Get Ready For This - Accent Mix-up?

I'm going to need a special tag for '90s music' because I keep finding weird stuff going on in music from the 90s.

Today's 90s jam we're talking about is "Get Ready For This," by 2 Unlimited. If you grew up in the U.S. during the 90s and 2000s, you will remember this song as a club banger and a basketball "jock jam" (the only basketball game I've ever been to, in the 2000s, played this song). I never heard the full version until recently.

The song features a standard, 80s-inspired New York-style rap. The parts that sound particularly New York-ish are the following:

"Feel the base, you just get closer
Be impressed by the words I chose of
Once again kickin' it live
Doin' everything yo just to survive
Above the law, I take our stand
Being on stage with a mic in my hand"

Let's ignore the ungrammatical "the words I chose of" lyric. In "live" and "law," the singer uses a heavy dark 'l' sound. Using a dark 'l' sound at the beginning of syllables used to be a more common New York feature. Nowadays it's widespread enough among American English speakers to not be considered "accented," but Newman (2015) considers New York dark 'l's to be heavier than other American varieties.

The more interesting part is the vowels that follow - he uses an [a] sound in "live" and on [o] in "law."

Monophthongal [a] is found in two varieties - white Southern English and African American English. The song otherwise doesn't have features of white Southern English. The original influential rappers were Black Americans from New York, who speak an accent of African American English that is influenced by the multi-ethnic New York English variety. He sounds more similar to the latter than the former to me.

He also uses an [o] vowel in "law" and "on." If he were imitating either white or Black Southerners, he would have probably used a diphthong like [ɑɒ] here. Instead he uses [o]. The COT-CAUGHT distinction was already losing its foothold on American English by this time, with New York English holding out and preserving the distinction. This distinction would also be found among Black New Yorkers. This makes his performance even more Black New York-ish.

This wouldn't be notable except for this lyric:

"Bustin' it loud to the crowd, the age is 20, I'm from the south"

No way this man is "from the South." He is obviously imitating New York rappers. He may be broadly imitating Black Americans, but African American Vernacular English has regionally distinct varieties, and the one he's imitating is not Southern.

The rapper in question is not only not from the South, he's not even from the U.S. His name is Ray Slijngaard, and he seems to be a Black Dutchman. He speaks English, but with a clear Dutch accent. Notice how he devoices /v/ to [f] in his interviews.

There are varieties of Dutch that distinguish /v/ and /f/, but Amsterdam Dutch does not (H. Van de Helde, 1996) - just as well, since Slijngaard is from Amsterdam. There is no English dialect that devoices /v/ to [f], to my knowledge. And his English, while seemingly based on American English, still shows signs of L1 interference.

One topic we have covered ceaselessly on this site is that people feel comfortable imitating other accents in music, but not so much in spoken speech. Slijngaard appears to have felt comfortable enough doing a faux-NY-AAVE accent on his rap. But he didn't have enough awareness to realize that there is something a little weird about saying "I'm from the South" when you have an accent that is not only not Southern, but from another region entirely.

The "I'm from the south" lyric is probably just mimicking rappers who rep their hometown, and filling in a rhyme with "crowd." And nobody else seems to have paid much attention to this, because it's not a song that requires deep attention to the lyrics. It is, nevertheless, a source of humor when listening to the song on repeat.

Works Cited

• Michael Newman. New York City English. 2015
• H. Van de Velde, Marinel Gerritsen, Roeland van Hout. The devoicing of fricatives in Standard Dutch: A Real Time Study Based On Radio Recordings. 1996

Now here you go again - Stevie Nicks' Incomprehensible Singing

Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" has found new popularity with the younger generation as a popular TikTok featuring a man skateboarding, drinking cranberry juice, and lip syncing the song has gone viral.

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♬ Dreams (2004 Remaster) - Fleetwood Mac

While listening to the song, I was reminded of how I always found Stevie Nicks kind of hard to understand - I'm pretty sure I just made up half the lyrics to "Dreams" whenever I sang it.

I listened to the following three songs: Rhiannon, Dreams, and Gold Dust Woman. All three were primarily written and performed by Nicks, and are considered signature songs for her. I left out songs like "I Don't Wanna Know" and "The Chain," both of which had Nicks as writer but not as the primary vocalist. I also did not look at any post-Rumours albums because it gets weird and also I did not want to.

We are lucky enough to have studio and filtered acapella tracks, which makes it easier to tell what is her singing and what is interference from the background. I have selected clips from the below tracks to illustrate.

Stevie Nicks seems to operate on the base American Rock Register, which is influenced primarily by African American English and secondarily by white Southern English. The following features are quite common among 70s rock bands:

• PRICE-monophthongization. Every "I" becomes an "ah" for Nicks.
  • "Who am [a] to keep you down?" (Dreams)
• CAUGHT-diphthongization. "Want" sounds like "wa-unt."
  • "You wawnt your freedom" (Dreams)
• TRAP-diphthongized. Nicks splits the vowel in words like "had" into two vowels.
  • "What you "he-ad and what you lost." (Dreams)
  • "Thunder only heappens when it's raining." (Dreams)
  • "Heave you any dreams you'd like to sell?" (Dreams)
  • "She's like a ceat in the dark" (Rhiannon, 0:44)
• STRUT-centralization - the 'uh' sound in "loves" is raised to sound kind of like "lurves."
  • "See your sunrise lurves to go down." (Gold Dust Woman)
• KIT-diphthongization. Nicks loves to split short 'ih' sounds into two vowels.
  • "Wake up ian the mornian'" (Gold Dust Woman)
  • "Neaver seen a woman taken by the wiand" (Rhiannon)
• Non-rhoticism. Nicks pronounces 'er' sounds as 'uh.'
  • "Lousy lovas." (Gold Dust Woman)

Fleetwood Mac originated as a blues band, but Nicks's arrival in the band heralded a shift towards more lush pop material. The band still used a lot of acoustic instrumentation, and the electric instruments like guitars and keyboards were not used aggressively. Nicks' faux Southern/AAE accent jibes perfectly well with the band's musical direction, as well as the musical zeitgiest of the time.

