Barthes: Hozier and Dylan

(I think this is the right video below.  Due to copyright issues, the video I want to attach isn't coming up.)

“‘Grain’ - the singing voice is not the breath but indeed that materiality of the body emerging from the throat, a site where the phonic material hardens and takes shape.”

“This voice is not personal: it expresses nothing about the singer, about his soul; it is not original and at the same time it is individual: it enables us to hear a body which of course, has no public identity, no ‘personality’.”

“I will not judge a performance according to the rules of interpretation, the constraints of style...I shall not go into ecstasy over the ‘rigor,’ the ‘brilliance,’ the ‘warmth,’ the ‘respect for the score,’ etc., but according to the image of the body (the figure) which is given me...I know immediately which part of the body it is that plays...If on the contrary it is the only erotic part of a pianist’s body: the pads of the fingers, whose “grain” I hear so rarely....If we were to succeed in refining a certain ‘aesthetic’ of musical enjoyment, we should doubtless attach less importance to the tremendous break in tonality which modernity has produced.”

Upon listening to the first song, “To Be Alone”, the corporeality of the singer’s voice begins to emerge within the listener’s mind.  This voice brings about an assemblage of adjectives within the mind in an attempt to define the voice’s tone, timbre, and individuality.  This voice develops its own identity and personage that gives way to the development of a being that simultaneously contains an anonymity (if the artist were not pictured) and a familiarity.  This voice however can’t be deemed original or individual despite a seemingly unprocessed authenticity.  While listening to the second song, “In My Time of Dyin’”, we hear a likeness in the voice of Dylan as well as the voice of the guitar.  In both, we find the eroticism Barthes speaks of coming through the fingertips of each artist, and the grain is seen to have a feeling of spontaneity and imperfection - leaving us to wonder if each song is replicated perfectly each time they’re played.  The second song (which was released in 1962 as opposed to the 2014 release of the first) although comparable to “To Be Alone”, has much less of the perfect tonality that Barthes refers to within modern music.  The breaking and strain of the second voice contains a rough grain that the first lacks due to the first’s refinement that holds a sort of purity and precision.