Switched on Pop - A Brief History of Men Singing Really High

Episode Date: October 15, 2019

Men singing high is so ubiquitous in modern pop that we might take it granted, never pausing to ask: has it always been this way? Estelle Caswell, who makes the Emmy-winning Earworm series for Vox, decided to find out, and she stops by to share results from her painstaking study of male falsetto in pop music from 1958 to today. Some of her findings may surprise, like 1996 was the peak year for falsetto, Justin Timberlake doesn't sing as you high at might think, and falsetto has been around as long as pop itself.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switch on Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And with Charlie Harding out on parental leave, we are bringing in some of our favorite musical thinkers onto the show to cover his absence. And today, I am so excited to be joined by one of my favorite people in the world of music. It's Estelle Caswell. Estelle, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. I really appreciate being on. Estelle, you are the, I can say this now. You're the Emmy-winning producer, writer, creator, creator of the Vox series Earworm that you can find on YouTube. It is annoyingly, I'm watching your videos, and I'm like, I wish I had done that. It's really good. It's the greatest form of flattery, for sure. And, you know, we're actually going to dig a little deeper into one of your,

recent episodes. What subject are we discussing today, Estelle? Today we are talking about probably my very, well, now very public obsession, but was for a very long time secret obsession of any moment in a song where a guy just like hits really high notes. Is there an artist right now that you feel like really exemplifies this style of high male singing? Yeah, well, I kind of want to start this conversation off by admitting something, which is that I'm a poother. Whoa. If you know what a poother is, we're friends. Do you know? Yeah, I'm really moved that you feel comfortable sharing your story with us here in this space.

I'm very shy about it, but I'm just going to put it out there, so I don't feel so ashamed. If I'm going to be totally honest, I've poothed myself before, too. I mean, I dabble. I dabble in Puth. I wouldn't say, I don't know if I'm a Poother, but yeah, I get Puth now and that. We're talking about Charlie Puth, by the way. Oh, right. Yeah, sorry, just to clarify that. If nobody picked up on that. I don't think it's very sure what his fans are called, but perhaps Puther is the best term to use here. Yeah, let's hope so, because I really don't want to stop saying it. I'm going to tell you why I'm a fan of Charlie Puth. First of all, I do want to mention, like, all good pop stars, he has a great Instagram. So if you follow him on Instagram, you can actually, like, get a lot of insight into his musical prize. because he produces a lot of his own work, and he shares a lot of that process.

So this is a G. There's a G. And here's a C sharp. Here's an F sharp. Here's a B. Here's an F. Here's a B flat. Here's an E.

And one thing that I realized kind of following him is how often he sings in falsetto. He literally uses that as his vocal technique. And I started thinking about how many other of his contemporaries do that. Sean Mendez, Justin Bieber, Sam Smith. I mean, literally you could rattle off every single pop star, listen to their music, their biggest hits, and realize the most sort of poignant or exciting or hooky moments of those songs

are them just like hitting high notes. So I figured maybe we should start with an example of a Charlie Puth song that's very recent. He just released it that shows exactly what I'm talking about. I'm so ready. And that's I Warned Myself. So what do you think about that, Nate? I'm so glad you play this. This is like dictionary definition falsetto.

I think the first thing that you just feel is like this sense of giddiness almost. It's just, it's really, it gives me this like little. Thrill to hear it. Well, it's like contrasting Charlie Puth's singing voice with your deep, like, baritone talking voice is a very good example of how high he can go. It's like a great contrast. Yeah. Can you sing that high, Nate? Can I sing?

I want myself. Oh, wow. That was like a mini-ripperton style whistle. That was way more impressive that I could have expected. That means a lot to me. That means a lot to me. Ordinarily, I just have to accept that I'm more of a Barry White than a prince. But, I mean, I'm not sad about that.

