Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

I started reading this delightful article yesterday.

most linguistic changes of this sort aren't random or arbitrary - there is usually a reason that sound changes happen, and a reason that they spread as well. The spread of "may" and "babay" doesn't seem to be caused by random innovation - it's a daisy chain of influence from disparate genres and peoples all reaching their zenith in the massive pop moment of the 90s.

I say "started" because it's long, and also because I got so excited halfway through I had to stop and do a little infodump at my lovely patient family to tell them about HAPPY-laxing (specifically in Manchester accents).

The article is impressively thorough, in both the linguistics and the music history of who sang like this (I'm sure I recognize Lefty Frizzell's name from Andrew's podcast, or at least from Andrew mentioning it. But that section of this article is reminiscent of the patient, relentless research I remember from his podcast anyway.)

The article ends by noting some lamentation or surprise (in an article I liked much less on the same topic; it was less accurate and more needlessly unkind in a standardized language ideology kind of way) that the linguistics of pop music hasn't been studied much. I would be surprised if it hadn't been actually, but I'm not surprised we don't know about it. I hope it wends its way out of academia and into public consciousness some day.