Music in regional accents

Not all of them, by any means.

The Beatles, The Small Faces, The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Sade, The Cranberries, Blur, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, The Streets, Lily Allen, Lady Sovereign etc. etc., just to name a few. These are the ones that came into mind immediately, but there are much more, I suppose.

By the way, there are two singers whose singing accent doesn't even bear vague resemblance to their real accent.

Amy Winehouse - sings with a pronounced American accent (I don't know which one exactly as I'm not really au fait with American accents - I guess it's Southern American, though) but she's actually from Camden and speaks accordingly, with a bit of a Mockney influence here and there. Some say her real accent is fake, too. I don't know...

Lisa Stansfield - sings with a...well...probably General American accent but speaks with a very thick Northern English accent (she's from Rochdale)

I'm sure they aren't the only ones but I find the difference in their case probably the most striking.

That's a real poser...I've never ever in my entire life heard anyone sing with a pronounced Geordie accent, apart from unknown local groups, of course.

Jimmy Nail is a boarderline case in this sense...when he speaks in his songs you can detect a (not so) slight Geordie accent.

Sting is from Newcastle, too, but I don't think he sings with a Geordie accent. I'm not an expert, though...

>>It seems that almost all rock/pop music in the English-speaking world is sung in a pseudo-Southern American accent, and I was wondering if anyone could point out singers who use their own regional accents in their music.<<

I would disagree that most such individuals actually try to emulate southern NAE dialects. Rather, much of it seems to rather be more northern NAE *but* has been very often partially or fully derhoticized and generally lacks many specific features of various northern dialects such as the NCVS. The actual use of specifically southern or midland dialects seems to be more limited to Country music, even though much of that these days seems to be more just plain old pop in a midland dialect.

>>That's why I said pseudo-Southern, because a lot of singers seem to use a few features of Southern American English like /aI/ monophthongisation and (partial) non-rhoticism without using other ones like THOUGHT as [Ao], diphthongisation of lax vowels, etc. I suspect it has something to do with ease of singing, because monophtongal /aI/ can be drawn out more easily than a diphthongal one.<<

Tis true - I do hear /aI/ monophthongization in sung NAE, which I'd forgotten about. However, it does occur in non-southern NAE dialects on a more limited basis, particularly before /l/ and /w/.

Recently I've been watching the comedy series "Flight of the Conchords", about an eponymous New Zealand folk duo trying to make it in New York. Their singing accent sounds to a great extent like a rhotic North American dialect - in some cases their sung vowels sound radically different from their spoken vowels, such as their sung [E] compared to their native [I] in words like "bet" - albeit with some New Zealand influences such as maintenance of the trap-bath split, pronouncing "dance" as ["da:ns] for example.

Boss Hoss, a German country band, sings with a thick Texas accent. It cracks me up.

>>Boss Hoss, a German country band, sings with a thick Texas accent. It cracks me up. <<

I would probably almost be more amused if they made country music in German myself.

<<I would probably almost be more amused if they made country music in German myself.>>

Why not?

>>Why not?<<

My use of "almost" was more to not definitively state whether or not I really would be more amused by country music in German or country music made by Germans in a thick Texan accent.