Lyrical Tic

Heeeaay! That's a James Brown lyric. He wrote that shit! He's writing a song and, "I need a word in here... Heeeaay! That's good!"

— Eddie Murphy, from his 1983 stage show Delirious

A Lyrical Tic is an odd, toss-in sound found in a song that a particular singer or a band seems to make in a whole lot of their songs. Sometimes when they're used, it seems the singer is just being enthusiastic and so makes some sort of "Whoo Hoo" or "Yeah!". Other times, Lyrical Tic is used in "Oh crap, I've forgotten the next line" moments. Whether the use of a nonsenical, random sound rather than an actual lyric makes a song better, or breaks the rhythm and the mood, is a matter of opinion.

A musical variant of Verbal Tic. See also Scatting.

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Examples:

Rock

• Steven Tyler of Aerosmith seems to favor the "Weeeaooows".
• Aimee Mann is fond of tossing the word "baby" into her songs at random.
• Win Butler of Arcade Fire is fond of spontaneous, often very high-pitched, 'WOOO!'s. While they at first sound like a marker for more up-tempo songs, toned-down whoops appear even in slower songs like 'Neighbourhood #4 (7 Kettles)'.
• Ash are fond of the "woah"s and "ooh"s and a lot of their lyrics refer to space, stars or the galaxy. For example Sometimes ("Saturn's decline in the star sign, seasonal adjustments stars realign"), Shining Light ("A constellation once seen, over Royal David's City"), Angel Interceptor ("Angel Interceptor, Apollo 21, Uri Gagarin, flew into the sun") and "Jack Names The Planets".
• Awolnation (a.k.a Aaron Bruno) enjoys randomly screaming "Yeah!" or "Hey!" between verses, the beginning of the song 'Soul Wars' being a prime example.
• The early The Beatles were fond of "Whoo!", in imitation of Little Richard.
  • Yeah yeah yeah!
• Stuart Adamson of Big Country would often shout "HUP!" "HA!" and "SHA!" in the middle of songs.
• Billy Idol is rather fond of "ow!"
• Buddy Holly had the glottal stop, as in "We-eh-ell, the little things you say and do, make me want to be with you-uh-oo."
• John McCrea from Cake says "all right" somewhere in nearly every song. Often extended to "Aw! Yeah! All right!". There's also the occasional "Yah!", shouted as though he were cracking a whip.
• Damo Suzuki of Can loves manic yelling and high pitched shrieks. He sounds particularly deranged on "Peking O" and "Soup". He also did a James Brown-esque "uh!" at the start of "Halleluwah".
• You could almost always tell when Ric Ocasek was singing lead on any Cars song, especially on Heartbeat City; listen for an "uh-oh."
• Ian Astbury of The Cult is quite fond of ending lyric lines with "Well..." Example from "Sun King": "I was thinking, what I've been missing/I'll tell you truthfully, well..."
• The Cure's Robert Smith seems particulary fond of making meowing noises in a number of their songs, mostly the upbeat tracks such as 'Lovecats' and 'Mint Car'.
• David Lee Roth has many, including "OH YEEEAAAH" and "woo!".
  • He's enough of a Large Ham to make long phrases like "I ain't lyin' to ya!" and "I'm gonna tell you one time!" work like this. In multiple songs. To say nothing of the infamous "GODDAMMIT BABY I AIN'T LYIN' TO YA, I'M ONLY GONNA TELL YOU ONE TIMEEEEEAAAAAAAYEEAAAAAHHH" in "Runnin' With the Devil."
• In the case of Evanescence Amy Lee uses AH AH AH rather a lot on their 2011 album.
• Mark E. Smith of The Fall (Band) is known for adding an "-ah" at the end of lines in a way similar to the Mike Doughty example above. It's not quite after every line, and generally seems to be his way of emphasizing certain lyrics. It's particularly rampant in "Repetition" - "Ah-we dig-ah, Ah-we dig-ah repetition-ah!".
  • British comedians Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer labelled this The Club Singer Style after inept singers in Northern working mens' clubs, and took it to a particularly incoherent extreme on their Shooting Stars spoof game show.
• Jeno Ringler, vocalist for Isle of Q, ended almost every single line with a descending grunt. "I'm not part of your little scene-ugh!"
• Japan's ridiculous debut album Adolescent Sex has David Sylvian saying "whoa babe" and "dancing" a lot.
• Jerry Lee Lewis would often substitute the word "me" in lyrics with "Jerry Lee", i.e. "If you see Corrina, send her on home to Jerry Lee..."
• Joan Jett is a serious abuser of this trope- nearly every one of her songs includes her "OW!". Earlier songs from her time in the Runaways include a lot of moaning and sex noises.
• The Kaiser Chiefs seem to like going, "Wooooaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!"
• Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant had his easily recognizable array of wails and high-pitched screams, along with his randomly inserted "Oh baby"'s.
• The Misfits have been fond of various "Whoa's" and "Oh's" in all incarnations.
• Isaac Brock from Modest Mouse has "Well!"
• Finding a song by The Offspring in which singer Dexter Holland doesn't shout "woah" or "yeah" is like finding a needle in a haystack. Only there is no needle and the haystack lied to you.
• Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam makes quite a variety of sounds, the most common are probably "Mmmm", "Unh-huh" and "Oooooo".
• Sting seems to have a thing for stretching out the coda of songs with "ee-oh"'s. See, for instance, "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic", "Walking On the Moon" or "Message In a Bottle" when performed live. Probably related are the two "eh-ey-ohh"'s he sings at the beginning of "Synchronicity II".
• Regina Spektor goes "tsk-tsk" to the beat of the music a lot. It's often accompanied by snapping.
• Michael Stipe would often go 'ho''ooh' or 'whoa' in the early R.E.M. songs, for instance in "Harborcoat" and "Just A Touch". He would often stretch these noises over the melody for harmony purposes. Another one, which he still does, is shout some of the words in a particular line rather than sing them (for instance in "Just A Touch" and "Discoverer").
• Roy Orbison's signature cat growl. "Rrawrr!" In the liner notes for a song in which it was sampled, it was referred to as "the Mercy growl". Guess his other (less frequently used) tic.
• Say Anything...'s lead singer Max Bemis tends to use "woah!" as a filler — played with in the song "Woe".
• Spiritualized's J. Spaceman's "Come on!"
• Mike Doughty of Soul Coughing almost always pronounces an additional vowel at the ends of words which end stanzas. It's rather unusual at first, but eventually, you can't imagine Soul Coughing music without it.
  When you were languishing in rooms I build to file you in-uhh
  And when the wind set down in funnel-form and pulled you in-uhh
  • And he still does this in all of his solo material. It is definitely unique, that's for sure.
• Less so in later years, but on System of a Down's first album, Serj Tankian was notorious for this. The song DDevil is a good example.
• Tendon Levey has his "HELL!" and "HEH!".
• Tom Waits often interjects his more percussive songs with a guttural "Hah!"
• Bono likes his "ohhhhhhh"s.
• The Used's Bert McCracken often makes "mm"s "pow"s and "chk-chkow"s, some of which are reminiscent of Michael Jackson.

