What The “Best” Singers Actually Sound Like

Every so often the world will be blessed with a truly transcendent vocal performance, like Mariah Carey at the 1992 Grammy's. On the flip side, the world will from time to time be cursed with an excruciatingly awful performance. Like, every time Mariah has sung since 2004. And then, once or twice in a generation, we get to hear what no music fan was ever meant to hear: the isolated, natural audio of someone singing. Very. Badly.

For the isolated vocals to make their way to the public used to mean only one thing. Somebody pissed off a sound technician so badly that the techie distributed the awful vocals for the express purpose of embarrassing the vocalist. I'm convinced that the reason the world got to hear Linda McCartney singing "Hey Jude" ridiculously off-key was because some sound engineer didn't like that they weren't allowed to have any non-vegan food on the premises.

Nowadays, though, when anything and everything can be uploaded to the world instantaneously and without any fear of repercussion, it's almost weird when you CAN'T find isolated vocals from any artist you might look for. With that said, here are some natural, un-filtered and isolated vocals from some of today's most popular artists. Some aren't half-bad. Others are all the way bad. You can check more out here.