20 Singers Who Rock a Fake Accent

Rock is all about selling a persona, and sometimes you have to change more than just your haircut. Whether it's to seem more "real," to appeal to bigger audiences or just for fun, musicians have been rocking altered accents for ages. Here are some of our favorite fakers of dubious dialects.

Shania Twain

It's a scientific fact that Canadians are virtually indistinguishable from Americans -- until one says, "There's a mouse about the house." Just look at Shania Twain, the woman behind the best-selling country album in history: She did her time in Nashville, she perfected that distinctive twang. When she sang, "I feel like a woman!" during the Super Bowl, it was naturally assumed she felt like a Southern woman -- as in the American South. But she's not even from Southern Ontario!

Watch Shania's Super Bowl Performance

Ministry

Ministry's Al Jourgensen is the poster boy for hard-core American industrial music and the asphalt-melting aggression behind songs like 'Burning Inside' and 'So What.' But on the Chicago-based band's debut, 1981's New Wave classic 'With Sympathy,' the vocal duties were apparently handled by a young English girl who also happened to be named Al Jourgensen. Naturally, Jourgensen has distanced himself from his frilly synthpop years: "I just disregard that record. I don't consider it part of my catalog whatsoever."

Watch Ministry's 'Revenge' Video

The Rolling Stones

The Stones may have started out as England's Newest Hitmakers, but in the 1970s Mick and Keith put on their cowboy boots and broke out the thickest Nashville-by-way-of-London accents you've ever heard. On Dixie-fried gems like 'Dead Flowers' and 'Honky Tonk Women' (and its slower, more cornpone version, 'Country Honk'), the only thing missing is a great big "yee-haw!" And yet, this being '70s-era Stones, they somehow manage to make it seem really cool.

Watch the Stones Perform 'Honky Tonk Women'

Keith Urban

It's typical for a country singer to be from the South, but Urban's birthplace of Whangarei, New Zealand, is closer to the South Pole than the Grand Ole Opry. The Aussie-raised country star still talks like he's from Down Under, but he's been singing with a classic American twang since his days at Australia's Northern Suburbs Country Music Club. Guess you don't get four consecutive Male Vocalist of the Year CMA nominations if you croon like Crocodile Dundee.

The Killers

Based on instant indie-rock classics like 'Somebody Told Me' and 'Mr. Brightside,' it's easy to imagine Killers lead singer and Las Vegas native Brandon Flowers hiding from the baking desert sun by, say, playing darts, eating shepherd's pie and crying in his pint in a dark pub. So why does a dude from Nevada sound like the palest new sensation from Old Blighty? Maybe he just has the delicate soul of an English poet.

Lily Allen

This pop sensation grew up popping in and out of the poshest schools in London, but her 2006 debut album, 'Alright, Still,' is overflowing with a working-class Cockney dialect. At least the upper-middle-class miss had a good answer for critics who called Allen out on her contrived "mockney" accent: On her ever-popular blog, she shot back, "The songs I sound mockney on I recorded when I was 18 and probably was pretending to be something I wasn't."

Green Day

Oakland, Calif., native Billy Joe Armstrong put the "oi" in "fake English voice." When your idols are young, snotty, British punks like the Buzzcocks and Sham 69, it's natural to take on a bit of Anglophilia, but Green Day's early albums had the world convinced they were straight outta Brixton. Now, whenever the subject of fake English accents comes up, Billy Joe is inevitably the first name on everybody's lips.

Matisyahu

A product of the well-known overlap between America's Hasidic Jewish and Jamaican communities, the man born Matthew Paul Miller channels the soul of the islands despite the fact that he was born in West Chester, Pa. Strangely, though many people seem surprised by a man of Matisyahu's faith making reggae, not many eyebrows have been raised by the Jamaican accent pouring out of a white dude from the American Northeast.

Amy Winehouse

Her love affair with the British tabloids makes her seem as English as they come, but on record Winehouse is 100 percent Alabama sass. Actually, the English have a long tradition of American-sounding "blue-eyed soul" stretching back to the late 1950s, so Winehouse is hardly unique. But like fellow Brit Dusty Springfield before her, she's so good she fools a lot of listeners into thinking those pipes could only have come from, say, Philly or the Motor City.

Robert Pollard

The ltra-prolific solo artist and Guided by Voices frontman is proudly out of the fake accent closet. The former schoolteacher from Dayton, Ohio, has an unhealthy obsession with the Who and British pop in general, and he doesn't care who knows it. In fact, on the 2007 track 'Pretty Not Bad,' Bob doesn't just sing with faux-Brit voice, he sings about it, announcing, "I was born out of weirdness and intricate science/I got a fake English accent."

