Can this be described as “singing”?

“Where people sing, you can rest easy. Bad people have no songs.” This centuries-old proverb, still in common use in Germany today, conjures up images of well-behaved souls pairing romanticverse with sweet, pleasing melodies. It was coined long before thrash metal bands began roaring about impending apocalypse, life in hell or the critical condition of their livers. 

German bands such as Kreator, Sodom and Tankard demonstrate impressively that harmony theory and conventional singing are entirely counterproductive in this context: what matters instead is expressive growling, shouting and screaming. As is typical in Germany, even this guttural demonic roaring comes with a carefully structured pedagogical training programme and even a certificate. 

Rap in raw rhetorical style

German rap, too, raises fresh questions about what singing actually is – often in settings that resemble police incident reports straight out of urban hotspots rather than conjuring up places of peace and quiet. Portrayed complete with all the darker sides of his biography in a successful Netflix documentary, German rapper Haftbefehl delivers lyrics oscillating between gangster mythology, drug excess and brutally direct street semantics, for example. His music doesn’t really involve a lot of singing, but the rapping is so intense that the message gets through even if you only catch every other word. 

When echoes ring out from the mountains

Then there is yodelling, largely untainted in terms of content – freshly elevated to intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO and in Bavaria as self-evident as wearing lederhosen. Technically demanding, aesthetically challenging, it can be uplifting or deeply unsettling, depending on your acoustic sensibilities Germany’s world-famous “yodelling diploma”, invented decades ago by the comedian Loriot, already showed that this vocal rodeo technique can actually be learned in a meaningful way. 

And in a model display of intercultural connection, the Germany-based “Japanese yodeller” Takeo Ischi proves with Asian charm that you don’t have to come from the Alps to scale the highest peaks of this very particular vocal art. 

There is no doubt: “singing” is whatever your vocal cords can produce. You just need to be careful about where you choose to “rest easy”.