Scrawled in Wax

As seems to happen every few years, English pop divas were recently in the the news a lot. With Amy Winehouse’s drunken antics and Lily Allen’s refreshingly loose lips, you couldn’t get away from these ‘cockney’ singers if you tried. But Kate Nash, the most recent addition to this newest English invasion, has been in the news for slightly different reasons, namely that she rocketed to fame after Lily Allen mentioned Nash on her Myspace page and also a that she only picked up a guitar 2 years ago and is already at the top of the British charts.

I’m still deciding if Nash is brilliant (like she is on the track Foundations) or simply a harbinger of the apocalypse (as when she deadpans the line “Birds can fly so high / And they can shit on your head yeah” on Birds). But to me, most striking about Made of Bricks is Nash’s dogged refusal to sing in American accent. And while that might sound a bit strange, think about it: when singers from all over the world sing in English, they largely do so in an American accent. From the Cardigan’s Nina Persson to Bono to the bloody Beatles (who I blame for this), the American accent has become the accepted norm for musical expression in English.

Perhaps the most stark example of this trend is Amy Winehouse. While she speaks in a thick North London accent – so much so that she is often incomprehensible to North Americans – she sings as if she were from Detroit. But my point is not that “people should just be themselves”. If it were that straightforward, people would be. Instead, what we are looking at is normativity at work – the situating of something as ‘normal’ to the exclusion of a slew of other norms. While the term has a different meaning in philosophy, it is used in cultural studies to examine how, for example, heterosexuality, the masculine or ‘Whiteness’ are all uncritically positioned as norms. But to my mind, the clearest example of normativity right now is the American use of the ‘.com’ website suffix. Websites in general are known as ‘dot coms’, while country specific sites have extensions like .co.uk or our own .ca . Yet type in the -.com address for any major company around the world – Sony, Honda, T-Mobile – and you will end up at the American website. To get to the other national websites, you need the .ca or .co.uk or whatever extention. To wit, the normal ending for a website is ‘.com’ – and normal in the real world is American.

So, what does any of this have to do with Kate Nash? Well, while Nash is by no means the first to sing in an English accent (everyone from traditional folk musicians to Massive Attack to the Arctic Monkeys have done so) the mass acceptance and appeal of pop stars Kate Nash and Lily Allen may signify something new. Nash is unapologetically English and peppers her songs with markers and idioms familiar to an English audience. By doing so, she has rejected the ‘normalcy’ of America and challenged the unspoken rule that says that if you want to be successful you will sing as if you were an American. But unlike an obscure indie act, Nash’s success may indicate a desire to reject the homogenisation of the globe, the seemingly inevitable march towards the entire English-speaking world becoming American.

That’s not to say, of course, that the values in a Kate Nash song are terribly different than in one by Rhianna or Hillary Duff – I mean, let’s not get carried away. But perhaps the success of Nash and Allen are indicators that the internet, rather than homogenising the world, will cement certain aesthetic differences, as surfers now aware of the overwhelming diversity that is out there, seek comfort in the familiar and the known. While keeping up with the latest trends in West-Coast hip-hop is possible from a flat in Hounslow or Etobicoke, it’s a heck of a lot easier and more relevant to simply listen to music that reflects not only your dialect but also the markers of the world you live in.

So in response to my question – “Is Singing in an English Accent an Act of Rebellion?” – probably not. But is a bunch of popstars singing in their native accents significant? It just might well be. Hit the comments to let me know what you think.

Note: The preceding post had absolutely nothing to do with a minor, inappropriate crush on Kate Nash. No really. Nothing at all.