The celebration of Damien Chazelle's La La Land was short-lived. Multiple awards won, Oscar retracted, viewers and critics swiftly decided it was actually not that good. Ryan Gosling's character, jazz musician Sebastian, was no romantic dreamboat but like every worst date she'd ever had, according to Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman, while in London's Camden Town the gleeful dancing figures of the film's poster were parodied as Theresa May waltzing with Donald Trump under the title Lie-lie Land. Worse yet, some admitted its two stars could not sing or dance well. To be fair, they never pretended they could. Rather than the escapism offered by musical films in the mid-twentieth century, with their polished, professional performances by figures such as Gene Kelly or Carol Channing, La La Land was, for Will Brooker, a film for the age: ‘reality-show-standard song and dance routines are perfectly suited to this new era, when a mediocre business man and second-rate television celebrity can become Commander-in-Chief […] Our current culture doesn't just excuse amateurs, it elevates them to the highest roles.’Footnote ¹ The elevation of amateurism intersects with understanding the technological mediation of voice as exemplified by the two books under review, both of which deal with types that do not comply with certain conventions of technique or artistry. Jennifer Fleeger travels from late nineteenth-century fiction via films and cartoons to twenty-first-century television talent shows in search of the ‘mismatched women’ of her title – those whose voices do not synchronize convincingly with their bodies. Allison McCracken focuses on a mismatch of masculine bodies and voices through her history of the crooner, a singer who also subverted stylistic and social norms of vocal delivery.

Both Fleeger and McCracken are open about their personal motivations for their projects. McCracken acknowledges the resonance of the crooner for her childhood group of friends – ‘nascent feminist, gay, and queer-coded “theater” kids like us’ (ix). Fleeger introduces her topic by describing trying to sing her son to sleep, humming hesitantly in ‘my untrained voice’ but eventually resorting to recordings:

Guilt over maternal absence becomes central to Fleeger's definition of the ‘mismatched woman’ who is swiftly – and perplexingly – conflated with childlessness. Her first example is ‘Swedish nightingale’ Jenny Lind. Despite the spectacle of her 1850 American tour stage-managed by P. T. Barnum, Lind conveyed a purity and Christian beneficence that contradicted ‘the image and reputation of the diva’ (2).Footnote ² Before Lind, there was the similarly childless (if notoriously promiscuous) castrato, who carried ‘soprano voices in male bodies’ (2). Fleeger contends that the women she discusses in the following chapters were all household names but not ‘maternal’, which she considers to render irrelevant much of the existing literature on women's voices in film and media studies because of its dependence on psychoanalytic theory that roots the development of infant subjectivity in the connection to the mother's voice.Footnote ³ The disembodiment incurred through recordings made the ‘mismatched woman’ more culturally prevalent and significant, with each new technology – from the phonograph to the internet – bringing with it another manner of mismatch. ‘Mismatched women’, as characterized by Fleeger, need not be bound to narratives, ‘because they live to sing’; they are ‘happier singing than speaking’ and thence bound to the notion of music being non-representational; their phenomenal voice justifies the presence of ‘a complex female figure in an otherwise shallow popular culture’; however, their liminality means that they cannot play a maternal role – just as sound technologies, according to Rick Altman,Footnote ⁴ cannot really reproduce but only represent (14–17). Fleeger argues that ‘in her rise to fame, the mismatched woman offers a fantasy of female agency that reaches back to the siren's song, operating outside the realm of male desire, technological manipulation, and maternal care’ (20). By the end of the book she explains that through her case studies she has come to realize ‘how easily music conceals the real damage done to women by patriarchy, transforming their struggles into works of art through musical codes that reflect gendered social conventions’ (198). Similar feminist claims were made before in the heady days of the new musicology; Fleeger's monograph adds a fresh perspective by making those claims in tandem with a survey of audiovisual technologies.

