I don’t mean singing in a foreign language, I mean if they aren’t enunciating their words.
There is a style of singing where the singer rolls one word into the next word, or just cuts a word off. I find it distracting and I tend to skip the song very quickly when I realize what they are doing.
While it is a popular way to sing, I have never enjoyed it. I heard some of it in the 1980s but it wasn’t widely used. Today I find a lot more singers doing it.
Sorry, but I had to down vote this as a popular opinion.
While the enjoyment of less enunciated and clear vocals has expanded over the years, wanting clear, easy to understand vocals is the norm.
Now, I happen to dislike what gets called “cursive” singing, particularly when it comes along with unnecessarily exaggerated vowels and outright wrong vowel sounds, so I feel you on how annoying it is with the current trend of it. It has, as you noted, had previous spurts of popularity, and even the jazz era version grates on me.
What’s crazy is that I listen to a good amount of death and other metal that’s often less intelligible, to an unfamiliar ear, but once you get past the unfamiliarity it’s less annoying than the “cursive” singing. It’s better enunciated most of the time because it has to be, or you can’t produce the growls and screams at all.
So, yeah. I share your peeve about it, but it’s actually a pretty common opinion to share, overall.