Why do songs sound weird when the lyrics are pronounced properly at the end (i.e. when an artist sings “ah fell offuh the ladduh” as “i fell off of the ladder”)?

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Why do songs sound weird when the lyrics are pronounced properly at the end (i.e. when an artist sings “ah fell offuh the ladduh” as “i fell off of the ladder”)?

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3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Songs sometimes use slant rhymes which are imperfect rhymes. Train and plain are perfect rhymes. Plain&same, off a&ladder are slant rhymes, they *kinda* fit. When you sing (or rap), you can kind of bend the sounds around to make them sound more perfect. Reading it plain, the awkwardness shows through.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because generally your singing voice isn’t as harsh as your speaking voice (unless you’re doing punk or something stylistic), so you don’t use such harsh word endings

Anonymous 0 Comments

For one, a lot of the time, what you speak is actually closer to “what the singer sings”, ie. pop music often times is sung in a way that reflects people’s pronunciation a bit better than reading each word off as it was written in the dictionary. So in your example saying “ah fell off a'” instead of “eye fell off ovv” very clearly, is a pretty normal thing to do in speech (give or take; I think the prevelance of “ah” for “I” is also a bit stylized, see below)

On the other hand, in many genres there are also certain affectations that we expect to hear that sound nothing like our normal speech, like how mid-2000s rock artists liked to turn “ee” sounds into “ay” sounds. One that is pretty prevelant across popular music is not singing your R’s (non-rhoticity), similar to how English in England is spoken (as you wrote, “ladduh”).

But basically, when you remove all the genre-tied stylizing of the pronunciations and then also pronounce everything overly clearly it sounds a bit funny. The latter especially makes it sound like you’re singing the words but not really “understanding” them because it doesn’t sound like you’re phrasing them at all.