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.

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