Auto-Tune: Pop Music’s Latest Scourge
December 2nd, 2008 by Cooper Levey-Baker in News
Ed. note: This rant comes courtesy of Eric Snider and Tampa Calling.
Pretty much any time a music critic of my, um, seasoning takes a stand against something trendy, he (she) runs the risk of being labeled an old fart. But I don’t think I’m succumbing to old-fartism when I say that the rampant use of Auto-Tune in today’s pop music is a scourge that I hope ends up in the dustbin of bad fads after a few more mouse clicks.
Auto-Tune? You may know it by its previous incarnations as a Vocoder or Talkbox. It’s an audio processor developed by Antares Technologies that corrects vocal pitch, but its trademark effect is the robotic sound it can add to singing.
The main perpetrator of the scourge is T-Pain, a hack who sings, near as I can tell, everything through Auto-Tune. He’s been highly rewarded for this gimmickry with several hit albums and a bevy of guest vocal appearances on hip-hop singles. In fact, Diddy reportedly paid T-Pain a royalty to work Auto-Tune “magic” on his new recording.
If Auto-Tune was relegated to a well-compensated clown like T-Pain and a few hooks on hip-hop songs, no problem. But it’s spreading like Ebola. Kanye West uses the effect throughout his new disc 808s & Heartbreak, which means that he’s doing a fair amount of singing, which is not good. Britney Spears, Madonna, Justin Timberlake and other pop artists have used it, which suggests it’s getting more and more entrenched as mainstream practice.
I have to admit that computer-sounding vocals can be pleasing as a novelty, when done in small doses. Roger Troutman and his band Zapp used it extensively in the 1980s, and I still have love for “I Want to Be Your Man,” his No. 3 single from 1987. (By the way, Roger had to generate the sound via synthesizer with a tube-like thing in his mouth, just like Peter Frampton did on Comes Alive!.)
Check out Roger doing his pre-Pain thing here:
So … why does the proliferation of Auto-Tune make my ears beg to be stuffed with cotton? Well, it represents a bunch of things that gnaw at old farts like me: A follow-the-leader ethic in pop music that seems to be getting worse all the time, regardless of artistic consequences; a lack of imagination and musical savvy in favor of a computer program; non-singers (Kanye) or marginal singers (Britney) being rewarded for using a device that masks their lack of vocal talent. (When T-Pain performed “One More Drink” with Ludacris on Saturday Night Live, he sang without Auto-Tune. No surprise: His pitch was way off.)
I don’t think these concerns are reserved for hidebound veterans such as myself. You can be the streetest 20-year-old cat on the block and still find Auto-Tune artificial and offensive.
Here’s where I take solace. Although I wish I had the power to halt Auto-Tune use by mandatory decree, I’m damn sure it won’t be long before the folks who soak it in as part of their daily soundtrack will get entirely sick of it.
December 2nd, 2008 at 1:22 pm
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December 2nd, 2008 at 4:14 pm
I don’t buy into this idea that users of auto-tune are just masking a lack of “natural” vocal ability. First of all, auto-tune has real expressive qualities when used well. It is, in Sasha Frere-Jones’ words, “the rare edit that calls attention to itself.”
Here’s an excerpt from his excellent essay for the New Yorker on the subject, linked at the bottom.
Someone once asked Hildebrand if Auto-Tune was evil. He responded, “Well, my wife wears makeup. Is that evil?” Evil may be overstating the case, but makeup is an apt analogy: there is nothing natural about recorded music. Whether the engineer merely tweaks a few bum notes or makes a singer tootle like Robby the Robot, recorded music is still a composite of sounds that may or may not have happened in real time. An effect is always achieved, and not necessarily the one intended. Aren’t some of the most entertaining and fruitful sounds in pop—distortion, whammy bars, scratching—the result of glorious abuse of the tools? At this late date, it’s hard to see how the invisible use of tools could imply an inauthentic product, as if a layer of manipulation were standing between the audience and an unsullied object. In reality, the unsullied object is the Sasquatch of music. Even a purely live recording is a distortion and paraphrasing of an acoustic event.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2008/06/09/080609crmu_music_frerejones
December 2nd, 2008 at 4:58 pm
I don’t think Eric is criticizing the Auto-Tune for somehow being inauthentic, Kerem. I think he’d agree that it is just another tool at an artist’s disposal, just like an effects pedal or DJ scratch. And while I do believe the Auto-Tune is primarily used to mask a lack of vocal ability, you’re right that it still has expressive possibilities all its own.
I think what is annoying about the Auto-Tune trend is simply how widespread it has become, and how one-dimensional it really is. It’s as if every hip-hop song suddenly had to have a banjo in it. Banjo-laden hip-hop isn’t necessarily a bad idea, really, but it would be awfully hard to swallow if every new hit contained the same formulation.
This gets right to the problem I have with the new Kanye West disc, which I find to be quite mediocre. I don’t give a shit if West can sing or not, or if he needs a device to help him find his pitch, but the Auto-Tune limits his sonic palette so much that the entire thing sounds very same-y. Every artist needs his or her tools, but going back to the same sound song after song will always get tiresome.