I don’t mind vocal fry in regular speech, but I absolutely cannot stand it in songs. First of all, if you’re using vocal fry in a song, you’re almost certainly off pitch.
Second, it just sounds bad, like you broke your voice. While ok in regular speech, while performing it makes you sound like you need to take a break. Or perhaps never sing again.
Vocal fry just has no place in music, really.
Who’s doing this?
I’m completely serious because I basically don’t listen to new music in English anymore. At present I mostly listen to Russian, Turkish, Balkan and some Italian which still seems (despite language barriers) to be more about emotional connections rather than “damn I’m hot” attention whoring.
I know what you mean. Reminds me of someone riding in my car one time as I had my regular music playing. Then, I had a bunch of MP3s on CDs. About ten songs played on shuffle and they all just happened not to be in English.
The guy riding in my car with me said exasperatedly, “I’ve heard nearly a dozen songs and I haven’t heard a word of English! What’s up with this?”