Pop accent, American English and worship

At college, when listening to those who are lead singers in chapel, it is sometimes very clear that they may have learnt the music from an American source. Interestingly, unlike pop music, quite a lot of lead singers in a worship setting don't actually use north American pronunciation features in singing, but some do. In doing so they are probably signalling a psychological reality, for them, of the social domain of singing rock or pop music; it is a domain in which certain features are expected to be used* and for them, perhaps, contemporary worship music is in the 'pop' domain.

Some research from New Zealand was done on NZ pop singers and their performance accents: Pop accent comes naturally�(Science Alert). Actually I was a bit disappointed, at least by the reporting. This is because of a mismatch between the stated aim: "research at AUT University’s Institute of Culture, Discourse and Communication looked at why we pronounce words differently when we sing." However, the news article doesn't say all that much and without the actual article, I'm speculating as to the whys that may actually be given and the results. The news article certainly didn't seem to really answer the question except to say that it happened. My understanding of what it does actually say is that it seems to happen because pop singing is a domain where an Americanised accent is expected (and that the meanings of a NZ accent in pop music therefore relate to comedy etc). So maybe (and this is my speculation) the 'why' really is simply that people pick it up just as they pick up more standard or more local variants for use in appropriate circumstances. In which case americanised English in pop music is mainly, probably, a statement saying, in effect, that what is being performed is 'pop' rather than (say) folk and the performance is being construed in solidarity with the traditions of pop music. It is a claim to be taken to be performing within that frame of understanding.

So the question I'm pondering is what is the meaning of using or not using an americanised accent in leading worship or even in singing our own worship? Is it a bringing of our own cultural repertoire into worship or is it a loss of 'authenticity'? Certainly, I wondered several times whether to ask a particular lead-singer whether they could lead in their own voice because the change was so marked from their own normal accent and I actually found it more difficult to sing along because I do normally sing worship in more-or-less my own normal accent and to be led in such a different accent with all the suasion that brings to move ones own expression to match that of the lead. So maybe that's the issue about this in leading worship: if a congregation normally sing in an americanised accent than, fine, but if they normally worship in their own, then use of a more 'normal' accent is called for. And part of the issue then is not to restrict 'worship' to singing; what accent(s) is/are used to express said prayers and preaching?

I'd say that there are other things we might want to consider in this case too. There is the socio-economo-political one about how we situate ourselves in respect of American hegemony (though this is a convoluted matter, historically**). It may be that if we wish to take seriously a somewhat resistant stance to the dominant Powers (cf Keesmaat and Walsh, Colossians Re:mixed), then we may want to encourage local rather than mid-Atlantic voices in worship, for example. Another is how far we judge such register switching to be 'authentic'; that is how far it is heard or felt as 'natural' or alienating; does it distance worshippers from their worship (for example, by tending to push it into a 'performance' category like Karaoke and thus making it rather than God the focus)? Theologically, the issues can be seen, then, to revolve around an 'incarnational' trajectory which affirms the indigenous and values the marginalised (cf Lamin Sanneh's work on the effects of vernacular Bible translations: affirming African languages and vernacular cultures).


*Typically the markers of 'pop English' are post-vocalic r (ie the r is sounded after vowels unlike southern British English), the reduction of /ai/ to /a:/ (so 'I' will be typically pronounced 'ah') and quite often the vowel in 'on'/'God' is lowered (so that to Brit ears it tends to sound more like 'ah'). There are a bunch of other little linguistic tells that also go with this (the treatment of intervocalic 't', nasalisation etc), so that list is not exclusive, just the more obvious features. Of course there are often (amusingly to the linguistically aware) hypercorrections; intrusive 'r' where the re-introduction of post-vocalic are is overextended to areas where it never would be in n.Am. English.

**A number of years ago, one of my university profs (the relatively famous Peter Trudgill, a major sociolinguist) did an occasional lecture on accent in pop music in which he outlined how much pop music was done in an Americanised accent. In fact, he pointed out, it is done in a somewhat southern n.American accent because it is betraying its origins/roots in black music (I'll leave readers to recall histories of pop music which should put that connection in context). One of the interesting things he noted though was that punk rock had tended to 'allow' if not encourage singers to use British features in contradistinction to n. American a tradition which can still sometimes be heard in newer music which inherits the punk style. This leads to an extra and ironic amusement to be found in the film Jumpin' Jack Flash, where Whoopi Goldberg's character is trying to decipher Mick Jagger's black-n.Am English accent ...