Pop

• Bob Dylan is fond of starting out lyric lines with "Well,..."
• Beyoncé trills her notes. A lot. You can sometimes pick her songs out of a crowd just on the basis of this Lyrical Tic.
• Christina Aguilera throws Woo Hoo's, Hoo woow's, aha's and WOOOH into her tracks!
• Delta Goodrem, as of 2007, when in doubt, put an AH/EH in there; Waiting For Forever, Dancing With A Broken Heart, Angels In The Room, One Day, Sitting On Top Of the World, Touch and You Will Only Break My Heart.
• Imogen Heap was rather fond of "Da da ooooom" in her early years. It seems to have carried on in the Frou Frou cover of Holding Out for a Hero and in Speak For Yourself's Loose Ends, albeit with the "oom" changed to "dum" and with more "da da".
• Lady Gaga likes stuttering syllables in whatever phrase is the hook - "puh-puh-puh-poker face", "stop telephoning me-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh", "Judas, Juda-ah-ah!", "Muh-muh-muh-marry the night"... Oh, and don't forget "Rah rah ah-ah-ah! Ro mah ro-mah-mah Gaga oh-la-la".
• Michael Jackson's "Whooo!", often accompanied by him grabbing his crotch. Also his "Eeee-hee" and "Chamone/Ja-mawn-eh!", and "Chk-uhh, chk-uhh". "Hoooooooo!" is another one; he started using with the music video for "Bad", but it didn't become a prominent non-lyric of his until The '90s.
• Michelle Branch does something similar to Soul Coughing in her song "Everywhere": "Just tell me how I got this far-uh"
• When Owl City puts Scatting in his songs, it's almost always repeated "da"s.
• The Songdrops songs, by Bryant Oden, often have "Bom", "Bum", or "Ba-dum" in between the lyrics.
• Vanessa Carlton combined trying to sound like a little girl with a crying wail on every other lyric. It doesn't help that her "Pretty Baby" is creepy in content to start with.
• There's a tic known as the involving the "wa" and "oh" sounds in 2010s pop music which has become so ubiquitous it has come to be known as the "Millennial Whoop".

