The Other Kind of "Pop" Filter

Pop music has for a good long time been meant to be catchy, upbeat, and as the name implies popular. One thing that has become unfortunately popular with the advent of digital recording processes is auto-tune. I’ve got nothing against an artist fixing a take here, or using something to add a bit of flavor to a track in a new or innovative way, but it’s gotten to the point where our pop artists aren’t even singers. Our pop artists are just bodies in front of songs. Pop music went from being talented singers whose ambition was to become famous over an ambition to become accomplished singer/songwriters. 

I’m not saying everyone needs to be terrifically well rounded, and certainly a large number of people have established themselves as very popular artists without being particularly well rounded. However we are in the midst of a revolution of Milli Vanilli type acts. The difference between groups like Milli Vanilli and Ashee Simpson  and these modern pop artists is that the ones that are using auto-tune with such bold frequency is that when we hear vocal lines that clearly don’t belong to these artists, we accept it. When the boys in Milli Vanilli were caught there was a backlash, now if you’re auto-tuned to the point of ill recognition to the “singer’s” vocal line, you’re rewarded with a recording contract and a short skirt or tight pants. Ke$ha here exhibits her talent, but voluntarily will instead prefer to record songs like this and just get them fixed.

I may not have even become so frustrated with this trend until I was driving my fiancé’s Jeep a few weeks ago.  Two of the speakers in that car are blown, and having heard Ke$ha, Lady Gaga, etc. in my car (which has a nice, fully functional stereo) and then hearing them on blown speakers again for the first time in several months was an eye opener. These songs have gone through so many filters, and are so drastically digitized; I forgot the speakers were blown until I hit a song without much of these studio effects, but the biggest culprit is auto-tune. I like techno, and in fact have been playing with A Klokwork Kaos for the last few months, helping round out the sound and add some live instrumentation to the currently all electronic sound.  

What I really have to ask here is how does this happen? Most pop music recorded in the last few years has undergone such extensive filtering that it’s hardly music anymore. Last I checked, you need working speakers to hear music, but if you’re listening to pop radio you can get by with a couple of functioning coils and torn cones, you probably won’t even notice. The strangest thing about this, is that despite my distaste for how this has come around, I don’t hate this music, I just think that we’d be better off with artists  displaying their talents

Grammys and ranting.

After over a week’s procrastination and a series of conversations regarding the Grammys and the decision to cut back the number of awards they are offering as well as the inherent value of awards for musical accomplishments I’ve finally managed to figure out what to write about.

It’s somewhat interesting that the Recording Academy has decided to decrease the number of awards issued in this and subsequent years, going so far as to stipulate rules for further cuts in the future. They have decided that if an award receives fewer than 25 nominees for a year it will be withheld from the awards that year, and that if for three consecutive years that is the case they will terminate that award. With that said, let’s be realistic here, we’re not going to lose “Best Pop Solo Performance” any time soon, no matter who bemoans the notion that Ke$ha or Lady Gaga do not deserve awards for their musical “efforts”. We are instead apt to lose awards like “Best Small Ensemble Recording” or “Best Reggae Album”.  Two awards from categories that lost a number of awards this year, or literally could not lose another award while maintaining existence.

It’s newsworthy, it makes for reasonably entertaining TV, but really what do these award matter? When have you ever been a fan of something and decided that because it hasn’t won enough arbitrary awards, that it’s not cool enough anymore? It’s not just us as fans, how much difference does a Grammy make to most of the people winning awards during the televised sections of the award show? Does (I hate to reference the same artist twice, but she’s the best example I’ve got) Lady Gaga care about an award like this? No. She gave up being an exceptional pianist and a very strong vocalist to become a “pop icon” which, in all reality means that the money was more important than artistic integrity. She has become more famous for her use of synthesizers and a vocoder (for those of you who don’t know, Auto-Tune is a brand of vocoder, or pitch correction software) than she ever was as a proficient, and reasonably well known pianist. I don’t think most of us blame her; she’s doing something she likes rather than what she loves, because it pays better. It’s no different than if you went from a fulfilling but only reasonably paying job to becoming the figure head CEO of a company.  Would you then also need awards to validate yourself? No, you’d have boatloads of money. Why would you suddenly care what some only vaguely described body of critics and your peers think about you, especially if your peers were to include the likes of Brittany Spears, Christina Aguilera, Avril Lavigne, and Miley Cyrus. Every single one of them is attached to a genre that is solely geared toward making money.
 

Avril Lavigne’s current single What the Hell will not become a longstanding anthem in the vein of AC/DC’s Back in Black It is instead all but destined to be forgotten in 5 years time, while having made an absurd sum of money for the record company that happened to put it out. For me, as a guitarist/bassist I can’t imagine taking much satisfaction in receiving a Grammy, or any such award really. It may be because I like a large number of artists that don’t quite “fit” into the whole Grammy discussion, but it may also be that I don’t think that having a collection of people tell me I’m extra special this year would make me any more proud of my work. I have to imagine that when you hear a band trying to recreate a sound on multiple albums, that it’s either because the album sold so well the first time, they’d love to do it again, or because they were proud of that album, regardless of critical reception, it sat well with the artist.

The utterly arbitrary nature of these awards is one of the worst things about them. Metallica won the “Best Metal Performance” Grammy in 2004 for the song St Anger. That song is from an album that was critically panned, by a band that admits making a number of mistakes with the production of the album, and was stacked against songs that were much better received. Would you be proud of winning an award for something you did that even you openly admit is bad? The awards aren’t all bad, but overall especially in light of what kind of criteria is required to win an award (In Metallica’s case, a history of winning the aforementioned award) and the kind of artists that are being given the most air time, how could we say these awards really matter?