Sorry, what were we talking about? Charlie Puth, falsetto. Exactly. I mean, I think, like, if you look back at his album voice notes last year, which did really, really well, it's not just this one song that we heard where he does this. It's like his go-to vocal technique. And sometimes he goes low in certain parts of the same.

song, but for the most part, he's singing in a really high register, and more often than that, he's actually singing in falsetto, which will get to the definition of a falsetto, but he's doing that. And what's kind of interesting to me is that he's not a unique voice. All of his contemporaries are doing this as well. And when I kind of like started getting obsessed with, and this is where my obsession turned into like just actual hard manual labor, is that I noticed this and a lot of music I was listening to on the radio, like, over the last couple of years. And I started thinking, like, is there a way to quantify how much falsetto exists in pop music rather than just sort of talk about it anecdotally?

So I actually did that, which was a very hard process. I'm sure this is one of those things where you're like, oh, yeah, how it's kind of can be? It's just like a high voice that should be easy to track. And then the second you start to actually figure it out, you're like, oh, wait, this is a lot more complicated than I thought. It ended up being incredibly challenging, but for this episode of Switched on Pop, what I'm going to do is sort of try to take you on a very long journey of men singing really high all the way back to the first billboard charts. And what we're going to do is go decade by decade and break apart some really key songs that illustrate how pervasive the falsetto is. I am so down. Let's go.

All right. The first thing I kind of want to talk about is just like the process of digging into a huge amount of songs. And what we found was that like out of all the streaming services, you know, Spotify, title, Apple Music, Amazon, whatever, that Pandora had an actual project dedicated to quantifying music and putting qualitative data to it. But doing it in a way that was like very manual. So they had actual people listening to music, and they would have like a rubric in front of them and score certain things like falsetto and vocal register and like 400 other characteristics. And this ended up being called The Music Genome Project. It's been around for about a decade.

And over that decade, I think they've scored about 2 million songs. Whoa. And what they provided us very nicely was a spreadsheet of all of the songs that they have in their database that has a falsetto score. Huh. And not only that, but like a man singing and like sort of telling us different things about this song that we could actually chart and see over time, see a chronology. And essentially what we did was we got this database, which I think they handed over about

47,000 songs, so a lot more than what was on the billboard charts. Like there was a song that we got that was a yodeler from like 1911. and they had a falsetto score dedicated to this song. Obviously, unfortunately, that yodeler, his name was George. He did not chart on the Billboard Hot 100. It didn't exist. So he was erased from our data set. Sorry, George.

Yeah. So what we did was we cross-referenced that data set against the data set we had that was just the Billboard Hot 100 songs. and found what is our final data set, which is, I think it was around like 20,000 songs or so, and charted that literally from 1958 to the summer of 2019. The second I saw this chart, I was like, wow, this is incredible, because it was exactly what I wanted. And so what I'm going to sort of do is describe what has happened over time with men singing high and talk about the songs and the ways that these songs have evolved

and been influenced by each other over time till the point where we have an artist like Charlie Puth who's very comfortable singing high and we almost come to expect him singing high because this is a technique that's ingrained in our psyche by like listening to music for the last 60 years on the radio. Fascinating. The first thing that I want to do is talk about what falsetto is.

So Nate, do you have any sort of definition in your head of what a falsetto is? Yeah, that's a great question. I feel like it's one of those things I instinctually know. I'm like, oh, that's falsetto. To me, it seems like singing beyond your normal range as a vocalist, singing in a place in your voice where you don't have the full power of your diaphragm, maybe.

You're sort of like pushing and finding something that's more in what singers call their head voice. So it might not have the same power as like. a big note in the middle of your vocal range, but it has that unmistakable, high, wispy tone to it. I think you hit the nail on the head there. That's like a perfect definition. I think a lot of people will immediately think of the Bee Gees, staying alive. It sounds like they're singing in falsetto the whole time and they are. And so it's just a matter of like describing what they're doing.

