Sharpened 5th in otherwise regular diatonic scale

Question

Generally, I'm very pitch intolerant; out of tune vocals can send me running from the room. I'm particularly intolerant of 3rds & whether they push or pull depending on whether the feel is minor or major - I will accept flat, but I cannot listen to sharp [See my previous musing on the sharp 3rd in the Oasis Wonderwall chorus - there's another more disparaging, but I can't find it right now]

That being said, Green Day's Basket Case has always intrigued me.
The song is a pretty basic* I IV V vi in E♭ with a diatonic melody, yet the vocalist fairly frequently pushes the 5th, B♭, quite hard towards B natural. He doesn't do this every time there's a B♭ nor is the push always as noticeable, but he does it sufficiently frequently that it becomes a part of the 'feel' for the track. The vocal overall isn't one that really needs cent-precision, of course.

By all rights, this should drive me nuts, yet it doesn't. My brain accepts it as a natural component of the song.

So, rather than this being "Why does this not hurt?" I guess I'm asking "What is the name or reasoning behind this phenomenon?" Is it like a comma pump?

Link to official Youtube… for those who don't like punk, he does this right at the head of the song, before the 'punkness' gets going properly, in the last word of the first & third lines
"Do you have the time to listen to me whine?" then "… melodramatic fools"

After comments.
For those who are not hearing it, here are the first couple of vocal lines in Melodyne with "whine" & "fools" circled in red, "do" & "time" in green. [Look at the pitch line not the note 'blob'. You'll need to click through then zoom in to see it properly.] He's really squeezing towards halfway between B♭ & natural on both "whine" & "fools" but not on "do" & "time".
I've never put it through any hard analysis before, so I'm glad it proves it's not psycho-acoustic, it's really there. ;))
_{The analysis for 'time' isn't perfect, the pitch detection breaks in the middle of the note.}

^{Click for full size}

*Listening to this more carefully after posting & actually getting the guitar & Melodyne out to see what's going on, the sharpened 5th is always against a G Major, a III Maj, which makes the B♭ very ambiguous, as G contains a B natural. This seems to be what causes the "argument" in the track at those points. So, though it's a 'regular' I IV V, it contains both vi and III - that's what threw me… now I just need to figure out why that III is 'acceptable'.

Answer 1

Final edit: I did some experiments, and the general feeling is that any gradual pitch bend of a note or a series of notes of gradually changing pitch is OK, as long as it starts on the right pitch or at least keeps moving and doesn't play a steady bad pitch for too long. And when the bending stops and the pitch clearly settles somewhere, then it better be in tune. I can't tell if others feel the same. And then my original speculation on why this particular pitch bend makes musical sense:

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This is probably subjective, but to me, bending the melody Bb towards B over the G power chord turns the total chord from a G minor to a G major chord. Particularly for dominant chords, I like to make the third ambiguous by bending it between minor and major, or play both at the same time. In this song, a G major would be something like a secondary dominant G -> Cm. With a little more bending it starts to remind something quite different.

I haven't really experimented with it to know where the limits are. Does the note have to start on either minor or major, or does the pitch matter at all, as long as it's somewhere between the limits of minor and major? Intuitively, I'm inclined to say that particularly in blues/jazz/rock contexts, it doesn't matter where exactly the third is.

EDIT. Here's the spectrum of the "listen to me whine" line in the Transcribe! transcription application by Seventh String Software:

Here's the spectrum for the G-based chord after "whine":

Anyway, if there's indeed some B natural in there, then the singer is just slightly bending towards that. But to me it sounds like an overdriven power chord without actually attempting to articulate a major third.

One more picture. G-D power chord played with a simple sawtooth waveform through an overdriven guitar amp simulation. Transcribe! suspects there's a bit of a B note, even though none was played. Even a single G note played with the saw wave has some B in its overtones, but with the overdrive it's louder.

Answer 2

I'm the first to analyze any microtonal detail, but come on... it's a punk rock song. The intonation is a bit all over the place, and that's kind of for its own sake. Insanity, paranoia, self-suppression... there's a lot of inner conflict here, and the swaying, sort of over-boiling pitch expresses this better than anything.

What is special about the ⅲ is that the minor note isn't at all in the guitar part, and so the vocal part has more freedom do go astray without it being all to obvious. But to my ears it's still definitely too low to make it a Ⅲ chord. Though keep in mind that even a powerchord contains a just major third as an overtone, but not a minor third, in that sense the B-natural does indeed sound, and with the overdrive sound and absent anything else in the arrangement at that point, one may be tempted to hear it as more of an actual note than you otherwise would. Perhaps Melodyne is also falling fool to that, it's not that it can perfectly distinguish any sound components, just remarkably well.

Regarding comma pump, in principle there could indeed be one here: if you construct the Cm as a Pythagorean whole step over the B♭ (instead 5:3 sixth over the tonic), then the G in it is already sharper than 12-edo, and if you then build a just minor third over that, it'll be perhaps 20 cents sharp on paper. But again... in this genre, nah.