Am I wrong? I just heard Keira Knightly song from movie Begin Again. She didn’t have a hint of accent or sound like her at all actually. But everyone, from Annie Lennox to Adele. Male, female, none have their actually speaking accent. Why is that?

You just noticed this now?

No, I’ve just always wondered. Just wanted to know for for once...

but, is there a legit reason?

It’s a good point. Also Ozzy Osbourne is a weird case to me. I mean when he’s just talking you can barely understand him, but yet he sings and is clear as day.

Love his stuff with Eminem in Going the Distance. You can legit understand him. On the show and interviews he’s a blathering incoherent mess. Doesn’t he have disease or something? Parkinson’s?

I think he does, but even before you could never really understand him.

There are exceptions, such as Johnny Rotten (Lydon) of the Sex Pistols.

Lydon's singing accent and normal talking sound very similar british.

Another singer who doesn't sound "american" in their singing, is Nena.

In the american release of Nena's 1984 album, there were some songs in english. It sounded like the singer had a german accent, even with english lyrics.

I don't know if the singer was just singing everything "phonetically" or not.

I think it that singing just uses a different part of the brain than speech. Mel Tillis famously had a terrible stutter, but sang perfectly. That always struck me as being so odd!

What we think of the American accent used to be fairly common in upper class British society before the Industrial Revolution. It's the lower class British accents that have...evolved away from us. I know that most pop music in the UK was sung with an American accent until things started changing in the late 1960s, when it became trendy for rock acts singing with their native accents.

I think it’s a matter of influence. Everyone in rock is imitating old American blues music. American and British alike. Today’s copycats are copying copycats who copied the blues.

Same in country music. Why do they almost all have that twang? It’s part of the sound. It started with hillbilly music and everybody copied each other.

Whenever I'm bored and going through youtube, I listen to covers of pop songs done by millennials and younger (genZ).

It becomes a guessing game of figuring what region/country/continent the singer's accent is from.

Rock and Roll was invented in America, by Americans like Ike Turner, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, etc. The Brits who became rock musicians early on, like The Beatles, The Stones, etc., learned to make rock music by emulating those Americans, so, naturally, they emulated the American accent.

Not all British acts did the same. Steve Marriott of The Small Faces generally sang in a distinctive Cockney accent. Likewise, later British groups like The Jam and Oasis sang in native accents. The question in this thread is a perfect example of selection bias. It's not that all British (or English) rock bands sing with American accents, it's that the ones who broke big in America tended to do so, therefore we assume they all did.

Take a listen to "Lazy Sunday" by The Small Faces or "David Watts" by The Kinks, and then rethink the question.

Did nobody think to google this?

https://www.ajournalofmusicalthings....-accents-sing/

That still seems odd to me, though. So removing all intonations of speech results in something that sounds like American English? Because I was under the impression that British people thought of Americans as having an American accent.

I always thought it depending on how they practiced enunciating the words when they sang. You see a lot of Filipino singers, for instance, that sing in almost perfect English without an accent, but those are songs that were originally in English anyway.

Case in Point: Arnel Pineda. He's been the singer of Journey for over a decade.

Pineda's singing voice sounds almost identical to former Journey vocalist Steve Perry. In contrast, Pineda's talking voice sound heavily accented. (I can't pinpoint the exact region it is from. Purportedly Pineda was from the Philippines and spent years in Hong Kong).

Well, it seems to me the American accent grew out of the flattened accent from singing then.

I assume that they sing with American pronunciation for the same reason that Abba sang in English: the US is the biggest market.

See, the thing is, I don't think it's intentional. I think it's a quirk of the human brain processing language. Something about needing to hold sounds in certain patterns changes inflections and stuff. I don't think they're doing it for marketability.

The quoted professor is right. When you sing you are bending your voice to match the lyric and rythem of the song. And when the rhythm and lyric you are inspired by is American blues and R&B you stretch it to match that, and end up sounding American.

I heard an old disco-style Ministry song on the radio the other day. Hearing Al Jourgensen sing in a fairly heavy fake English accent was interesting. Not "cor blimey" heavy but still very noticeable.

Same with a lot of UK punk bands of that era, The Clash, The Damned, etc.

Why would we do that? This is an OldBoy thread after all...

On the other side of the coin, sometimes the "dumbest questions" are actually very insightful and the smartest ones which can asked.