Right. And defining it as falsetto. Because I'm thinking there's a difference between. someone who just has a really high voice, like the operatic counter-tenor Philip Josowski or something, who is singing in maybe the same register as Charlie Puth, but he's not using falsetto. He's just using his normal range, which happens to be really high. The whole point of falsetto is that it's beyond your normal range and has this particular tone. Yeah, exactly. And I think even a lot of countertenors would say that a lot of the time,

they're just so comfortable singing in falsetto and they have such a control over their falsetto that it sounds more natural, perhaps, but that they are singing in falsetto quite a lot of the time. And this is where things get very, very blurry and gray, because depending on what vocal coach you talk to or what sort of school of vocal teaching you adhere to, there might be varying definitions of these terms. But I think in pop music, what we're accustomed to hearing as falsetto is like sort of that breathy, light, airy, high-pitched sound coming specifically from a male singer. The stand alive is like, it might sound really punchy and good because they've perfected it or they've like, they've learned how to do it very well. But it could also sound like Charlie Puth just going like,

kind of that breathy, high-pitched voice. And I think that's what falsetto is. It's like kind of that breathy, high sound. If you sing in falsetto, you'll immediately feel it, like, transfer from your chest and, like, I guess what you would call your modal voice, to straining a lot of your head and you can feel your voice coming from your head rather than your chest. Interesting.

We don't talk anymore. We don't talk anymore. We don't talk anymore. We don't talk anymore. We don't talk anymore. I could feel it. Between the last one and the second to last one, I had to leap to another place to the falsetto place in my voice.

Exactly. And like yodeling where your voice, like you actually hear the voice break, shows the difference. Like you're singing in your chest voice, and then it sort of like breaks, and you kind of hear that break happen and yodeling. I'm just taking every description you give as a direction. I hope that's okay.

No, this is perfect. I want these all as a ringtone. Switched on pop ringtones by Nate Sloan. So that differs, of course, from like a high vocal register, which Pandora also scores. One very clear example of a high vocal register versus falsetto is like guns and roses. Because they're kind of just like singing really high, but it's still a powerful, clear, crisp sound. It's not that sort of sensual falsetto. that you might associate with like R&B or slow jams or something like that.

So where we're at right now is I have this data set of 47,000 songs. I've culled it down to just songs that have charted on the Billboard Hot 100. So that's like, you know, hundreds of weeks from 1958 to 2019. And what I've done is sort of looked through that spreadsheet and looked at how they were scored. songs like the Jonas Brothers Sucker got a falsetto score of a six and a register score of nine. And in my head, that makes a lot of sense because those songs are really high. What I wanted to do was sort of chart songs and see how many examples of that high falsetto score and a high register score actually exist over time and see where it was just like an explosion of popularity as a millennial who mostly started.

listening to the radio and then the late 90s and really listens a lot to, you know, Spotify and the charts and things like that. I feel like today we are in this sort of golden age of singing really high and that it's such an asset to a male vocalist to be able to do this. And in fact, if you're singing high in a song, you're likely to succeed. Obviously, there are other variables here like production and all these things. But singing high is like a huge indication. of success. And so what I wanted to do is, like, see if there were any other decades where this was such a trend. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova, and I'm hosting a new

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They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. And so I want first, Nate, to see if you can make some predictions of where you think perhaps a high falsetto score would really be pervasive and maybe separate vocal register from that. So like where you think singers were singing really high, but perhaps not falsetto. And we're tracking from 1958 to the present here. Exactly.

I'm going to guess early in that period. We're not going to see a lot of falsetto still in the late 50s, early 60s, still the age of what you might call the crooner, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Bing Crosby. These kind of singers come to mind, these sort of like baritones or low tenors. Maybe as you get into the later 60s with the rise of soul music, like earlier we were talking about the Bee Gees, maybe some disco is causing the male voice to rise. then maybe it drops back down in the 80s and the 90s before cresting into the current golden age that we're talking about. Okay, so I'm going to say 70s is a peak and like 2000s to 2010 is a peak. But that's a wild guess.

