the question for us:
What makes a gifted singer?
Every voice has a personality, just as every human body has its own smell or shapes. Brought to life deep in the belly, pressed into shape by the throat, set in motion by the bellows of the lungs, brought into final form by the tongue and lips, singing is always a kind of audible kiss, a spontaneous confession, a burp of the soul simply cannot be held back on the way through earthly existence. How hopelessly honest! How scary!
Incidentally, contrary to popular belief, the ability to sing with a fairly good tone is not an obstacle if you want to become a rock singer, at most it is a tiny disadvantage. Conversely, the vocal deficits of Lou Reed do not guarantee a “Pale Blue Eyes” every time, just as the clumsy dancing bear growl of Tom Waits does not automatically result in a “Downtown Train”. Nevertheless, the anti-singing style characterized by figureheads such as Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison and Jonathan Richman has proven to be surprisingly long-lasting and formative.
For me, Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, to name just two, are magnificent singers by any standard that could ever be relevant in my eyes – expression, surprise, feeling, structure, humor, horizon. These two, a handful of others: their soul burps are to me the soul burps of the gods. The singer’s voice, its beauty, touches us in a place as personal as the place where it is created. What is strange is not only the ecstatic submission that singers can seduce us into, but also the disillusionment that sometimes follows as soon as we regain control of our senses – as if they had tricked us into loving them, fiddled with our circuits and discovered a weak point discovered that we thought had long been soldered shut. Anyone who falls in love with a singer becomes a teenager again, every time.
Singers are frauds. Every now and then we ask ourselves whether we shouldn’t look at them as actors, and then decide that the “real” REM are Buck, Berry and Mills, not that crazy frontman Stipe, or the “real” Rolling Stones are just Richards – Wood-Watts-Wyman instead of the annoying moneybag Jagger. But be careful – keep thinking in this direction and you begin to speculate as to what the Doors would be like without “Mr. Mojo Risin’” or whether someone could convey Dylan’s gnarly syllables better than Dylan himself. And there is hard evidence against both. In fact, bands like the Stones or REM are often so unique and impressive precisely because the instrumentalists manage to create the perfect framework for their vocalist’s not 100% musical approach to a song: the pathos or the mumble, the spoken interjections or the superfluous syllables that disrupt rhythm and meter as we know it,
se movie star airs that we admire singers for and at the same time resent them for.
The funny thing about this poser phobia is that singers also suffer from it – so much so that some of them wear a guitar that has been carefully unplugged beforehand on stage. And it explains the “rock” preference for singers who write their own songs. If a vocal performance that touches our hearts is reminiscent of a tightrope walk, breathtaking and grotesque at the same time, then we can take comfort in the fact that Neil Young or Gillian Welch or Joe Strummer at least dug the foundations for the masts themselves and stretched the wire with their own hands. Whereas singers who rely on existing or tailored material – like Janis Joplin, Rod Stewart and Whitney Houston – may just be birds landing on other people’s wires. As we listen to singers roaming around a karaoke machine like magnificent animals, we may get a kick out of wondering whether they are seeing in the lyrics the meaning the author intended, or any meaning at all.
Which gives a clue to what makes great singing in the rock and soul era: that there is an underlying tension in the distance between singer and song. A bridge is built spanning a great void, and we never know if the singer will be able to cross it. The gap may be between the nature of the voice and the actual meaning of the words, or between singer and band, musical genre, production style, or audience expectations. In any case, there is a wonderful sense of unease underlying the singing style that defined the pop era. The simplest example comes from the moment it was created, i.e. Elvis Presley: The first listeners thought the white guy was a black guy. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that the moment Ed Sullivan’s television show brought this disjunction into everyone’s living room, American culture was fascinated but also a little confused – a feeling we haven’t quite gotten over to this day. The fact that only a few singing styles have had the same revolutionary potential since then is not due to a lack of effort. When the Doors tried out what rock’n’roll sounds like with a facade of sullen pathos, or the Ramones or Modern Lovers provided the soundtrack to infantile convulsions, the listener might have thought at first: Is this a joke? But the joke is change transformed into sound – something changes in the way a song affects us. In the cafe where I’m writing this, Morrissey was just coming out of the speakers, and he was clearly coming through the doors that Jim Morrison opened.
Ultimately, the role of singing in popular music, after Elvis, after Sam Cooke, after Ray Charles, is the same as that of the instrumental soloist in jazz. This means that if he doesn’t push against the limitations of his form at least a little, nothing actually happens. Regardless of whether the lines sung were written by the singer himself or concocted in a Brill Building or Motown laboratory, or whether they come from another genre, from blues or bluegrass or musicals: a rock, soul or pop singer has to do something with them Doing unspeakable things that try to go beyond the given context. Etta James, Ray Davies, Mama Cass, Mark Kozelek, Levi Stubbs Jr. – they all may not sound like protest singers, but they are always singing against something, whether in themselves, the band behind them, the world in which they live, the material they’ve been given to sing, or everything at once.
We judge singing before the rock era by how perfectly the lyrics are served. This is the standard that Frank Sinatra exemplifies. Since 1956, we have judged singing based on whether the singer discovers something in a song that they themselves were never able to express. This explains why voices like Joan Baez or Emmylou Harris or Billy Joel never really seem to sing in the contemporary idiom, no matter how much they brush material or accompaniment against the grain, and why Elvis – like Dylan – is always rock, even when he “Blue Moon” sings. It also explains why virtuoso throats like Aretha Franklin or, yes, Karen Carpenter work in the new tradition. No text, no matter who wrote it, could ever express what their voices needed to express, and they didn’t wait for a solo or a few whispering strings to convey it for them. They put it in their voice, their voice sent it into the ether, and from there it traveled into our bodies.
How can we ever thank them enough?