The isolation track is not, judging by my research, a stable ontological category. Even if we climb down the ladder of abstraction a rung or two to the “vocals only” subcategory, there’s still some ambiguity (regarding, specifically, what the word only means). Take this “vocals only” version of Boston’s “More than a Feeling,” which includes some backing vocals, the occasional guitar lick, and lots of clapping. I admit, it would be a shame to shed these bedraggled, surviving elements just for the sake of acapella purity: the guitar, in particular, seems like an ancillary vocalization, and the clapping just rules*.
YouTube doesn’t always know what these are either; the top search result** for “isolation track” is a video of 12-year-old Australian guitar-child prodigy, Taj Farrant, playing tremolo-heavy House-of-Blues-style jam-sesh whatnot (popular with his peers, I’m sure) against a backing track. Skillful and spirited, he looks like he was kidnapped by the ghost of dearly departed bluesman Stevie Ray Vaughn, with his skinny dreads and black flat-brim hat. Evidently, he signed a recording deal after “appear[ances] on Australia’s Got [at least some] Talent and The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” His is likely some of the only blues that Ellen has ever heard***. I wish him well, but this is not what I’m looking for.
Mark Merrell’s 471-video playlist of “isolated musical tracks,” however, is just the ticket****. It is an embarrassment of riches. Take Bon Jovi, for example. You’ve probably heard his “Livin’ on a Prayer” many, many times***** but likely have no idea how completely insane his vocal scaling is until you can savor it in the pristine clearing of a voice-only recording. When Jon Bon really lets loose, it’s spill-your-drink alarming. The comment subfields are full of wonder at his erstwhile analogue feats and morning over his shot voice, which was evidently ground to a mediocre pulp by this kind ostentation.
The “Enter Sandman” vocal track, like the Boston one lauded above, features dashes of complementary instrumentation—muted backup vocals, occasional (hilarious) guitar****** flourishes, and some kind of rhythmic tisking. The funniest part is when even the haphazard accompaniments freeze for twenty seconds or so and then the spoken prayer (“Now I Lay Me down to Sleep”), which alternates, with some overlap, the voice of a young boy and Hetfield’s own malicious-to-bored recitation, begins. It sounds as shockingly out of place here as it does not in the standard version. In any case, the prayer is soon blasted offstage by Hetfield’s hammy, sultry/menacing metal lullaby, “Hush little baby...,” that is fundamentally confused in its appeals. Is he being mean, comforting, seductive? Kind of all and none, maybe. Would you be able to glean this corny weirdness amidst all the fuzzy distortion of the complete track? Possibly, but it’s much clearer and dumber here.
The gold standard “vocals only” track is Van Halen’s “Runnin’ with the Devil.” Here’s how it starts:
David Lee Roth: “Hooo!...Oh-Agwaragharr Ye-es! [fingers snapping] Yeah-he-yam-ee-yam! Hhhowhhyyjahhheh!...................High lifve my life like there’s…Nooooo Two-Morrooooow!”
And it keeps getting better from there.
David Lee Roth was in his early 20s when he recorded this song, but his voice is that of a much older man, oscillating between conspiratorial smokiness and train whistle key changes. His swagger is robust, to the point of lunacy, combining weirdly un-rock elements, like the Vegas stage show, with a poor unconflicted white man’s version of Little Richard. All of this was, originally, set against the amphetamine spider-strumming of Eddie Van Halen’s lewd and zany lead guitar and the band’s harmonic backup vocals. Freed from all the early pop metal apparatus, however, Roth comes off as the wildest kind of interloper, a madman in a sequined suit, trailed by a dancing chorus, howling out fifteen minutes of hallucinatory cocktail tunes before Wayne Newton takes the stage. And yet, we remember, he was a hard-rock icon, at the cultural epicenter of a decade of grandiose front men and foolish guitars.
What’s the worst iso track I’ve ever heard? Hard to say. The acapella version of Nickelback’s “Photograph” is tough to beat. The vocals are doused with equal parts sincerity and strain—it is the tone, I imagine, of a guy proposing marriage while trying to push through a dam of a constipation. The voice-only recording of Five Finger Death Punch’s “Over and Under” is up there. The guitar-only cut of Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life” highlights the worst part of the worst of all average songs and so freights a special, dreary horror. Nu Metal and turn of the century alt rock are both reliably nauseating, so it’s no surprise these genres would make for the very worst iso tracks.
The thing is, though, even when I settle in for some hate-listens, it’s not long before delight takes the wheel. Isos reward the listener’s patience in unexpected ways. Songs with long instrumental intros, especially, lull you into complacency or even task-specific amnesia. Then a voice erupts, out of the void, and knocks you backward, like an exploding cigar, with a mixture of shock and joy.
Isos defamiliarize inescapable radio mainstays and our favorite hits alike by showing us the surprising but unnoticed nature of their component parts. You might not even know that your favorite singer really can’t sing or that a seemingly unassuming bassline is the deranged doodling of a largely unnoticed but resentful background vandal longing to break free until you hear those things on their own. I could not think or type while listening to the, little did I know, busybody nonsense of John Paul Jones’ bassline to Led Zepplin’s “Ramble On,” a song that in its entirety sounds like a bland summer vacation anthem for 15-year-olds. But when the rest is stripped away, what remains is a motor-fingered bouncy house of sound that treats your eardrums like a speedbag. Who knew*******?
The Internet’s not all bad. Back when I was growing up, if you didn’t know the lyrics to a song, you had to guess, or find someone who actually knew (some people have an ear for this stuff; I never did). Even if you owned the C.D., they didn’t all come with liner notes, and chances are you were thinking of a song you didn’t own, something you heard eight times a day on MTV. Same thing with movies. It took a village to find out, like, who the EPA guy was in Ghostbusters. You had to ask around, find someone who owned it********, or hope it was somewhere in your friend’s dad’s copy of Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide. The Internet is narrowly perfect for stuff like that, looking up song lyrics and movie credits, and a few other things, isolation track videos being one of them. They feature that auspicious blend of celebration and critique, through light-touch creative sampling, that’s ideal for glancing semi-personal, semi-public encounters on social-media platforms. They’re roughhewn and at times indifferent to generic parameters, which only increases their populist charm.
I know well-meaning normal people sometimes make these just because they think the acapella version is cool or beautiful, but that’s not what I’m interested in at all. Instead, I love how the original corporate architecture of a top-40 tune is wobbled by the isolation process and how the music that’s colonized us finally sounds new after years and years of sounding anything but.
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*Especially since it conjures images of recording session clapping takes, and one wonders, of course, how long this went on. Did the Boston guys nail it in just one shot? Did Brad Delp keep screwing it up by losing the beat? Do session players handle the clapping detail?
**Algorithmically tuned for “Relevance.”
***Some facile Internet research shows that she had at least one other early adolescent blues guitarist, Toby Lee, on her show as well.
****And it contains much of what I’ll praise in ensuing paragraphs.
*****Just the other night, I heard my mother-in-law’s neighbor clatter home from the bar, singing it brokenly when she heard it on the radio, which, incidentally, she leaves on for hours at a time when she’s not home, presumably for the sake of her lonely dog.
******The guitar work here seems like it was written specifically for all their teenage fans who would badly cover it, in that it is indistinguishable from bad cover music itself.
*******Musicians, probably.
********I only had Ghostbusters II.