In the same year that Fetty Wap introduced his "Trap Queen" to his stove, an indie girl also introduced us to her kitchen. Even though the short-form video platform Vine is long gone, the impact of that six-second video by user Chrish is still being felt to this day across pop music — especially on this side of the border.
Calgary pop sensation Tate McRae released her third album, So Close to What, last month, and it has proceeded to make her the first Canadian woman to top the Billboard 200 albums chart in the 2020s. Despite the chart success, online discourse around the project has been pretty consistently split: while many on social media are impressed ("just punched herself a ticket out of the khia asylum," they're saying), others are frustrated by McRae's cursive singing.
A decade on from Billie Eilish debuting with "Ocean Eyes" — and two decades since CocoRosie — the highly divisive "indie voice" trend is still running rampant. Nine years after 12-year-old foremost ukulele girl Grace VanderWaal auditioned for America's Got Talent, mainstream pop is still trying to compare avocadies to bananies.
The stylistic choice to sing with "elongated vowels, clipped consonants and run-on phrasing," as musicologist Nate Sloan has put it, refuses to die. After initially making their debut as a nervous teenager covering blink-182 in the middle of a mall in 2013, Halsey is still going strong, while Olivia Rodrigo has been holding down the fort for Gen Z's new class of pop goils.
"Cursive singing is ornate, but not about swagger or braggadocio. It's an encouraging whisper, or an introvert's take on originality," reads a comprehensive dialectic dissection of the practice from a 2021 Ace Linguist blog post, which goes on to propose that the oft-memed "indie voice" behaves as other vocal styles do: as "a way to communicate something to the audience and to signal group membership." Further, they claim most singers aren't usually aware of the style they're singing in, adopting and switching unconsciously.
This unconscious bias might have something to do with Canadian roots. Sure, cursive singing's long, diverse history covers numerous parts of the world — my colleague is convinced Icelandic Björk was the impetus; others theorize Amy Winehouse as the British source code, while Australian pop star Tones and I is a top late-2010s offender — but the part about introverted originality and signalling group membership certainly harkens to a play many Canadian artists looking to cross over into the larger US market have to make.
After entering the public eye with a 2016 appearance on So You Think You Can Dance, McRae burst onto the music scene (beyond her YouTube channel) with the 2020 single "you broke me first," a wistful mumble-pop number that's not exactly danceable. It was the 2023 single "greedy" from the pop star's sophomore album Think Later that became her career's TSN Turning Point: a bouncy, beat-driven empowerment anthem about putting a cocky dude in his place.
McRae has said in interviews that she felt the need to embody an alter-ego of sorts when writing the assertive song — which won Single of the Year at the 2024 JUNO Awards — with OneRepublic's Ryan Tedder. Ace Linguist's observations about signalling group membership with cursive singing certainly seems to fit the bill, with the artist's true breakthrough coming from having leaned into confident Britney Spears cosplay to match her prowess on the dance floor.
Which group is she trying to signal her belonging to, though? Well, first we can rule out Canadiana: much of Canadian national identity is built on virtue-signalling (sorry aboot it) to identify ourselves as better and nicer than the US, which feels especially potent amidst this needless trade war. That being said, there are so many examples of Canadian cursive singers: Jessie Reyez and Alessia Cara each embodied the style on their mid-2010s breakout hits ("Figures" and "Here," respectively), while Charlotte Cardin proves indie voice isn't not just for Anglophones (although, to be fair, most of her songs are in English) with her ever-growing success.
Shawn Mendes is one of the men who have very successfully adopted the feminized style, as well as grandson, the solo project of Jordan Benjamin — who was born in Englewood, NJ, but spent most of his childhood in Toronto and did his undergraduate studies in Montreal before relocating to Los Angeles. But do any of these artists stand out as being Canadian in the nondenominational sea of popular music?
No, no they don't — and that's the point. None of these acts, least of all McRae, have a sense of personality or cultural context that comes across in their music that might make their nationality identifiable to the untrained ear. (No, wearing hockey pads on an album cover doesn't count.)
And maybe there's no way of "being Canadian" in the modern pop landscape and succeeding when you've identified yourself as an outsider from the mainstream market south of the border. Cultural commentator Liz Duff has argued that McRae's CanCon radio reference points are why certain American critics don't "get" her, but it's actually the inverse; people get her because she's been homogenized beyond being recognizably Canadian.
