A History of the Musical Stutter

There’s something beautiful about the stutter as a musical device. It can express a very human and basic feeling, like a person in a lovesick tizzy struggling to wrench words out. In the hands of deft producers, stutters are deployed to make a mini-hook out of a single syllable, extending a peak moment into a rolling eargasm. Two of the first music scenes I fell in love with, future bass and digicore, revolved around stuttering, maybe because I heard a phantom flutter of the stutter I once had as a five year old who struggled to say words that started with “s,” or maybe I’m just hooked by the way a broken word tickles the brain.

Stutters have been a feature of music for over a century—probably since the dawn of time, when homunculi were groaning staccato cavesongs—and their use has exploded as digital programs made it easier to quiver and hiccup the voice. Here’s my ode to the almost, a timeline tracing stutters back to when they were used for novelty and emphasis, before more recently becoming the basis for spasming songs that capture transhumanist fantasies and modern unease.

Described as probably “the most famous stuttering song ever” by the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, “K-K-K-Katy” was huge among American soldiers during World War I. O’Hara was from Canada but taught singing to the US Army. His subject would become a central motif of stutter songs throughout the canon: A guy so head over heels for his spellbinding Katy that his vocal cords got bunged up. While O’Hara only earned one cent per copy of the sheet music, the tune was covered far and wide.

Hooker had a stutter, and this lovestruck tale of trying to seduce a woman who already has a man was apparently made as a self-parody to play on his reputation.

Unreleased until the 1970s, it's angelic and romantic—the singer’s inability to stop loving his crush means he might stutter forever, but he doesn’t care.

Steve Wahrer hijacked hooks from two songs by The Rivingtons — "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow" and "The Bird's the Word" — for this surf rock tidal wave of degraded syllables and somersaulting jibber-jabber.

Another early stutter hit, No. 2 on the UK charts, briefly banned by the BBC because it didn’t want to offend listeners with a stutter. Roger Daltrey’s shivery delivery in this youth rebellion anthem was at least partly inspired by Hooker’s song. Their manager Kit Lambert also apparently suggested Daltrey stutter so he’d imitate a jittery British mod on speed.

Otis Redding: “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)”

Where’s the line between intentional nonsense, conceptual stuttering, and freefire methods like scatting and ad-libs? Otis Redding made this song in the wake of stuff like The Crystals and Phil Spector’s “Da Doo Ron Ron,” though it was a technique he routinely used—laying fa-fas to map where the horns should go.

Lou & co. expressed the synapse soak of shooting up “Heroin” with a sudden tempo shift. Here, sputtering verbal incontinence.

“Ch-ch-ch-changes,” Bowie sings, stammering for dramatic effect or maybe as an autological evocation of “changing,” the word becoming itself.

It’s not totally clear why Elton buh-buh-buh’d, but Bernie Taupin has said it was a perfect fit for the song’s sci-fi theme, which might’ve come to him in a dreamstate or as a byproduct of “watching Kubrick on drugs.” It’s about an imaginary band of androids, with an androgynous automaton lass named Bennie leading the charge.

Bachman-Turner Overdrive: “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet”

Originally an inside joke about Randy Bachman’s stuttering brother Gary, who was also the band’s first manager, it got added late to their third album. Randy wanted to re-record it without the stutter, but he thought it made him sound too much like Frank Sinatra, so he kept it in. The Stuttering Foundation has since recognized it as important.

This was an “exasperated” song he made while feeling like he was never going to make it big. His syllables were bunched up, shoving, impatient to finally get there.

The sound of a ticking, ch-ch-ch-ch, ready-to-pop explosive — and maybe also the catched breath or tingly tremble of sexual anticipation.

Billy Joel: “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)”

One of a slew of upcoming entries on this list that don’t seem to have a conceptual explanation for their stutters. It’s catchy and fun to sing along to.

A tribute to The Fly, this is psychobilly’s greatest stutter. A dirty, jumpy, insectile vocal line spraying syllables all over the degraded guitar and feedback.

Doug Fieger’s undulating address captures his depraved yearning for his Sharona, perfectly mirrored by Bruce Gary’s drum rhythm tripping over itself.

An elliptical and scurrying close-up on the after-effects of colonialism and xenophobia, where Joe Strummer seems to imitate the scared, halting tenor of a kid trying to speak with his absentee father, an American soldier in Vietnam.

Ian McCulloch lets the sexy freak run amok as he yelps threats of obsolescence and horny vegetable references. The stutters come before the gasps, like he’s revving up for climax.