I mean, it's a wild guess, but you're right on the money. The first decade we're going to talk about is the 60s because we don't want to forget about the 60s. There are some great examples of falsetto. But once we get to the 70s, it's like you can throw a rock anywhere and you'll hit a male singer. You'll hit a, you know, a record executive's office

like forcing all of their singers to sing in falsetto. That's just the way it was. But let's start with the 1960s because I think perhaps the great example here is the Beach Boys who perfected

those like really beautiful rich crisp harmonizations and the song I get around was a huge hit and has a falsetto score of an 8 and a register score of a 9. Yes. I think people naturally, you know, sing along to the main singer there because they can't harmonize,

like they can't reach those high notes in the background vocals. Yeah, that is a, that's a stretch, yeah. It's a stretch, but you're good at it, and now you're just showing off, Nate. I am. I could do the low part. Round, round, get around. I get around. I get around. I get around. I'm a one-man band. What can I say? I'm the beach boy. I feel like you can make a viral YouTube video of you're just singing the beach boys in different little boxes like the Brady Bunch. And eventually you'll get to those high notes and actually nail it. Just going to pitch that as an idea for you.

I know. I just, I don't want to be recognized. I don't want people coming up to me saying like, oh, do your one-man. Beach Boy viral video. It's just I can't live that life, Estelle. I can't. I need to protect my anonymity. Very proactive of you. Yeah. So we've got the Beach Boys, which I think I would call that like the classic 60s falsetto. Like it's just kind of the sound that you immediately recognize as a very, it's timeless, but it's classic and it's very much of the 1960s. It didn't really like go anywhere else. There is a song, though, that feels very dated to me, and it's like, you'll immediately hear the technique, and maybe you know what it is. I maybe want to just, like, trace the origin of this. Well, maybe I'll just, like, play it. It's bread and butter by the new beats, and we'll

talk about exactly what we're going to hear. Let's take a listen. Wow. Have you heard this song? No, I need to hear it more, but no, I've never heard it. This was like a huge hit in 1964. And I don't think like people who didn't live in the 1960s really know this song. Like for me, it's not a classic that I can recall as a 60s song. It's like really weird. It's weird. Which is a nice reminder because you like, you listen to a lot of pop today and you're like,

God, pop music today is so, you know, so weird and out there. And then you listen back and you're like, oh, no, pop music was always weird and out there. It's just we don't maybe remember. Yeah, they really fell through the cracks there. And this episode of Switched-on Pop is really about pulling those long-lost falsetto songs back into the conversation and just appreciating them for what they are. Yeah. The final one from the 1960s that I want to talk about because I think it did influence a lot more artists to come is the impressions and their song Keep on Pushing. That's just like sweet.

That's just like sweet. That's just awesome. Yeah, this one I know, this is the vocal trio led by Curtis Mayfield. Wow, this just holds up so well by contrast. And I never thought about it. It represents a very different approach to falsetto, more of a soul falsetto, less of a do-op kind of jokey falsetto or something. Yeah, that's interesting.

And you can hear this technique of falsetto in pop music today through like a very specific thread through 1970s disco, which we're going to talk about, and soul and funk, and then New Jack Swing and R&B and Neo-Soul. All of these artists from the 1960s on are in some way like pulling this type of falsetto into their music. and interpreting it in their own ways. Think about that falsetto as we talk about these other decades,

because I think you'll hear it in the next few songs. The first one that we're going to talk about in the 1970s, because 1975 in particular was like the biggest year for falsetto. It was like highly likely that you would have falsetto in your song, and most songs, like 20% of songs in 19, that were sung by a man in the top 10, we're using a lot of falsetto. So this is like kind of a outlier year, but the whole decade in particular, because of the emergence of disco and soul and even funk, you've got these vocal groups from the 1960s

turning into these really big like Earthwind and Fire and the Ohio players and Eddie Kendricks who came from the Temptations going off solo and like making his fall. falsetto really a very influential part of the decade. So we're going to talk about a couple of songs in the 1970s. The first one is in every single wedding from today all the way back probably to the 1970s, which is got to give it up by Marvin Gay. It's perfect. It has a falsetto score of eight and a register score of nine.