All her Southern features are vowel-based, and most of them introduce diphthongs. The only one that reduces a diphthong, PRICE-monophthongization, has been standard in American rock for so long that it's almost not even worth mentioning. (I wonder if Lana Del Rey was influenced by Nicks - her love of diphthongizing the short 'i' KIT vowel is very Nicksian.)

Nicks also has the following features, non-consistently?

• Consonant deletion.
  • "It's o-ly right that you should..." (Dreams)
  • "Bla[ʔ] widow." (Gold Dust Woman)
• Consonant lenition.
  • "Pick your [f]ath and I'll p[f]ray" (Gold Dust Woman)
  • /t/s before /l/s become vocalized and flapped.
    • "Hea[r]less challenge." (Gold Dust Woman)
    • "But they never cry ou[r] loud." (Gold Dust Woman)
  • GOAT-monopthongization. "In your shad[o]" (Gold Dust Woman)
  • Lack of aspiration.
    • "Mmm [p]ale shadow, she's a dragon." (Gold Dust Woman)
    • "Women, they will [k]ome and they will go." (Dreams)
    • Very emphatic /b/. "She rings like a Bell in the night." Could be an example of cowboy (implosive) b? (Rhiannon)
    • Splitting one syllable into two: "It's only right that you should p-lay the way you feel it." (Dreams)
    • EmPHAsis on the wrong syLLAble. "When the rain wash-ES you clean, you'll know." (Dreams)

    If you're a long-time reader, you may recognize some of these features from my Ariana Grande article. These features increase singability by simplifying a more complex syllable into CVCV.

    Combined with Stevie Nick's recognizably light, breathy voice and floaty phrasing, it's clear that Stevie Nicks is not singing for comprehensibility, but for aesthetic effect. She loves to stretch out her vowels, especially in words like "cat" and "win" that would normally be harder to sing.

    Finally, it does not help that her lyrics are unusual for American rock. She uses a lot of symbolic imagery and unusual collocations, making it harder to fill in the gaps if you happen to miss a word. If the topic is "I love you, tell me it's true" you've probably heard enough variations on a lyric like that to be able to fill in what's going on if the singer slurs "I love you, tell ??? it's true." But it's harder to predict what's meant to go in "It's ??? ??? that you should play away your ???."

    "Rock on gold dust woman
    Take your silver spoon
    Dig your grave
    Heartless challenge
    Pick your path and I'll pray
    Wake up in the morning
    See your sunrise loves to go down
    Lousy lovers pick their prey
    But they never cry out loud" - Gold Dust Woman

    "Now, here I go again, I see
    The crystal vision
    I keep my visions to myself
    It's only me, who wants to
    Wrap around your dreams and
    Have you any dreams you'd like to sell" - Dreams

    "She rules her life like a fine skylark
    And when the sky is starless
    All your life you've never seen
    A woman taken by the wind
    Would you stay if she promised you heaven?" - Rhiannon

    Having listened to these songs again, Stevie Nicks is not the most incomprehensible singer. Ariana Grande is more willing to play fast and loose with consonantts than Stevie is, who is picky about when she deletes and when she stretches. Nicks is also not the most unusual vowel performer. A band like Alt-J is easily weirder than her.

    She actually reminds me a little of Fergie when she did that really weird rendition of the American National Anthem. Weird phrasing, a recognizable tonal color, and unpredictable phonetic changes. The difference is Stevie Nicks wrote these songs, and so her interpretation of them matched with the lyrics and the production - Fergie's version of the Star Spangled Banner clashes with previous renditions we've heard before by going for a weird slow sexy cabaret thing.

    What makes Stevie Nicks's performance so memorable? Perhaps when the rain wash-es us clean, we'll know.

And in cheeching you will learn: More Stop-Affrication

I've written about sounds becoming fricatives (like 'v', 'zh') or affricates (like 'ts', 'ch', 'dj') multiple times on the blog: glides becoming fricatives, /tr/ and /dr/ clusters getting affricated, and all manner of stops becoming affricates.

Today I present to you a very simple example of stops becoming affricates: /t/ becoming /tʃ/ before a high vowel. This is happens commonly across languages. Those of you studying Japanese may know that historically, the sequence /ti/ became [tɕi] and /tu/ became /tsu/.

I don't know exactly how common this is in English, but I've found /t/ becoming /tʃ/ before /i/. Example from Phil Collins:

In learning you will [tʃ]eech (teach), and in [tʃ]eeching (teaching) you will learn

Example number two is from the Backstreet Boys. Notice that although there is a /tʃ/ in 'reach' before the 'to', the singer clearly stops and produces a second /tʃ/ sound for "to." I would imagine that this one is influenced by the nearby /tʃ/ in the environment (he doesn't affricate the 't' in 'two worlds' one line before), but it's still neat.

Can't rea[tʃ] [tʃ]o your heart