The Beatles – A Hard Day’s Night

The Stooges – TV Eye

Geraldine Fibbers – Get Thee Gone

Price – Kiss

First things first: go listen to “A Hard Day’s Night” and get about 1:18 into the song, and notice the scream. It comes right before they launch into the solo, and oh, it’s a thing of beauty. But it’s also a weird bit, from today’s perspective. For one thing, it reminds you that the Beatles, for all their seeming bubblegumness, were regarded as reckless musical troublemakers at the time, because they did things like scream in the middle of songs, even if that had been a rock ‘n’ roll staple for 6 or 7 years. But this just doesn’t usually strike us as a scream, partially because it’s being used as a transition (as opposed to your traditional drum fill or scratchy-move on the low E string or melodic pickup transition), and partially–and this is the important bit–because it’s a happy scream. And oh dear me, isn’t it? It’s an absolute whoop, a yawp, a yell of joy, of oh-man-I-just-got-to-the-end-of-the-chorus-and-what-a-fucking-chorus-it-is-holy-shit-I-just-have-to-yell! And it’s (I think) Paul and John screaming at the same time, as they’re backing away from the mic into that great, tumbling solo. But it doesn’t sound like a scream to us anymore, because screams aren’t supposed to be happy.

Viz: “TV Eye,” the opening scream of which does the descending “into the abyss!” thing that psychadelia likes, this from the Stooges’ most psychadelic album, Fun House. Don’t get me wrong–it’s a great scream, and a great song. But it’s a long way removed from the Beatles’ scream. And at the time, that was probably good; the dark turn pop took after the sixties was a useful thing. But the problem is, it’s never gone back. The Iggy-scream is still the scream of choice for most of your discerning lead vocalists in the last twenty years, as are the little yelps that the big opener leads into.

A slightly different variation can be found in one of the best songs from one of my favorite bands, the Geraldine Fibbers. The scream here is not placed at the forefront, but rather under a song, much like how feedback went from “whoa that’s a cool squeal, let’s mic it real loud” to “hey, that would be a neat drone to put behind a song.” Carla can often be found bansheeing away behind a particularly good section of vocals (“Dragon Lady”) or instrumentals (“Get Thee Gone”), presaging and, if you ask me, beating the whole screamo thing to the punch by quite a few years. One article (which I can’t seem to find) even focused in a pretty convincing way on the scream Carla lays over the 2nd-half instrumental break of “Get Thee Gone,” which is a wonderful piece of ecstacy-rock, but here’s it’s scream-as-epiphany or response to the power of the music, rather than the exuberance and joy of the performer, like you might find in a soul or early R&B record. (There’s not a whole lot of happy Geraldine Fibbers songs anyway, but that’s OK.)

I won’t even dignify scream-as-expression-of-pain by classifying it, but suffice to say that unless you’ve got a gaping bullet wound at the time you’re recording your vocals, it’s probably a bit too literalized.

The garage-rock revivalists do a half-hearted version of the Beatle-yawp, but it comes out “Ow!” which is half-cribbed from Axl Rose anyway (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and misses the full-throated exuberance of the “AAAAAAHHHHHH!” you hear at 1:18 in “Hard Day’s Night.” It’s not cuttin’ it, fellers.

Maybe the closest thing we have in modern times to that yell is Prince, whose myriad Tourettic outbursts seem of a one with the exuberant music, and seem drawn out of him in much the same way the Beatles’ were. And there’s that same sense of joy mixed with being a little at the end of your rope–the Beatles with exhaustion, Prince with horniness (Prince seems like he’s been through some hard day’s nights himself, if you know what I mean). But especially you hear this in “Kiss,” at 3:28, where after tensing and building and stroking for a good amount of time he just utterly loses control of his voice as it screeches to the absolute top of his range to yell something like “AIN’T NO PARRAAGHHHUURRAL RRRRAG, grr-AM grr-AGATA WITH!!!” because the music’s just that goddamn good, that exuberant and joyful, that there was no other choice at that moment than to have a verbal fit and yell it like someone who just doesn’t give a shit about being composed or cool anymore. And then, beautifully, it comes all the way back down. Now that’s a joycore yell.