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Originally Posted by Janszoon
A song with a male voice singing what was originally sung by a female voice or vice versa is, by its very nature, not a slavish imitation of the original though.
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^ That`s a good point that didn`t occur to me.
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And keeping the lyrics the same while changing the gender of the singer is potentially more of a change to the context and meaning of the lyrics than switching them.
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^ I didn`t really consider that either. You`re saying that a song that (typically) celebrates heterosexual love is deliberately re-used to suggest homosexual love, right? Yes, I can see that as being quite effective.
"... there are plenty of songs in which the singer adopts the voice of a different persona, but my suspicion is that
those are less common and often less powerful than the confessional "this is the real me" song. " It did occur to me that this was a rather monstrous generalisation, so you`re quite right to be picking me up on it!
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I think one can tell a powerful and sincere fictional story without pretending it's autobiographical. Some of my favorite lyricists—people like Nick Cave and Tom Waits—have made careers out of doing this. We don't question the sincerity of the emotions in a film just because it's not a documentary about the director's life. We don't question the sincerity of the emotions in a novel just because it's not a memoir. I've never understood why there's this weird double standard that's so often applied to song lyrics.
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^ I thought about this myself for a while, and in my case I think it`s connected partly to my expectations and partly to how the material is presented:
Watch a movie or open a novel and usually I am already thinking, "Ok, I want to hear a story", but that`s not my usual plan when I listen to music. Maybe my attitude is more, "Ok, tell it like it is."
In terms of presentation, I think there`s a significant difference here: in a movie or a novel, you can lose yourself in the story and forget the director or novelist if you want. At one level, they are just a name in the credits. A singer`s presence is harder to ignore, though; it`s very clear who is delivering the material and sometimes that works as a restraint; it`s not so easy to make an imaginative leap of the kind that seems so natural with books and movies. That is not to deny though, that there are many great songs involving empathy/imagination or interpretation of someone else`s experience...maybe I need to type less and think more on this topic!!
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