I’m asking this just out of curiosity. Feel free to mock me about it in comments.
Here’s my question. When I listen to popular music, I almost never hear a foreign accent. I hear accents perfectly well in ordinary speech, but not when the words are sung. With occasional exceptions, when I listen to U2, Adele, Abba, or Keith Urban, I don’t hear Irish, British, Swedish, or Australian accents. To me, the lyrics mostly sound pretty close to my own familiar California accent.
So….is this because popular foreign singers deliberately adopt an American accent? Is it due to some inherent property of slow, melodic speech? Is it because my hearing is defective?
There are exceptions, of course. The Beatles all had such distinctive Liverpool accents that I usually recognize it in their singing. Beyond that, I don’t really listen to enough music to have much sense of how common this is, especially outside of the top 40 realm. Anyone know what the deal is here?
