In Support of Auto-Tune
Or why we don’t want music without it
A sanitized society is a happy society — a weird, freakish, Stepford wives version, but a society, nonetheless. No highs or lows. No ups or downs. Just the beige, bulging, masses marching together to create some weird, maniacal cult. The indulgent use of Auto-Tune in music today does exactly what consumers want, it creates a product with a limited risk factor.
For those unfamiliar with Auto-Tune, it’s a device or a software plug-in enabling sound engineers to pitch-correct vocal tracks by a singer to any particular note. Essentially it allows people who cannot carry a tune to sing into a mic, and a sound engineer can manipulate the noise that spews out of their mouth into something that works with the song. It makes singers out of people who cannot sing.
As music became corporate, it seduced us into believing that what we get is what we want. Sure, there are purists who can recite who played on what track in which year, but for most of the buying public, they don’t care. It’s too difficult.
I had that dizzyingly painful realization after watching the wonderful documentary, The Wrecking Crew. In that movie I realized that much of the beloved music from the 60s and 70s wasn’t recorded by the actual artists or bands. No, most of the music during that era was recorded by the backing band known as The Wrecking Crew, a close-knit group of session musicians from Los Angeles. For years I thought that bands like the Beach Boys, the Byrds, The Monkees and a host of other bands were actual bands. But as it turns out, like Santa Claus, God and a representative government, that was just another flat-out lie.
But does authenticity matter?
For me, yes. Yes, it does matter. But I guess that makes me a purist, an old school blowhard that expects reality for reality’s sake. But I’m not like most people; for most people, it doesn’t matter… in the least.
The modern industry of music is less concerned with talent and honesty than it is with fame, fortune and marketability. Shit, if taking a dump onto a microphone while a DubStep beat is driving the track would trend on YouTube, we’d all be doing that. Taking risks in the music industry is like Kryptonite to Superman. In order make money in this industry and to make a living, you must be able to remove the risk associated with delivering a saleable product. To hell with creativity when money is to be made.
Auto-Food, Auto-Candidate
Our society doesn’t stop at music when it seeks out to sanitize its consumables. It’s found in a host of other things like food and politics.
We get most of our food from only a few food providers, like Monsanto and ConAgra. Most of the time, we are much too busy to research which products we consume is actual food. We have no idea if a thing that appears to be food, is in fact food, if it’s safe for consumption. Instead, we run into the supermarket. We grab an available cart. Throw random, boxed chemicals into said rattling cart and pay for it using unseen currency. Never thinking twice about popping open a container, throwing it into the oven and chowing down whenever the timer says it’s okay. You just assume it’s food.
The value we put onto ConAgra-like versions of consumables is minimal. It’s purely a functional thing. It’s like a soldier on the battlefield that doesn’t complain about the slop they ingest to fuel themselves. I know the saying goes “there are no atheists in foxholes.” But what’s probably also true is that there aren’t any anti-GMO vegans in foxholes either.
We, as a society, just eat the damn Cheeto.
We don’t give a shit about anything that we consume.
Music, like food, is like that. We act like we’re purists, but we still buy Ed Sheeran instead of the authentic Sara Niemietz. I don’t hear people complaining that a Katy Perry song was created in some factory in Sweden but licensed to the highest bidder for some sort of karaoke version of the song. We, as consumers, don’t care if it’s real or fake. Shit, for all we know, robots could be creating the music and we couldn’t tell the difference. And worse, we wouldn’t care.
Politics is pretty much the same thing.
Politicians lie. We know that they lie. And we accept that they lie. Even the Trump supporters that chanted, in unison, “Mexico will pay” in response to Trump’s crazed question about who will pay for his stupid wall, knew that they were lied to. Those supporters didn’t think he would actually try to build the wall. It’s like we’re a nation of passive-aggressive submissives that are too lazy to do anything about it or too busy to take the time to research or too ignorant to know the difference.
In any case, we don’t care.
Which brings me back to why Auto-Tune music is okay. I can go on and on about how awesome Etta James was or how Nat King Cole had perfect pitch — or hell, that even Tom Jones can sing better than anyone out there today. But the reality is, it doesn’t matter. Auto-Tune creates exactly what consumers want: a product with a limited risk factor.
The robots won.
Let a few corporations in the world write code, program the sequencers and crank out the next hit.
We will consume it. We always did. We always will. We’re conditioned.
