It can't be denied that T-Pain, now considered the king of auto-tune, brought a degree of fresh artistic interpretation to R&B music through bringing back the vocoder. But with the influx of rappers who can't rap, singers who can't sing and everybody else in between who is just plain confused as to what the fuck it is they are doing exactly, it also can't be denied that as quickly as auto-tune was sensationalized, it was also beaten to a bloody pulp.
As expected that some entity or another would say something, Jay-Z finally broke the news a bit more than a week ago to the public that everybody seemed to sort of know already but kept brushing under the rug: auto-tune is dead. You could say that like every other truism that is a rock-hard pill to swallow, this has produced a couple of different responses: confirmation, denial, backlash and deceit.
Though the latter of the four groups seems a bit odd to throw into the bunch, artists such as Kanye West who clearly had an infatuation with the technology explain that they "thought it would be interesting... to use a medium that people in my community didn't respect." First of all, everybody knows that in Kanye's Semtex interview, dude explicitly said his primary use of the technology is because he can't sing. Unfortunately though, this is about where all of the credible and respected opinions start and finish.
According to NY Magazine, people such as Will.I.Am resorted to "rambling and name checking obscure Edward Norton Movies" while others such as Jim Jones stated the obvious by stating "We're getting money off of auto-tune," further confirming that most artists jutst wanna pimp you out these days. Lucky for us, nobody gives a fuck about Jim Jones or Will.I.Am. After all, when your album doesn't even break 50,000 sales in the first week and when your group is clearly groping for relevancy as shown in the litany of Target commercials and lack-luster reviews, nobody is considering you an arbiter of influence... Just saying.
It is unfortunate that someone had to write a song about how badly auto-tune sucks in order for hip-hop and R&B artists to even become semi-aware of how much it sucks. What also blows on a comparable level is how much time it has taken for people to become aware of this. I mean, shit. When did T-Pain come onto the scene as a mainstream artist bearing auto-tune? 2004? 2005? You mean to tell me that it took four long-ass years of people sounding like they were Robocop and C-3P0 to realize how awful they sounded? And then when artists catch wind that, yes, in fact we the consensus did like it better when they actually sang, they had the nerve to actually cop an attitude. As if they actually have something to be bitter about?
People, remember this much: Jay-Z might be a forty year old man on a fast track towards a family-oriented reality TV show on MTV, but dammit, dude never clowned himself by fuckin around with vocoders. He stuck to his art. He had very high, highs, and he had very low, lows, but you can never say that his most recent albums were the product of, much less succumbed to, a trend... That has to count for something these days right?
And as for the king of autotune himself, T-Pain, apparently D.O.A. has given him incentive to come out swinging in November. All I've got to say to T-Pain is "do you man." Shit, it's not like dude didn't make it popular right? And plus, it's not a crutch. If need be, he can actually sing... Quite well. On a positive note, if push comes to shoove, he can always drop another "Karaoke Niggas" and put more copycats on blast which is always fun to listen to when Pain does it. (info via NY Magazine)
Technorati Tags: Culture, Cheap Thrills, Music, Hip Hop, Auto-Tune, Jay-Z, D.O.A., Death of Autotune, Jim Jones, Will.I.Am
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