"She's serving but there's nothing on the plate," a comment on a viral Twitter post with a clip of McRae dancing in her "Revolving door" music video reads, perhaps incisively noting that there's a lack of substance behind the cursive singing mask. While I've always disliked the term "flowery language," this vocal style seems to be a vocal equivalent to the way using fancy words to make something sound nice can expose an inherent lack of meaning in the expression. In a vibe-based economy of niche, mood-befitting Spotify playlists, it makes sense that this is something we might be easily able to tune out when it's reduced to background music.
And many don't come to this dance-y style of pop for lyrical heft, although that's not to say that McRae's album is void of clever turns of phrase. On "Purple lace bra," a mid-tempo bop about the sexualization of her artistic persona, she delivers the punchline, "I'm losing my mind, 'cause giving you head's / The only time you think I got depth." It's a quip that could easily be taken from a less-finessed Sabrina Carpenter B-side ("Purple lace bra" was written with Carpenter's frequent collaborator, Amy Allen). It's just shy of being a cringy clunker, but there's something endearing about the willingness to go there.
Breakout single "Sports car" presents a similar scenario, where McRae refers to fucking as "uh" (or "uh-uh," if you're nasty) instead of in the more explicit terms Carpenter would certainly use. On one level, it kind of feels like a cop-out; on the other, the way she hits the syllable on the clanging, early-2000s beat is actually pretty sexy (whether that's because it gets her full onomatopoeic enunciation is neither here nor there). But the thing is, the "Sports car" chorus is essentially free of cursive singing, with McRae instead opting for whisper-spoken delivery.
"Whenever young women, who are always the innovators of vocal style and language, create a new sound — whether it's the valley girl of the 1980s or the cursive singing of the 2000s — there's always a resistance to it, right?" Sloan observed on an episode of the Switched on Pop podcast he co-hosts with songwriter Charlie Harding, noting the inherent misogyny in the general distaste for the hyper-feminized cursive style. "There's this sense that this is not the proper way to speak, because these people are not serious members of society; this represents some kind of degradation of the standards of language."
While that episode dates back to 2023, a more recent edition of Switched on Pop sees Harding and producer Reanna Cruz address "AI-generated pop star" McRae directly. Of Think Later single "exes," Harding noted that he doesn't like the song's "Y2K vibe-snatching" pastiche from an intellectual standpoint, "but when it plays, I wanna move; I love the song emotionally." They go on to suggest that, while McRae isn't the kind of artist who revolutionizes the pop playbook, she's part of an important B-team of artists who refine sounds we're already familiar with; Cruz argues that, instead of comparing her to Spears, McRae could be considered this generation's Paula Abdul.
There are plenty of arguments to be made for Canadian sounds and lyrics cropping up across our country's musical history, but mainstream pop music is one where we have historically failed to differentiate ourselves. Our pop artists with the biggest international crossover success, like Justin Bieber, fit in nicely with pre-established moulds. And consider the Weeknd, who gets increasingly popular the more he drops his vibe-y "Toronto sound" and makes Max Martin-ized pop indistinguishable from his American forebears. There's maybe another argument to be made for the critical darling Carly Rae Jepsen's failure to become a supernova being because she openly injects personality and experimentalism into her songs.
When we take into consideration 2024's Holy Trinity of Pop — Carpenter, Chappell Roan and Charli XCX — what stands out to me is that none of these songwriters are the type of nameless, faceless artists occupying vibe-based algorithmic autoplay. When you hear them, you know it, and that's because we know them. I don't mean in a parasocial stan-culture way, either: I know Charli's fearless commitment to her messy party girl-vision and innovative production style (y'all gon' jump if A.G. made it); Roan's timeless song structures, high-drama performances and outspokenness; and five-foot-nothing Carpenter's larger-than-life goofiness and randy earworms.
What I know about Tate McRae is that she's a kick-ass dancer who has found her way into some catchy songs with Tedder's hooks-everywhere approach to pop, even if the choruses often fall flat compared to the momentum established elsewhere. Aside from cursive singing, her other vocal experiments — the very 2000s whisper-chorus of "Sports car," her Ariana Grande-style switches from head to chest voice in "It's ok I'm ok" — are at least intriguing.
But at this point, maybe it's too late for McRae to drop the "indie voice" act that, with the help of a top-of-the-line team of songwriters and producers, has gotten her to fit into the larger international (or North American, anyway) pop sphere du jour; however, it's worth noting that, after years of gradually toning it down, Eilish seems to have mostly transitioned away from cursive singing on her latest album, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, so it can indeed be done!
I fear that, if McRae started singing normally, she might expose the fact that the indistinctness of her slurred syllables was getting her so close to hiding what, exactly, she lacks in originality.