Dang. Yeah, that seems like the right score. That is much high, yeah. I think what I like about this falsetto out of all. of them is how effortless it sounds. It's like he's just sort of casually walking down the street and just singing and... Just floating. Yeah, it's floating.

And only Marvin Gay and maybe a few other people can pull that off and make it sounds like super manly, but like super high at the same time. So that's like the mid-70s, which is like the hot spot for falsetto and music. The next one that I want to play has an even higher score. It's a falsetto score of 9, which is very, very rare in this data set. I had never heard this song, actually, until I did this research. And I can't tell you how much I love it. And I've been listening to it nonstop since I heard it for the first time.

This is Natural High by Bloodstone. Natural High. Amazing. What do you think of that, Nate? That is stratospheric. Natural High by Blood. I've never heard this. I'm into it.

Wow, so the 70s were in every possible way it was the highest decade. Yes. People were getting high all over the place. Yeah, and I think a lot of people think of disco and their immediate reaction is Saturday Night Fever and the Bee Gees. And I think what's important to think about is how many artists the BeeGs used as inspiration to get up to that number one spot and to sort of become the go. to reference for the 1970s era of disco. But in fact, there are dozens of vocal groups, particularly black vocal groups,

that came from the 1960s and the 70s, that were, like, doing this for a very long time and doing it really, really well. And I think what happened is the BeeGs were like, I got to compete against those people. And what I found actually, like, I try to figure out at what point where the BeeGs, like, we need to sing in falsetto,

we need to, like, change this technique up a little bit. Yeah. And, you know, they're a group that existed from the late 60s on, and a lot of their music before 1975, before the mid-70s, there wasn't a lot of falsetto in it. If you listen to a lot of their earlier music, it doesn't sound like staying alive at all. It wasn't until, like, 1975 and 1976 where they, like, almost flipped 180 and were just like, we need to use our falsetto voice, and they did it, and it worked. Listen to the Bee Gees Discography, and you'll hear that switch right around 1975. Huh. So we're going to switch to vocal register because that's a slightly different vocal technique.

And what I found was that in the 1980s, vocal register was for the most part how men were singing really high. So they were just singing in their chest voice area. It was a little bit more crisp, less floaty, less Marvin Gay-like, and more Guns N'Roses, Prince. type of high singing. The first song I want to talk about is Kiss by Prince. It does have a falsetto score of an 8, but it has a register score of a 10. And this one, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah, this is such a touchstone for modern falsetto.

If you're like Charlie Puth, Justin Timberlake, Jason Derulo, what is the Rosetta Stone of falsetto? I feel like they would point you to this song. This is the prince walked so they could run. Exactly. So no genre really illustrates that more than hard rock and heavy metal. And sweet child of mind by guns and roses is the perfect example of that, which has a falsetto score of only a two. There is not a lot of falsetto in this song, but the register score is a 10. And I think hearing this against all of those falsetto songs, you'll really hear the difference.

I love this because not only does it remind me that there is this whole genre of high singing that I don't think about, which is hard rock, hair metal, glam metal. Now we're getting into the details of the distinction between falsetto and high register. So we want to be careful here. Right. Axel Rose is not singing falsetto, but yes, he is singing very high in general. He literally breaks the register scale, basically, but very little falsetto in the song. at all, as rated by Pandora. And the last song that I want to talk about is one that I think perhaps maybe fell through

the cracks in the 1980s. It wasn't like a huge hit, but I think it does represent what Prince might be doing and what other artists that are a bit more gender bending or androgynous or talking a lot more about gender presentation are doing. And that's Bronsky Beats Small Town Boy. This is like a gay anthem, starting in the 1980s. This is a song literally about being gay. And I think male singers who are gay sort of exploit their falsetto,

maybe perhaps in ways that are different than an Axel Rose. And so I want to highlight this song in particular because it does such a great job of representing what I'm talking about here. So do you know the artist Sylvester? Oh, the high-n-n-r-G disco artist Sylvester. I kind of like equate his style of singing a falsetto, which he's like really famous for, to what Bronsky Beat is doing. They're kind of looped into the same category of LGBTQ artists talking about gender. They're talking about their sexual orientation.