Fleeger's approach, though, with its emphasis on psychoanalytic theory (and its concomitant anxiety about maternal voices) and on the disembodiment of recordings, seems somewhat at odds with recent musicological writings which have begun to attend more to embodiment and presence in experiences and accounts of performance.Footnote ⁵ In the early chapters particularly, the examples are familiar and thoroughly raked over. For instance, Chapter 1 focuses on George du Maurier's Trilby (1894) and Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera (1910), again swerving to assert a somewhat dubious lineage from the castrato to the nineteenth-century female soprano.Footnote ⁶ Chapters 2 and 3 deal with early film, the former comparing Metropolitan Opera stars Geraldine Farrar and Marion Talley. Farrar is said to have successfully managed the migration from stage to screen in her film debut in Cecil B. DeMille's Carmen (1915) because her operatic gestures could convey her absent voice (if one was not provided off-screen in the cinema). Talley was more problematic in that, while her wholesome, youthful image was attractive, her voice as reproduced on the new technology of the Vitaphone was found inadequate. Although her career continued into the late 1930s, according to Fleeger, ‘A mismatched Marion Talley was a remnant of an earlier time, reminding listeners of what the machine couldn't fix’ (74). Part of the problem for both singers, apparently, was their relationship to motherhood – although they were close to their own mothers, they either disowned their babies (Talley) or seemingly preferred dogs (Farrar) (76–7). The ‘mismatched woman’, in Fleeger's formulation, cannot (be seen to) bear children because then ‘her peculiar combination of body and voice makes sense’ (75). It might be more productive to situate these figures more fully in the social and political context of woman's suffrage and, indeed, a much longer history of professional female singers having to cultivate an acceptable public image.Footnote ⁷

Talley made way for Deanna Durbin, another star whose youthfulness was stressed to divert attention from the ‘mismatch’ of her operatic voice. And from there Fleeger moves on to Disney princesses, who she divides into three periods according to their vocal style and animation technique. Heroines from the first wave, from Snow White (1937) to Sleeping Beauty (1959), were hand-drawn and sang operatically. The second wave began thirty years later with the computer-aided colour of The Little Mermaid (1989) and heroines who belted as if they were on Broadway. The current, third wave has been characterized by ‘3D computer animation and pop vocalization’: Fleeger reveals that she is writing just as Frozen has been released, in 2013. The ‘exceptional voice’ reflects the values of its era: the failure of body and voice to cohere enables the Disney princess to ‘follow in her mismatched predecessor's footsteps and escape technology's grasp, and in so doing become worthy of our daughters’ imitative play’ (108). The casting of pop singer Mandy Moore in Tangled (2010) prompts a discussion of celebrity voices in animated film: Fleeger argues that they can make the characters seem more real and human, even if we know that the pop concert, these days, is rarely truly ‘live’ (132–3). It is here that we begin to move towards the discourse of authenticity associated with untrained voices, as manifest in Fleeger's last two chapters, the first of which is on the ‘natural voice’ of American radio and television host Kate Smith, who used song to present a persona that did not necessarily match her personal situation (she was childless but thought of as maternal; sang songs of romantic longing but did not physically fit the media stereotype of the heroine). Then, finally, comes Susan Boyle, winner of Britain's Got Talent in 2009. Boyle's ‘amateur status’ was highlighted, according to Fleeger, by the way in which her slot was shot, with negative comments prefacing her astounding performance of ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ from Les Misérables. The television editing ‘suggests that there is an implicit argument taking place between Boyle, who is assuring the judges that she knows what she's doing, and the camera, which wants to make it appear that she's never done this before’ (171). Ultimately, it was the notion that Boyle was an anti-celebrity, to whom singing came naturally, which allowed her to be seen as ‘a potential star’ (174). Fleeger goes on to discuss the manner in which the internet has facilitated these kinds of ‘mismatched’ performers becoming ‘viral sensations’; another track that might have been pursued was whether the popularity of talent shows encouraged the casting of not-really-singing actors in films such as Les Misérables (dir. Tom Hooper, 2012) or the aforementioned La La Land.

Fleeger's volume provides access to sound files through an Oxford University Press website and perhaps for that reason tends to hold back from describing the sonic qualities of the voices under discussion. McCracken's Real Men Don't Sing does not offer a similar link but the author is willing to engage with the sound of the voices about which she is writing, which helps the reader hear with more of a historically attuned ear. McCracken also benefits from a tighter historical focus – her purview is 1925 to 1934 – and a firmer command of archival sources and theoretical frameworks.

According to McCracken, crooners transformed popular music by initiating the dominance of the microphone. Their song-delivery style thereby bridged

Against their sincerity, crooners also questioned modes of masculinity. Rudy Vallée is discussed in depth as one of the first bandleaders to have succeeded on the radio rather than in live concerts (although through his popularity as a broadcaster his shows also attracted crowds). He devised a kind of music different from his contemporaries in that it nurtured emotional engagement: his dances were slow; his lyrics spoke to middle- and working-class audiences; and his voice, though nasal with a marked New England accent, ‘registered as clear, unaffected, and unforced to his listeners, especially an audience accustomed to classically trained radio voices and the vaudevillian's projection and variety of heavier accents’ (140). Vallée's use of vibrato was also considered to give his voice a ‘personal touch’ – as McCracken notes, it evoked beloved classical tenors ‘yet his lack of training marked his delivery as more sincere, intimate, and modern’ (140). His broadcasts encouraged private listening, not because they were associated with domestic spaces but because they were listened to from a personal perspective (141).

