New decade. New afflictions. Porn fatigue. It sets in eventually don’t it? Not just in the wrist or eyes or nethers but crucially in the head. At some point the repetition, the organisation, the availability of all that skin starts feeling like too much of a good thing – whither the chase, whither the hidden, whither love, whither yearning? How much hornier did you get when the only smut you found was discarded in park bushes, hidden in a parents secret stash, swapped in a secret playground moment, hard-earned? Just as the charmless ubiquity of all that filth makes you dream of chastity, want your virginity back, I feel the same exhausted ennui with the slaggish textures of chart music these days. If modern pop organises sound in an entirely pornographic fashion, always at pains to drag us intimately into the soft-core close-up, the lips, the fingers, the hardcore loudness & lurid 2-D flash of the club and the limo and the bedroom, is it any wonder that Autotune is the audio/visual effect of choice, the contact-point airbrush lashed into the mix swiftly before anything can threaten the panoptic perfection of all that clicked & corrected skeez?
And man, I would love to still get horny over modern chart pop (and Shakira when her voice back flips, Britney’s snarl and GaGa when she allow us to hear her wonderful accent still hit it) but too often it sounds wet’n'willing to the point of affording no friction, the techniques too flappily apparent for you to even get close to anything approaching the ol’ vinegar strokes.
S’weird, even though its detractors are a sorry bunch of festival fodder (Jay Z’s menopausal ‘D.O.A. (Death Of Autotune)’ included) man is it DIFFICULT finding autotune’s pleasure centre, so severely do its gleaming textures corrode our bourgeois assumptions of democratised technology being good for music. We’re getting such sloppy seconds cos pro-tools & Cubase done turned all the innocence out of pop, the ability to be naïve, childlike rather than childish. The stink left by production’s state-of-the-art right now is that of a just-cleaned club-toilet, the freshly-fragranced fakery exposing rather than disguising the shitty ideas within.
Perhaps down to pure shrunken vision of what pop can do in our celebutante/can’t-singjay age, but even amongst supposed movers & shakers (the now-overrated Rihanna, the long-overrated Kanye) too often autotune’s controls are set for the heart of the hotel pool, the video-shoot, all that audible luxury & bad taste, an orifice-cramming glut of sophisticated sheen and classee boy-band-finger-in-ear showiness. Cos that’s what Cowell wants. What the people in their podules want. I don’t buy it. I’m a person in a podule. I want no such thing.
Don’t fkn jump on me poptimists. I have no problem with tech-abuse bullying itself to the front of the mix. When Pierre & other Chicagoans started fucking around with 303s it was go-nowhere magic, it was the reinvention and resurrection by discarded people of something discarded , something designed for rock that rock didn’t need and that rock didn’t have the guileless grace to abuse into new shapes, new futures. Autotune’s progress into pop has suffered no such drama, no such rediscovery; it’s a golden shower that has never showered gold. First the rich had it. It sounded horrible. Then the poor had it. It still sounded horrible. As a sign of the times we live in, autotune is cocaine, guilty-secret of the rich turned cheapskate currency, as classless now as fake tan and steroid abuse but importantly, for pop’s possibilities, it is a sound that’s repellent, in all senses, a motif impervious to all around it. From uberproducers’ guilty secret to Cher’s out & proud vocal surgery down through T-Pain’s zero-speed belligerence to every laptop studio on the planet autotune has wheeled through its possibilities to ever-dwindling avail, finding itself now the deodorant/slap of choice for pop before it can even dream of stepping out into the night and those bright flaw-exposing lights.
In excess (on the chaffest of the chaff hip-hop singles) it can make a weird kind of sense – actually preferable to its detractors’ mealy-mouthed bleatings about authenticity and integrity. We should be mindful of anything that seeks to make musicians pay dues, impose a hierarchy on inclusion in pop merely down to vocal ‘talent’, indeed any orthodoxy that makes us forget what a confection pop is. But the recording angel surely has to sound like an angel, has to have a sense of battle with the humans within it – too often we find, listening to modern pop and r&b/hip-hop in particular, autotune inflexibly sitting on weedy-assed beats, shining like a fake Rolex in a suitcase, blinding the eye whist dropping a glistened turd in your ear. You can’t polish it, no matter how reverse-double-bluff-with-salko be your hipster manoeuvres.
Porn fatigue starting to nag, sap your energy to keep hearing. So let’s start setting some rules here: RULE 1 – rappers should stop singing. Don’t sing rappers. Rappers, do not sing. The singing has to stop for those of you who are rappers. Y’know you rappers who sing? The singing rappers? Yeah, you. Sorry and all that, I know some of you have tried really hard but you can’t do it. Give it a rest. Anyone can rap (look at all the singers who think they can) but not everyone can sing. It’s your chronic reliance on autotune to fill the gaps in your melodic abilities that’s making much black pop feel so foil-on-the-filling nasty right now. Harmonies, multiple voices, are pop’s sweetest sound but autotune roboticizes their creation so predictably, fatally removes ALL trace of humanity – no matter how devoted you are to electronics and synthetic textures, without the sense of some moment of human volition/decision behind it pop simply doesn’t work. Spector, Meek, Derbyshire, Czukay, Macero, Quincy J, Moroder, Orridge, The Bomb Squad, Timba, Dre all knew it is an utter mistake to think there is ‘nothing natural about recorded music’. Without something natural, there is no recording; there is only demonstration, a tour round the desk, a spod’s snortling glee from the depths of the manual. Technological exploration/abuse is only progressive when directed by heart or head, when it’s kinda afraid but insatiably curious, when it wants revolution (e.g. scratching) or release (e.g. distortion). The only emotion you can consistently connect with autotune is smugness about the program’s performance, pride in the presets. And, crucially, when the machines are being binge-fed entirely unimaginative lazy-assed tunes to correct, it’s no wonder how much hip-hop now you just can’t and won’t remember even if/when it’s huge.
The new kit, & crucially too many producers’ lack of imagination with all that doodaddery, have served to make much ‘urban’ in oh-ten an identikit chrome blob, orbited by tricksy voices solidifying nothing. And it’s not just harmful for US pop when r&b is in such stasis, it’s harmful to any music for whom r&b is an historical, ever-influential touchstone.
& the frenzy of the version-flood isn’t entirely necessary. So let those obsessives like Triple Exe & Waxfiend filter this shit for you, but fer chrissakes don’t ever cock an ear AWAY from Jamaica, cos you’ll probably be missing some of the most vital, invigorating pop music being made on the planet right now. Just like you did last year with British hip-hop. Details anon. Re: dancehall I declare Autotune reprieved. Just. Next month all this will be irrelevant. And that’ll be the next turn in the story. Be there.
Written By: Neil Kulkarni
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