Their voice represents that feeling in some ways. Prince did it and a lot of his music. And I think carrying on through the decades that might get lost a little bit. So we're in the 1980s. I want to talk about what shifted because I have these two charts in front of me. I can describe them, which is that it sort of peaks in the 1970s and 80s. And then there's just this huge dip downward. What do you think happened to Nate?

It's very obvious. If you get it wrong, you're not just kidding. What do you think? Oh, gosh. Okay, 1990s. I'm thinking singers, songwriters, and I'm thinking, oh, hip hop. Yep, that's exactly it. So hip hop obviously, like, emerges in the 80s, but really, like, becomes a huge cultural moment in 1990.

And almost from 1990 till today, it's dominated the charts. And so what I've saw in my data after, like, charting falsetto and vocal register, is that in both data sets, It's just like a huge slope downward. And that was really surprising to me because I thought, well, at the very least, there would still be some consistency. There would be some leveling out. But it really, like, just tanked. And so I wanted to figure out a way to consider that in the story. We created a toggle for singing.

So whether a song has singing or not kind of defines whether a song is hip hop or not. we also created a couple of other things like did this song make it in the top 10? Was this song like actually a huge song versus like landed on the billboard charts for one day and one week in one year? Was this a song that charted for a really long time or was it kind of just like one of those songs that are lost in time? And what I found was that the second I turned on the top 10 switch and the singing switch that in In fact, 1996 was one of the biggest years for falsetto, even compared to the 1970s. Whoa. Yeah. Twist. And a lot of that had to do with the emergence of Neo Soul. So the song that I want to play to represent this trend in the 1990s is Me and Those Dream

and Eyes by DeAngelo. Hmm. DeAngelo, what can I say? I mean, this guy is an icon of mine. And this is, he's the reason I wanted to be, like, to be able to sing falsetto. That voice is, words fail, Estelle. But it is perhaps a nice reminder that even in this, like, 90s falsetto desert, we still have artists like DiAngelo who are not only using the style,

but I think really innovating it and sort of taking it to whole new levels. And if you listen to DeAngelo next to. Curtis Mayfield or Marvin Gay or Bloodstone, their voices sound very similar. And that's literally the reason it's called Neo-Soul is that DiAngelo is sort of bringing back this style of music and modernizing it and making it feel really current. To me, it still sounds current. It still sounds timeless. And I think that's a really, really amazing achievement, not just in his ability to, you know, just like write a really good song, but sing. singing voices and especially in pop music can sound really dated. And his in the 1990s, I think,

still, like, packs a punch today. One song that I want to sort of counteract with that, I love it just as much, but it totally reminds me of the 90s is by Savage Garden, I knew I loved you. This has a falsetto score of five and a register score of seven. I mean, that is a 90s classic. I love this too because it's a great reminder that this falsetto technique is not something that only lives in one genre. You know, it crosses from soul to pop to rock to, I don't know, I'm sure if we brought in our scope, we would even find it in like, you know, polka and regga tone. And I'm sure it's just, I'm sure you can find it everywhere, the more we would listen. Yeah. And actually, like, one song in the 70s, I believe that.

that became sort of synonymous with reggae music was Police and Thieves by Junior Mervin. Junior Mervin, I was just going to say that. Yeah, fascinating. It's a good example of like, you know, reggae music also capitalizing on high male voices. It might not come to mind, but when you listen to a lot of that music, especially like, you know, the 1970s era of reggae, there's a lot of high voices in there. Police and Thieves is a great example. I want to march ahead to the 2000s and the 2010s, because this is, of course, the era that we're in now. And I think there are a lot of songs that show just how popular and pervasive the falsetto is from perhaps maybe the touchstone of the 2000s that everybody will point to. In my mind is Cry Me a River by Justin Timberlake.

that has a falsetto score of a six and a register score of a six, which sounds low. But when you listen to it, it's like, this is a high falsetto song. Classic. Yeah, that sounds pretty high to me. Yeah.

