Indeed, rock might be described, in its most typical forms, as overwhelmingly a ‘voice music’ - not only in its domination, culturally and texturally, by singers, but also in its takeover from African-American music of ways of treating instruments as would-be voices, a tendency often amplified by electronic technology (pitch-bends, vibrato, wah-wah, etc.). This suggests that it might be better to construe the process of desire and identity surrounding rock in terms not so much of ‘lack’ as of plenitude: drawing on the ‘dialogical’ account of semiotics and subjectivity offered by the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, we might then describe the ever-present intertextuality of rock singing - its multiple references to to other songs, other voices, a variety of vocal traditions, a range of vocalising techniques - as a symptom of a state of, so to speak, over-completion.
—
Richard Middleton, “Rock Singing” (2000)