Hip-Hop/Rap

• brokeNCYDE go 'bree bree', a high-pitched piggie-squeal noise, which expresses adolescent rage, presumably. This was common for Crunkcore bands when they started doing it, but they continued long after others realized how awful it was, and named their pig mascot 'Bree'.
• Chance the Rapper's use of "Igh!"
• DMX made frequent use of growls, barking, "uh!", and "come on!" in his songs.
• Eminem:
  • Slim Shady is associated with vocalised disc scratching noices, particularly "chkka-chkka" and "chk, chk", usually when entering or leaving a song. Occasionally he uses disc scratches to set up a new rhyme scheme or as rhythmic filler.
  • The incarnation of Slim Shady used on Relapse has a signature adlib where he cries "ohh!" in a plaintive way.
  • In his work in the second half of The New '10s, Eminem uses his Annoying Laugh, or "get it?", to highlight a pun he's made.
• Eve has "uh" and "shit".
• Travie McCoy of Gym Class Heroes threw a lot of "So sexy"'s in random places on the As Cruel As School Children album.
• J. Cole has a tendency to punctuate some of his lines with a quiet "huh".
• Dave Chappelle immortalized Lil' Jon's "YAA-EE-AAH!" "OKAY!" and "WHAT!"
• Matisyahu never fails to drop a "Yaiyo!" or "Yiggi yiggi yo!" or two into his songs.
• Master P is infamous for his "Frankenstein's monster groan", which he interjects into his music at seemingly random moments. He even built one song entirely around it, "Make 'Em Say Uhhhh".
• Pitbull enjoys breaking out his "wooooOOH!" at least once per song, if not multiple times, along with chuckling at his own punch lines.
  • He also loves shouting out his nicknames ("Mr. Worldwide!", "Mr. 305!") and saying "dalé" at least once every song.
• Pusha T: YUUGH!
• Redman always starts his songs (or at least his own verse when rapping on someone else's track) with one or more "Yo's".
• TechN9ne (chah!) punctuates all of his lines (chah!) with one of these at the end (chah!) outside of the chorus.
• It seems sometimes that Will Smith can't begin a song without a "Whooooo!", "Uhn!", or "Ha ha!". For that matter, he doesn't seem able to end a song without one, either.

Metal

• Celtic Frost's Tom G. Warrior's "ugh".
• Alexi Laiho of Children of Bodom likes to go "YA-YOW!" a lot.
• David Draiman of Disturbed is known for a guttural, animal-like sort of growl/scream, which opened 'Down With the Sickness', Perfect Insanity and 'Stricken', among others. This is often rendered as 'O-wa-wa-a' or 'Uwawawa' or something similar in text.
• Parodied on Homestar Runner, where Strong Bad claims that one of the keys to being a Death Metal band is putting a lot of words beginning with "de" in your lyrics, like "decay", "decrepit", and "delouse".
• James Hetfield is well known for ending phrases with "-AH!" "All Nightmare Long" has this hilarious line at the end of the chorus: "But your luck! runs! out-AH!" He's also well known for "Yeaah-aaah!" and the occasional "Go!" as a new riff or portion of a song kicks in.
  • He is also fond of "Yeah!" or "Yeah-eah!". Someone actually took the time to compile all of them.
• Zac de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine loves to shout "UGH!" both in the studio and onstage.
• Till Lindemann of German band Rammstein usually rolls his R's. Also, when he sings "ach", it sounds like a growl.
• Ronnie James Dio was fond of "Lookout!"
• Corey Taylor of Slipknot is quite fond of muttering "huh..." between lyrics or at the beginning of a verse. He also tended to pant heavily into the mic from the force of screaming so harshly. This can be heard in songs such as "Eyeless" and the outro of "The Blister Exists."
• Stray From The Path's Drew York does this a lot with "Bleagh".