This is the one where I looked at the dataset and I was like, that could be higher. Like, I would give that an eight in falsetto and perhaps a tin on register. They low balled that one. Sorry, Justin, but you deserve more. The next one I want to talk about

is perhaps the song that inspired this obsession in the first place. And the reason being is it's called falsetto. And it's by the dream. And it is a great slow jam. Very repetitive. Gets the point across. Yeah. No, no doubt about that.

Yeah. So this song obviously, like, was written to accentuate the falsetto so much so. And the power of the falsetto. Like, out of all of these songs, I think this one hits you over the head with the idea that the falsetto is sexy. It's not in any way make you less of a sexual person. In fact, the falsetto will put you in the mood. It's a slow jam. It's like the perfect example of that.

I want to see if you think this is cheating. I don't think it's cheating. I think, in fact, it is visionary. and that the song that I want to talk about is I Want to Be Your Man by Roger Troutman, who is known as the lead singer of the group Zapp from the 1970s and 80s. We're going to listen to it, but he kind of cheats maybe a little bit, but I don't think it's cheating. Let's hear it. Ooh, I'm 100% on board.

This is high male singing. So what if he's got the added bonus of a talk box that's sort of, manipulating his voice into higher and higher registers, it has the same effect. It's high. It's thrilling. It's seductive. I'm absolutely going to give it to you. Thank you so much. He is sort of famous for using the talk box, which is kind of a cousin of the vocoder. And he had a custom made one that I believe was called the Golden Throat. It's kind of gross name to me. But Zapp are a group in Roger Troutman in particular who use the talk box in just the most artistic creative ways possible. And obviously that is a predecessor of what perhaps a lot of singers today use in autotune,

is that they can make their voices go as high as they want and they can pitch up their vocals, they can manipulate them in a lot of ways. And I think it's still valid. I think for me as a music listener, I just want to hear. somebody go really high. I want to hear a guy sing really high. And if they use a talk box like, you know, Justin Vernon and Bonnie Vair or Kanye West. Young Thug. Yeah, young thug. That is the way to sort of use falsetto or use a high voice in ways that we might not expect or that sound unnatural. And, you know, a falsetto in the end is an unnatural voice. So why not

use a talk box or a vocoder or auto tune to sort of push that even further. Yeah. It's a lot better than the way they used to do it in the 1600s when they turned young men into Castrati before they hit puberty. So I'll take a talk box any day over that. Definitely don't want to cut off anything in order to make somebody sing hi. Like just give them something to sing into. I'm so sorry I brought castration into this in the last two seconds of our episode. I really Charlie's always telling me, Nate, we got to get through an episode without you talking about castration. I got so close, but I just couldn't quite do it. I'm glad you held off until the very end because I think that is the perfect way to wrap this up.

It is, I will say, it shows that this is something we have always privileged in singing, these impossibly high male voices. And thankfully today, we achieve that in a more humane way. And that's something we're celebrating. Exactly. Here's to more humanity in pop music. Yes, I'll raise my coffee cup to that. All right. If you want to hear more of Estelle's work,

check out the Vox Earworm series. Sorry, the Emmy-winning Vox Earworm series. On YouTube, we'll throw up a link in our show notes. Switch on Pop is produced by Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding. Our engineer and editor is Brandon McFarland. Megan Lubin is our producer, along with Bridget Armstrong, and Liz. Nelson and Nashat Kurwa are

executive producers. We are a proud member of the Vox Media Network and you can find our podcasts anywhere that you get podcasts. How about we make a playlist of falsetto jams from this episode with Estelle and maybe send some of your favorite falsetto

tracks to us. Reach out on Twitter at Switched on Pop and we will build the ultimate compendion of men singing really, really, really high. We'll see you next week with a brand new episode and until then. Thanks. for listening.