"What the...You Mean I Can't Sing?!" places more emphasis on harmony and melody, aspects that Van Peebles felt he had "subliminally pushed into the background" on his previous albums. While Van Peebles said that some of the album's songs could have been written in a spoken word form, he decided to include more musical instrumentation than he had previously. Allmusic writer Ed Hogan compares Van Peebles' vocals to "Louis Armstrong, the comedy albums of Bill Cosby from the '70s, and the wild antics of cartoon voice artists Mel Blanc and ". Another Allmusic writer, Thom Jurek, compared Van Peebles' delivery to that of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Van Peebles describes his vocal style as "the old Southern style", which was influenced by singers he had heard growing up in South Chicago. Van Peebles also said that he was influenced by older forms of African-American music: "[...] people like Blind Lemon Jefferson and the field hollers. I was also influenced by spoken word song styles from Germany that I encountered when I lived in France."