A shiny spandex suit of a Gary Wright cover that sounds very ’80s but also ahead of its time. State-of-the-art studio trickery makes everything clear to her no-no-no-no-now, and by the track’s end, her single self disintegrates into a shock of Chakas.

Stutters spurt like the alphabet breakdancing in your ears. The twerpy beat is basically stuttering too, tweaking out with no care in the world.

Does this count as a stutter if he turned it into a gibberish word? He came up with the word first, improvising around the melody, and then reverse-engineered the song (about a crush named Sussudio) to give it meaning.

A weekslong No. 1 in the UK whose vocals come from news reports and interview dialogue. The cyborgian groove is way too cosmic for its subject matter, the trauma of the teens sent to fight in Vietnam. The track stumbles over words like “Saigon” and "destruction," mimicking a brain unable to stop replaying the horrors it witnessed.

At the time, samplers were often so rudimentary that musicians could only harvest a few seconds of audio at a time. So everything had to be stabs—very conducive to rapidfire stutters. Art of Noise were early pioneers of chop-art, making collages out of consonants and half-breaths since 1983.

A micro-hook to hook you into the hook, the swift burst of I-I-I-I-I conjures up a producer keyspamming.

Sigue Sigue Sputnik: “Love Missile F1-11”

The British’s band debut single, it’s a Moroder production that’s basically impossible to transcribe. The uncanny vocal tics throughout this track aren’t fully stutters, they’re something more inhuman and sense-defying. Martin Degville’s voice speeds and slows and billows out into a chemtrail of anti-matter.

In which stutters function as force, the staggered syllable wielded as a kind of battering ram, and also a sexed-up, moaning entreaty.

Morris Minor & The Majors: “Stutter Rap (No Sleep Til Bedtime)”

A low ebb in the great canon of stuttercore, this parody song somehow snatched a spot in the UK Top 10.

The stutter-as-flex (“E-e-even if I stutter, imma still come off”), a line rewired a decade later by Big Pun: “Even if I stuttered, I would still sh-sh-shit on you.”

Scatman John: “Scatman (Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop)”

“Everybody stutters one way or the other/So check out my message to you.” Gen Alpha has Skibidi Dom Dom Dom Yes Yes Yes, back in the day we had Scatman John. Stuttering made his life difficult since he was a little kid, and this was his attempt to make all the kids like him feel OK. There isn’t much actual stammering in this eccentric, eternal dance tune. It’s more bombastic scatting and growling like he’s a very hangry Wario.

Travis Morrison is so down bad he can’t speak straight, he’s about to have a nervous breakdown if he doesn’t blow a load pronto. There’s a prescient stutterification of the phrase “nape of the neck,” which has become a fixture of stuttery-breathy ASMR videos because people find the alliteration so relaxing and tingly.

Travis took the manic horndog route, Joe turns it inside out and uses the trope of unstable speech as a seductive kiss-off to a woman he’s sure is lying in his face.

A personal favorite in the history of slippery tongues. Sue Tompkins’ delivery makes my head go dizzy. It sounds like she’s beyond lost in the throes of affection and trilling senselessly in the happiest daze of her life.

“Stuttering” was the lead single of what was meant to be the group’s third album, Fire, before RCA canned it. It’s a shame, but maybe it makes sense the song flopped and precipitated their breakup. The stutter-firing fusillade is meant to resemble a shitty dude who can’t keep his story straight, pathetically apologizing to his girl, but I don’t know any male manipulator who talks like this. The stutters go berserk, it feels more of a piece with 2020 glitchcore than Y2K radio R&B.

The debut single that turned Miley Cyrus into a real-life Hannah Montana, feat. a love interest so lovely that Cyrus can’t help choking on her words.

I’ve got torn eye-lips? I-I-I-I uhghughuh. Nice brettthhs, I’ve got so-So fuuuuu-cKING too rough hehehehehhh. Or something. These are the chopped-up pleas of HEALTH’s Jake Duzsik, and they convey much raw feeling if not much coherence.

The stutters that ricochet in karaoke booths all around the world. An addictive hook-within-a-hook and also a clever way to sneak a “fuck her face” past radio censors?

Shawty's like a melody in my head that I can't keep out, keep that iPod glitching forever. One of a class of tunes like Selena Gomez’ meta-pop “Love You Like a Love Song” that riffs on the post-iPod, streaming era vibe of instant dopamine-rushing replayability.

