When you listen to the musicianship and quality of singing going into todays music compared to older music, are you shocked by how good the older music sounds in comparison? I don’t know about you but I find a lot of modern singers use some weird intonation whereby you cannot understand what words they are singing. It’s like they have grown up watching American Idol, X factor and other similar shows and now falsely believe demonstrating ‘vocal gymnastics’ trumps actually conveying the meaning of the song emotionally by connecting with the words.
I know what you mean, but I guess it can be also a stylistic choice I guess to be a mumbler or perhaps the words don’t mean anything anyway so why bother to pronounce them properly!