Free History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs by Greil Marcus

line — in the old sense of the word, where to worry something, a singer with a fragment of a song, a writer with a sentence, a child with a nail or a piece of wood for a toy, was to move something back and forth, up and down, until it gave up its true meaning, or even, as singing, revealed that the singer would never reach that final truth, but dramatizing how close he or she came—was erased by its fraud.
    Worrying also meant just that—that you could hear the singer worrying that he or she would not be able to get across what he or she was trying to say, that the singer would fail notonly him or herself, but the listener and the song. Otis Redding pushed it farthest: in “Try a Little Tenderness,” “These Arms of Mine,” and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” worrying a line dramatized a contract between the singer, the song, and the listener.
    The contract was that each would give what they had; that each would try, the singer speaking as he or she sang, the song speaking as it was sung, the listener speaking as he or she listened, to mean what they said. You could imagine, as you listened, that as the singer changed the song, the song changed the singer, and you could imagine that both would change you. Nothing would be left the same.
    Some forms of music spark the freedom of singers to say, in words or how words are sung, in pace, hesitation, timbre, shouts, or silences, what they most deeply and desperately want to say; other forms take it away. The essence of melisma after soul music was captured in a comment by the presidential historian Rick Perlstein, writing about how, in the 2012 campaign, for Mitt Romney a lie, hundreds upon catalogued hundreds, in all forms, in all tones of voice, the tiniest adding credence to the most profound, had changed from a mere political trick into a form of discourse, from a short con into, in Perlstein’s words, a long con, the rules of which were understood equally by both speaker and audience. “It’s time,” Perlstein said, “to consider whether Romney’s fluidity with the truth is, in fact, a feature and not abug: a constituent part of his appeal to conservatives. The point here is not just that he lies when he says conservative things, even if he believes something different in his heart of hearts—but that lying is what makes you sound the way a conservative is supposed to sound, in pretty much the same way that curlicuing all around the note makes you sound like a contestant on American Idol is supposed to sound.” Curlicuing around the note allows a singer to mimic the sense of event in soul music, the sense that something is happening which has not happened before and cannot be repeated, by mimicking the apprehension of soul, those moments when singers dramatize their struggle to bring out of themselves what lies buried in them, inaccessible, until this moment, even to themselves. As worrying is mimicked into melisma, it is also, behind the curtain of the effect, in a lie no one who tells it will ever admit to, satirized. What was once a sign of meaning what you said is transformed into a device by which singers communicate that they don’t. Perhaps reaching its limit with Jennifer Hudson’s performance of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” to open the inaugural ball, with Barack and Michelle Obama beaming, or trying to keep a straight face, music shifts from a means by which one can signify that one is not faking emotional commitment to a means by which one can signify that one is. It goes back to gospel, both the technique and the soul. As the singer must convince you that as he or she sings, he orshe has, by a commitment God can recognize, called down a visitation, then the tradition in which Beyoncé works is not merely bad music, but a form of blasphemy—though, unlike the outrage among devout African-Americans when Ray Charles or Sam Cooke or even Aretha Franklin used the gospel sound to sing about not God’s love but that of men and women