Lauren Elkin's Vocal Break is a moving study of the ways women express themselves through singing and the obstacles they encounter. As a child, Elkin took voice lessons in Northport, Long Island, where her teacher made her perform in front of a mirror. Singing Italian classical repertoire as a soprano, she was instructed to smile and lift her eyebrows for better placement, breathe from the diaphragm, and smooth over the vocal break where chest voice transitions to head voice.
Elkin practiced to make her voice "nearly featureless," though she secretly wanted to rebel. Looking back, she wishes she had understood that she could "work with, not against the imperfections in my voice... with its different colours and resonances, its scratches and cracks like skips on a record, its atmospheric flaws... Embracing the flaws can strengthen the work; through vulnerability can come power."
Examining the Female Voice
In Vocal Break, Elkin examines the female voice in all its forms and imperfections. Drawing on singers who have shaped her — including Cyndi Lauper, Cynthia Erivo, Tori Amos, Beyoncé, Poly Styrene, and Kathleen Hanna — she explores the rules and expectations imposed on female vocalists and how they have resisted them.
Elkin, a French-American translator and author of Flâneuse and Art Monsters, writes, "I am essentially not a writer. I'm a musician who got into writing." Though not strictly a memoir, the book mines her past as she examines singing through her own musical passions as both practitioner and listener. She delves into self-image, coolness, integrity, authenticity, genre constraints, and the impact of changing pop music trends on the voice.
Technology and the Voice
Elkin ponders the history of the vocoder and the vogue for Auto-Tune. Though "Auto-Tune sceptical," she is won over by Charli XCX's tech-assisted delivery on Brat, where "the grain of her voice is still present, filtered through a machine, grating down the scale and finishing with a real vocal crack."
Underpinning the study is the assertion that women using their voices is "not a neutral proposition but a hard-won right" and that judgments on their singing are tied to power and identity. For millennia, women have been sidelined, silenced, and held to different standards. Even today, they are criticized for being too loud, too quiet, too bolshie, or too timid. Such judgments extend beyond singers to women who speak in public, especially politicians, who are often called shrill if they speak with passion. Margaret Thatcher used a vocal coach to lower her voice and add seriousness.
The Subtle Textures of Sound
Elkin skillfully renders subtle sound textures on the page. She notes that Lauper's voice has a "metallic sheen" while Hanna's is "insistent, sing-song-y, nasal, mocking, up-talking, vocal-frying — everything that men revile about women's voices — and extremely effective if you want to further a feminist agenda, challenge gender norms, and generally shake people out of their inertia."
The book is the product of copious research, drawing on Roland Barthes's The Grain of the Voice, Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, and Homer's Odyssey. Surprising facts emerge, such as the French phrase for singing along in an unknown language: chanter en yaourt, or "to sing in yoghurt." Readers may flinch at businessman Guillaume Biro's account of Édith Piaf singing live in 1956: "An unimaginable pleasure burns into my temples and my heart is beating to bursting point... I literally explode in an orgasm like I've never experienced before, which leaves me prostrate in my seat."
Violence and Suppression
Elkin offers no grand thesis beyond that women's vocal styles are rich and varied, subject to undue manipulation and criticism, and underserved by the music business. Less widely acknowledged is the physical violence women have endured for daring to sing. The Slits' Ari Up was stabbed twice — "People didn't know whether to fuck us or kill us," said guitarist Viv Albertine — while Tori Amos was raped after a show by a man who demanded she sing hymns. In Afghanistan, women are forbidden from singing in public and from making their voices heard outside the home.
At the book's core is deep appreciation for singing as expression and freedom. Elkin notes, "I think more people should be singing. Singing is about wanting that thing that is just beyond reach, and that is why we love it, and need it. We too want things that are just beyond our reach, and sometimes, through music, we can get them, or feel like we have, for the time the music lasts."
Vocal Break: On Women, Music and Power by Lauren Elkin is published by Chatto & Windus (£22).
