Who is the most misheard singer of all time?
Rock and roll should never come with a translator.
The whole point behind the greatest songs of all time is being able to translate the emotions that no one can truly articulate with words. Whether that’s letting it all out in a guitar solo or singing that one note that hits people right in the soul, there’s no limit to how many musicians can touch people’s hearts. However, that doesn’t mean that everyone is the clearest singer in the world.
While everyone would love it if their favourite artists sang like Broadway singers and enunciated every single word, pop music has never really been built for that. It has the occasional singer who can belt and be understood clearly, but there are people who often garble their words or throw in pieces that don’t necessarily make the most sense when sung in a certain accent. The listener might have to do a bit more work, but if they sang normally, it would have never been the same as it was.
But what people can understand in songs has changed more than a few times as well. As much as Chuck Berry may sound completely normal these days, there are more than a few people who thought that the rapid-fire spitting on ‘Johnny B Goode’ was on par with the fastest lyricists of all time. Then again, as everyone’s mother has told them again and again whenever they are getting in trouble, it’s more about how you’re saying it rather than what you say, and things normally get garbled when the grit comes in.
Mick Jagger may have been known to push his voice to get that signature growl, and it was a lot harder to understand Robert Plant when he got into his upper register, but when metal came out, it was all over. Most people tuned out the minute that they heard Ozzy Osbourne start shouting on Black Sabbath albums, but listening to James Hetfield, any casual rock and roll fan started to have second glances when looking through some of Metallica’s first major blockbuster songs.
Because, let’s face it: Hetfield never claimed to be a great singer. There needed to be words in the song, and while Hetfield was willing to bear the brunt of that problem, that didn’t mean he was Freddie Mercury or anything. And when his diction was put to the test on ‘Enter Sandman’, a survey concluded that Hetfield had one of the most misunderstood lyrics of all time on his classic hit, with 70% of listeners getting the lyrics wrong.
Then again, it’s not like Hetfield didn’t have competition, either. There are artists like Kurt Cobain who wrote the most abstract lyrics of all time, and even when Michael Stipe stepped up to the microphone on the first few REM albums, it was clear that he was simply making words up to fill out the rest of the melody.
But in Hetfield’s case, it actually works a lot better for the mood of the piece. Every metal band has to have either a growler or a screamer that can pull off those soaring notes, and while Hetfield is by no means a screamer, hearing him embrace his inner caveman whenever he sings is much better than the alternative. Otherwise, we get the twang-y version of Hetfield on songs like ‘Mama Said’, and while those are great in their own way, it’s clear that they didn’t go over well with the Metallica faithful during the Load era.
But so what if people couldn’t understand what Hetfield was saying on their classic hit? Metal was destined to be music that was made for the outsiders that didn’t fit into mainstream society, and while most people would be horrified to hear that their songs were taken in a different way by their fans, people getting upset about not understanding Metallica is something that the hardcore fans would wear like a badge of honour.
