What was with 90s gril singers and the obsession with extreme oversinging/look at me I can hit a C8 so kewl XD

Ok let's get down to brass tacks. A lot of this came from gospel. If you listened to Aretha Franklin, there's power and conviction in her voice. You could feel her angst in there.

When you get into 90s singers like Mariah or Celine, it just feels like a cheap "Look at the note I can hit" gimmick. En Vogue is a group that seemed to capitalize on this. A lot of this trend started in the 80s with people like Jennifer Holiday and her hit "And I'm Telling You I'm Not Going." To me, it sounded fake and overblown.

Barbra Streisand also sang like this and of course her pal/sometimes songwriter Barry Gibb.

It seems like it is calculated with some singers. Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, and Mariah Carey didn't do it in their earlier recordings. Listen to their first or second albums. You don't hear the constant vocal pyrotechnics.

Also it seems like the instrumentals often too a back seat to the vocal performance.

Good point. With Aretha it sounded genuine. She came up in a segregated America and her artistic heyday took place across the backdrop of the civil rights movement. You don't get that sense of feeling from Celine Dion.

>Whitney
>Celine Dion
should be considered 80s
>Christina Aguilera
I know her first album came out around '99, but she's 00s.

>Also it seems like the instrumentals often too a back seat to the vocal performance
Back in Aretha's time the singer had to go along with the band. In more recent times you just have a ProTools beat with no real instruments and the singer is just blasting out the highest note they can over this beat.

Sadly Patti LaBelle and Minnie Ripperton started the whole thing. Not that it was their fault, but they certainly created the conditions that allowed this kind of vocal masturbation to happen.

That above all else. The interaction between the singer and band is something lost. For one thing a copypasted ProTools beat loses any sense of dynamics or expressive ability. I mean, as great as Aretha was in the 60s-70s, her 80s stuff and its electronic backing tracks was missing something.

Aretha's artistic heyday was unquestioningly 1967-72--a brilliant fusion of gospel, pop, and R&B on those albums. It's more her Arista period that I think irritates. She was coasting by then anyway, and she was in her 40s and had lost a lot of that youthful angst and edge.

At least Celine Dion had some sense of melody. I can't say that of Mariah or some of the others.

Post examples

Christina Aguilera is the worst example of this, with Beyoncé bringing up the rear.

And no, Barbra Streisand really didn't oversing at all compared with some of these clowns.

Streisand is annoying but not because of hitting C8s on every song, it's more her vocal tone and enunciation I don't like. Compared to Xtina or Beyonce, no she absolutely did not oversing. Though Back to Basics was alright and at least Xtina can sing unlike Britney.

Mariah Carey is just cringe as fuck. She has (or had, choice of words here) a stupidly huge range and completely squandered it on tuneless noise passing for "songs."

Also without a question, Whitney Houston started off the whole 90s-early 00s oversing trend when every producer and their dog was trying to recreate I Will Always Love You which turned a gentle love ballad into an air raid siren of vocal excess.

Celine Dion, while annoying, is at least capable of more restrained singing and seems to actually be a likable human being instead of a pompous, self-indulgent diva.

And just so you know I'm not sounding sexist here, I'll blame Eddie Vedder (maybe Cobain to a lesser extent) for 15 years of rock vocalists sounding like they were trying to push out a massively compacted turd.

oversinging can also happen to men

youtube.com/watch?v=xOAMHGb7hPE

>Christina Aguilera is the worst example of this, with Beyoncé bringing up the rear.
They're actually not bad when they dial it down a bit.

>Also without a question, Whitney Houston started off the whole 90s-early 00s oversing trend when every producer and their dog was trying to recreate I Will Always Love You which turned a gentle love ballad into an air raid siren of vocal excess.
That song as I recall was divisive and some people liked it, others hated it. To me it seemed like going squirrel hunting with an M-16. Whitney certainly had some impressive power and range which was fine in the right circumstance, but IWALY was a gentle little ballad that called for delicacy and intimacy, not trying to LARP as a Wagner performer. I'm very sure Dolly Parton knew how her own song was supposed to sound especially since she did three different recordings of it.

Many people think that Faith Hill, LeAnn Rimes, etc. oversing as well.

They sure as hell do especially when they tried recording Christmas songs. LeAnn fucked up the melody of Oh, Holy Night with her vocal affectations. Regarding Faith Hill, Where Are You, Christmas sounded much better with the little girl in the fucking Grinch movie singing it than that blaring nonsense. It's said Mariah Carey has perfect pitch but her mutilation of Joy To The World would never give you that impression.

youtube.com/watch?v=VPuwS3FHFQ4

Yeah this fucking blows. Too much vibrato everywhere and she sounds like she's staring at her shoes as she's singing.