When Lauren Elkin was a child, she took lessons with a voice teacher in Northport, Long Island, who would get her to perform in front of a mirror. Singing songs from the Italian classical repertoire, Elkin – who was a soprano – was required to smile and lift up her eyebrows as she sang since “it helps with placement”. She was told her breathing should come not from the chest but the diaphragm, and that she must smooth over the vocal break, which is where the chest voice changes into the head voice.
Elkin practised hard to make her voice “nearly featureless”, even though she secretly wanted to rebel. Looking back, she wishes she’d 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.”
In Vocal Break, Elkin examines the female voice in all its forms and with all its imperfections. Using the singers who have shaped or moved her – Cyndi Lauper, Cynthia Erivo, Tori Amos, Beyoncé, X-Ray Spex’s Poly Styrene, Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna and more – she examines the rules and expectations foisted on female vocalists and the ways they have fought against them.
Why is Elkin, a London-dwelling French-American translator and author of Flâneuse and Art Monsters, the person to tackle this? Because, she writes, “I am essentially not a writer. I’m a musician who got into writing.” Though her book is not strictly a memoir, Elkin mines her past as she examines singers and singing through the lens of her own musical passions, both as a practitioner and listener. She digs into notions of self-image, coolness, integrity and authenticity, the constrictions of genre and the implications of changing trends in pop music and musical theatre on the voice. She ponders the history of the vocoder and the current vogue for Auto-Tune: though she declares herself “Auto-Tune sceptical”, she is won over by Charli xcx’s tech-assisted delivery on 2024’s era-defining 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 Elkin’s 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 wrapped up in power and identity. For millennia, they have been sidelined, silenced and held to a different standard to men. Even today, they are criticised for being too loud, too quiet, too bolshie, too timid. Such judgments on voice and volume are by no means reserved for singers. Women who speak in public, in particular politicians, are subject to similar criticisms – often called shrill if they dare to speak with passion. There’s a reason Margaret Thatcher used a vocal coach to help her lower her voice and add a veneer of seriousness and authority.
Elkin is skilled at rendering the subtle textures of sound on the page. She observes 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”.
Vocal Break is also the product of copious research, taking in Roland Barthes’s The Grain of the Voice, Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces and Homer’s Odyssey. Surprising facts surface, such as the French phrase for when a person sings along to a song in a language they don’t know: chanter en yaourt, or “to sing in yoghurt”. Readers may flinch at the businessman and music publisher Guillaume Biro’s account of Édith Piaf singing live at the Olympia in 1956, which goes some way beyond the customary five-star rating: “An unimaginable pleasure burns into my temples and my heart is beating to bursting point,” he enthuses. “I literally explode in an orgasm like I’ve never experienced before, which leaves me prostrate in my seat.”
Elkin offers no grand thesis on the female voice beyond that women’s vocal styles are rich and varied, subject to undue manipulation and criticism and generally underserved by the music business. All true, if not necessarily surprising. Less widely acknowledged is the physical violence women have endured for daring to sing and be themselves on stage. The Slits’ Ari Up was stabbed twice – “People didn’t know whether to fuck us or kill us,” said the band’s guitarist Viv Albertine – while Tori Amos was raped after a show by a man who demanded she sing hymns for him. In Afghanistan, women are not only outlawed from singing in public, they are forbidden from making their voices heard outside the home.
At the core of this book is not just sharp analysis but a deep appreciation for singing and how it represents expression and freedom. “I think more people should be singing,” Elkin notes. “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.”