Adding to our recent conversation on lyrics/vocals in IDM, here's a
rather interesting extract from Pascal Bussy's book on Kraftwerk,
"Man, Machine and Music" (SAF Publishing 1993; ISBN 0 946719 098),
concerning the vocals on their 1974 hit "Autobahn":
"Like many of their subsequent pieces, it is really less of a lyric
and more of a minimal vocal accompaniment which, rather than telling
a story, merely punctuates the music. Obviously the words add meaning,
but there is also a sense of them being used purely for their phonetic
sound, almost like a nursery rhyme, with the famous line, "wir fahr'n
fahr'n fahr'n auf der Autobahn". The words as they are sung almost
sound English, "fun, fun, fun on the autobahn", sounding reminiscent
of The Beach Boys. It is typical of the detached and mechanically
half-spoken way that they would later use phrases in German, English
and French alike, merely for the sound of them, without purposefully
working in one language or another. As [Ralf] Hutter explained to
Geoff Barton in _Sounds_ [in November 1975]:
'We use language also as a musical instrument. It's like when we sing.
People say it's too low, we cannot understand the singer. But we are
not singers in the sense of Rod Stewart, we use our voices as another
instrument. Language is just another pattern of rhythm, it is another
part of our unified sound.' "
So, maybe it's not so much of a question of what do you say, but
rather _how_ do you say it, using vocals as just another texture
alongside the music...
---
ERkki
TampHexster, pHinland
trerra@uta.fi