Kesha slurs, squeaks, malfunctions; here, she gets a little staccato with it.

These are sweet, earnestly lovestruck stutters, the result of Jazmine getting so worked up over impressing a dude that it turns her lips against her.

Far East Movement: “Like A G6” [ft. Dev & the Cataracs]

The cyborgs are getting blitzed now, dousing themselves in oil and grease and draining BuzzBallz till they’re slizzered.

Katy Perry: “E.T.” [ft. Kanye West]

Jonah Weiner declared 2011 “the rise of the stutter in pop music,” and he tracked convulsions everywhere: Coldplay, Drake, Nickelback. At times in “E.T.,” it’s hard to tell what’s an artistic stutter versus a censoring device for radio. But it fits the theme of being seduced by a man-alien whom she begs to abduct her into the cosmos.

Vocal chops were all over the future bass and EDM trap I fell in love with as a teen, but this brostep classic is such a tour de force. It feels like the entire DAW is stuttering, or shuddering in a berserk rage both demented and euphoric.

There’s nothing shaky or incidental about the way these stutters are delivered—imagine a bratty robot girl chewing gum. SOPHIE transforms three simple syllables into a mesmerizing hook that makes my brain hopscotch in its basket.

James Blake: “If The Car Beside You Moves Ahead”

The most un-karaokable song since Cocteau Twins, and maybe the prettiest, most gorgeously glum stutter tune of the decade.

A very tactile and hand-drawn, kissy kind of syllable stretch-out. She hugs the word “bartender” like she’s holding onto him for as long as she can.

The inane and inventive vocals tore across TikTok and paired perfectly with a style of popular edits called “glitchcore.” Thus began a new era for stuttering in the SoundCloud rap underworld. These songs teetered between cool and garish but could also be serious, as on d0llywood1’s depressive “ihonestlymightjustgiveup.” It felt right that stuttering wasn’t just a brief effect but a structural bedrock in these songs. An attention-deficit generation who grew up playing quick-fire shooters were drawn to speed and stimuli. Stutters are like musical jitterclicking.

Around the same time, sigilkore pioneer islurwhenitalk was casting hexes and whipping the human voice into harrowing gales of word-splatter.

The nervy Detroit MC flexes to the heavens, but the diarrhetic stumble of his flow makes him sound like a fried Napoleon wilting in an isolation chamber.

JJJJJerome Ellis: “Evensong, part 1 (for and after June Kramer)”

“The stutter can be a musical instrument,” says JJJJJerome Ellis, who builds a vast flickery expanse of piano, sax, dulcimer, and spoken-broken-word.

Inspired by 2020 glitchcore, zayok’s got some of the most frail and intentional stutters. He crafts erratic twitch&b out of bashed-in refrains and volatile beats, singing about offing himself and yearning while his falsettos crack like dropped glass.

We’ve watched as Jane has figured out who they are through music—all their metallic snares and Palkia cries and Amen breaks one more step toward selfhood. In Jane’s agile fingers, overstuffed layers of sound aren’t overpowering, they’re something Jane can earthbend around themselves for a sense of confidence and identity. On a rickety rollercoaster of a track where they question changing their name again, stutters form the central motif: “J-J-J-J-J-J-J.” It’s a set of initials and a person in as much flux as their crazed DAW.

We’ve gone beyond stutters as human quirk and robot cosplay. ocelot and his collaborators in the 25r3set collective use vocal fragments as the base ingredients of a zombified mind-stew. It’s a deeply unsettling and unsettled vision of how it feels to exist today, brain blasted in a sewage cannon of retention-edited stimuli.

Mano and I debated whether the effect in this song is a stutter plugin or vibrato—please, producers, chime in—and if it were vibrato, then I’d have to include Lil Yachty’s “Poland,” but also that then I’d have to include neither, since this is a list of stutter songs. To my plebeian ears, Charli’s ra-aaaa-aa-aaaahk hook sounds less like the wavering warble of vibrato than like A. G. Cook hyperlooped a syllable. It's the rare musical stutter on a vowel (shoutout Jamie Foxx and T-Pain’s “Blame It”).

First she asked you to match her tweak and you couldn’t, now you’re dozing on her like a sleep-aid supplement? But this track is the opposite of somnolent—Tinashe’s voice drags and pops, catching on the iron clunk debris of the beat. The charts could use this as a wake-up pill: less copy-paste country and more sexy-acidic glitch-pop.