Goth

• Emilie Autumn likes rolling her Rs. She also has her voice break intentionally a lot (like in "Liar" and "If I Burn"), usually when transitioning from normal singing to Careful with That Axe. (the voice break is a sign that she's going to scream at some point)

Country

• Keith Urban has one that sounds like a mix between "ooo" and "mmm". He also likes to ad-lib variants on "yes, you did" a lot.
• Although the members of Rascal Flatts only write a small portion of their own songs, lead singer Gary LeVox is fond of ending every song on a bunch of "yeah"s and "ooh"s, often in falsetto.
• Shania Twain is famous for her gratuitous "woo!" and "uh uh" noises.
• Wynonna Judd uses a lot of "Uhn" in her songs, and sometimes actually ''hisses" in her songs. No, really, she hisses. Like a snake.

R&B/Soul

• Boyz II Men had a sound shared with many black male R&B groups of the time, "Nayhooooo!"
• Immature had "Yeyeh".
• James Brown may very well be the Most Triumphant Example of this trope. He was famous for going "ow!". He was also famous for variations of "Hunh!", "Heh!", "Whoa", "Ooh", and (as noted in the page quote), "Hey!"
  • A short-lived Twitmeme, "Radio 4 Minus One Letter", defined "From Our Ow Correspondent" as "a series of reports from across the world delivered by our reporters, interspersed with their impressions of James Brown".
  • The original version of the prank known as "blasting" involves driving up behind an unsuspecting pedestrian, cranking the stereo to full volume and playing the "ow" from the beginning of "I Feel Good".
• Little Richard loved his "Whooooooh!"s and "Ah Hoooooooo!"s.
• Van Morrison has a whole vocabulary of expressively soulful grunts, moans and vocal expressions for when the words fail him. A classic would be the conclusion of Moondance
  In the moonlight! On a magic night.. (presses microphone into fleshy underside of chin) Brrrrr...brrr-mmmmmm,ahhh,aahhhh, (moves mic back to more conventional singing position) In the moonlight! Can - I - just - have - one - more - Moondance - with - you....... my love.....

Jazz/Blues

• Bobby "Blue" Bland's phlegm-filled "YOW!", which he called an "eagle snort".
• Bing Crosby's "bubuhbaboom".
• Legendary actor/singer Benjamin "Scatman" Crothers got his nickname ("Scatman") because of this trope. He'd toss in nonsense sounds and "Hey, man"s into every song he sang. A lot of the sounds he made duplicated the music being played behind his vocals, a technique known in jazz as "Scatting".
• Ella Fitzgerald was also well known for scatting.
• Texas bluesman Joe "Guitar" Hughes often interjects "Ouchie baby" into his songs.
• Jazz musician Phil Harris had a habit of tossing in the occasional "Oh", "Hey", "Tell me" and "Yeah, man" on every song he sang. Like the aforementioned Scatman Crothers, he would also make sounds that mimicked the music that was backing him (like going "ba-pa-pa-pa-ba-dah" to accompany a trumpet flourish). When he and Scatman Crothers duetted on "Everybody Wants to Be a Cat" (from the Disney film The Aristocats), its a veritable garden of throw-it-in sounds and Scatting.
  • 4 years earlier, Harris and Louis Prima did a similar "scatting duel" on "I Wanna Be Like You" from The Jungle Book (1967).

Classical

• Glenn Gould was a classical pianist who involuntarily hummed along to the music. On many of his recordings, his humming is audible; many critics complained that it ruined many otherwise fine performances.
  • Maurizio Pollini has done the same thing.
  • Keith Jarrett fits too, with added grunting.

Latin

• A rare example of this happening with a band that mostly played instrumentals. Latin-jazz bandleader Perez Prado was known for two of these: "¡Dílo!" (Say it!), usually shouted just before the horns break in; and "¡AaaaaaaAAAHH!" The latter was left in as a sample when Lou Bega set lyrics to Prado's "Mambo No.5".
• Brazilian singer Samuel Rosa, from the band Skank, is an expert in Scatting. His most repeated one is "Ehhhhh!".

Reggae

• Bob Marley had many, mostly involving Scatting, repeating words, saying "oooh yeah", "well" and "whoa". A good example is "So Much Things To Say" from Exodus, which starts off laid back and quickly gets out of time because he's trying to fit so many words and noises into each line.
• Shaggy: "SHAGGY!"

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