Unlike Fleeger, and in keeping with more recent scholarship on radio audiences, which grants listeners an agency greater than they hitherto have been accorded, McCracken uses reception history to enrich and nuance her readings. Vallée's appeal to men and women is dissected and, in so doing, McCracken explicates how attitudes towards masculinity shifted during the period. Men could admit to liking (American) football and Vallée, even if they were hesitant to write the singer fan mail (‘I'm no love-sick sheik, having been married several years, as a wife and two kids will prove, but when you sing “If You Were the Only Girl in the World” I'm certainly glad I bought a radio’, one confessed). Women wrote more letters and were more explicit that they found in the thrill of Vallée's voice ‘a catalyst for heterosexual lovemaking but also an alternative object of desire and pleasure’ (153). McCracken observes Vallée's song titles repeatedly use the words love and you as well as first-person pronouns. The singer's willingness to adopt a feminine perspective, which was not unusual for the 1920s, became more contentious in the next decade. The film adaptation of Rian James's novel Crooner (1932), according to McCracken, rewrote the story of Vallée's rise to fame by presenting ‘the crooner as an antihero and a victim of exploitation who must prove his masculinity’ (247). The audience is depicted as consisting of ‘fluttering females’ but there was no need for their men to be concerned: the singer's appeal was asexual. In Crooner the antihero proves his masculinity by growing up – he gets married, stops singing and starts managing younger talent: the ‘mismatch’ of the male singer, unlike the women with which Fleeger was concerned, is shown to be ‘just a phase’ (248).

With the crooner under attack, the film industry needed to find a male singer who made ‘an acceptable leading man, a star, and a romantic crooner’ (265). McCracken argues in her final chapter that they found their man in Bing Crosby: unusually, a baritone, and importantly, in this pre-cardigan phase of his career, a playboy. Although previous commentators on Crosby have presented him as irrepressibly masculine, McCracken points out that he too was ‘charged with effeminacy’ in the early 1930s; it was through changing his vocal style to sound more ‘assured, detached, and relaxed’ and some cannily chosen slapstick film appearances that he was able to assert a ‘more masculine’ image (267). By 1934, she claims, Crosby had completely dissociated himself from the ‘toxic term that crooning had become’ (268). Particular song genres and performance practices were being tied to race, class, and gender, with queer and non-white identities being marginalized during the Depression-era focus on the sufferings of the common (white, heterosexual) man. The invention of the directional microphone meant that singers sounded substantially different from their predecessors, leading, McCracken concludes, to ‘a new definition of “natural” singing that has largely persisted – unacknowledged – to this day’ (269).

Crosby is distinguished from other crooners by McCracken as follows:

It is this careful accounting of Crosby's vocal performance – one of several similar passages in the book – that enables McCracken to make her larger claims about the trajectory towards ‘natural’ singing or about the crooner's social standing. The introduction of the Hollywood Production Code in 1934, she writes, ‘shut the door, decisively, on the kinds of fluid gender and sexual expressions that had been common in American popular culture for decades’ (298). High-pitched male voices were deliberately censored and Crosby became the acceptable masculine crooner; even, eventually, ‘“America's supreme musical patriarch”’ (Will Friedwald, quoted on 303).

In her conclusion, McCracken offers a broad historical sweep of attitudes towards male vocal performance, from Frank Sinatra through David Cassidy and Justin Bieber to Glee, American Idol, and The Voice. The latter's ‘blind auditions’ – through which coaches could be surprised by a contestant's race or gender – gradually made it clear that ‘the “freak” singer was in fact not uncommon at all but simply representative of a diverse, porous American vocal culture otherwise rarely acknowledged on a national mass-media platform’ (330). It is similar territory to where Fleeger ends Mismatched Women, but McCracken allows for voices to be studied as something – whisper it into the microphone – that need not always be freakish. Or, at least, admits that being freakish, when it comes to the way voices are conceived and theorized, is entirely normal. So why not have Ryan Gosling sing?