Vanilla Ice

Whichever of the many versions of his youth you subscribe to -- knife fights on the mean streets of Miami, or high school trigonometry in a middle-class suburb of Dallas -- Robert Matthew Van Winkle, better known to the world as Vanilla Ice, is a master of self-invention. Even his "singing" voice is invented; from his "street" rhymes to his rap-metal roars, you never know what flavor of Vanilla is coming next.

Tom Jones

It's not unusual to be loved by anyone, but it is unusual for the Welsh son of a coal miner to sound like he was born and raised on the Las Vegas strip. The ladies' knickers magnet we know as Tom Jones (Sir Thomas Jones Woodward to us commoners) was knighted by the Queen, but he sings a lot like the Southern-fried, Vegas-marinated King -- Jones is the first to admit his debt to Elvis Presley.

Jay Reatard

He's been called the enfant terrible of the Memphis music scene. He's also been called the king of bad English accents. Whatever you call him, Reatard is never less than entertaining. The aggro Tennessee native's tongue-in-cheek Brit delivery is more "unique" than "bad" -- like a cool cartoon version of a pogoing UK punker -- and sometimes it even disappears completely.

Snow

The aptly named Snow (which stands for "Super Notorious Outrageous Whiteboy") claims he picked up his Kingston "patois" in prison. Canadian prison. As in, really, really far from Jamaica. Born Darrin O'Brien in Toronto, Snow's overwhelming love of reggae and Jamaican meat patties so affected him that the outrageous white boy from the Great White North developed a magical Jamaican singing voice and scored a No. 1 with 1993's 'Informer.'

Watch Snow's 'Informer' Video

Have you ever noticed that the meek schoolteacher from 'The Happening' looks an awful lot like the lead singer of the Funky Bunch? Remember that guy? All underwear, no shirt; liked to dance; rapped with that super-thick accent straight from the mean streets of Boston? Well believe it or not, it's the same guy. But try to keep it on the down-low. As Mr. Wahlberg himself says, "I'm trying to figure out some way to destroy the evidence."

Watch "Marky" Mark's 'Good Vibrations' Video

Silverchair

Remember that brief, overcast year when every band sounded like flannel-clad, coffee-sipping Pacific Northwesterners? Well it wasn't just American singers perfecting the raspy, bummed-out thing. In the mid-1990s, Silverchair, the pride of Newcastle, Australia, lit up the "alternative" airwaves thanks to Kurt Cobain soundalike (and lookalike!) Daniel Johns. On hits like 'Tomorrow,' Johns rocked an oh-so-American gravel-voiced delivery so effectively that the Aussie press dubbed the young band "Nirvana in Pyjamas."

Joey Ramone

American punk bands were trying to sound like British punk bands before British punk even existed. On early singles like 'Beat on the Brat' and 'Blitzkrieg Bop,' Joey Ramone's ridiculously thick Queens, N.Y. accent is replaced by a just-plain-ridiculous "English" one -- it's more like a terrible impression of a fake English accent. Ironically, it was largely the Ramones who kick-started the punk craze in England. Good thing the Sex Pistols didn't try to sound like they were from Queens.

Watch the Ramones' 'Blitzkrieg Bop' Video

John Fogerty

When the Creedence Clearwater Revival frontman sang 'Born on the Bayou,' he may have been stretching the truth a little -- unless a tributary of the Mississippi reaches all the way to the swampy backwaters of Berkeley, Calif. So barring the existence of a thriving Cajun community in the San Francisco Bay, it's safe to say that Creedence albums like 'Bayou Country' laid the Deep South vibe on a little thick.

Watch Creedence Clearwater Revival's 'Born on the Bayou' Video

Eric Clapton

The guitar god wears his debt to Mississippi Delta blues plainly on his sleeve, but sometimes "Old Slow Hand" sings an awful lot like he was born at the Crossroads. While all the big English rock bands from the 1960s were obviously emulating their American blues heroes, Clapton sometimes veers so far into imitation that you can't help but wonder: Is the bespectacled Englishman just wearing glasses so people will call him "Blind Eric Clapton"?

Thin Lizzy

Thanks to stone classics like 'The Boys Are Back in Town' and 'Jailbreak,' Thin Lizzy helped define the American "classic rock" sound that dominated the FM dial in the 1970s, and Phil Lynott's booming, smoky voice is still a jukebox staple in Stateside barrooms. Which is why Americans are always shocked to learn that Thin Lizzy weren't even from the US. Lynott, who died tragically at age 36, was born in Manchester, England, grew up in working-class Dublin and sported a thick Irish brogue.

Watch Thin Lizzy's 'The Boys Are Back in Town' Video