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screaming in music is such a powerful form of vocalization, but oftentimes it’s bereft of the traits which make it appealing in favor of “technique”. screaming is best enjoyed as the desperate, painful, throat-shredding, vein-popping wails of a person who’s pushed to the brink
it’s rare to find vocalists who sound like they’re prepared to reach into their own mouths, rip their vocal cords out, and hand them over to you. now ppl watch tutorials and end up sounding like variations of each other, reaffirming the normie notion that screaming’s “just noise”
gone are the days of corey taylor and Jonathan Davis types destroying themselves for their art. now we have the 10-step process outlined in “how to scream 101” by some guy in a band with a ReverbNation page to teach people how to simulate a vocalization that is best served raw
when i hear “harsh” vocals i want to flinch. i want to wince at the thought of what it’d physically take to produce the same sound out of my own mouth. rappers who don’t know what they’re doing and just yell are shitting on the nerds w Melissa Cross techniques committed to memory
screaming, like all other forms of vocalization, is merely a tool. it’s a means to an end. what i see instead, in great frequency, is screaming being used as a placeholder flr vocal styles that would arguably be more appropriate and complement the overall composition much more
in such cases, it completely kills the potential for a song to have any semblance of dynamic contrast and any sort of depth beyond the instrumental. you could swap it out with a goat bleating or an airhorn blaring and it’d feel the same. it’s just percussive noise w no expression
this spiel was inspired by a night of listening to nu metal/hc/metalcore from the 90s-00s with vocalists who clearly didn’t stop to consider the long-term consequences of their vocals, then listening to modern metalcore w vocalists who all sound like pterodactyls w sinus issues
tl;dr heavy music purists are corny and anyone who worships technique and virtuosity instead of raw expression and creativity is the reason why younger kids identify their angst w rappers and pop artists making music in their bedrooms on laptops more than nerds with Kempers
