Realize It’s All Real: Auto-Tune is Not The Black Angel of Death
Which is more redundant: a crooning goon getting his a Vandross on…or a crate full of vocal samples cut-and-pasted to make a chorus because the artist can’t think of an actual hook?
Auto-Tune is used to sing hooks to make hit records. Scratched vocal hooks are used to make songs for the headz. So it seems, no?
This isn’t T-Pain vs. DJ Premier. I love “Above the Clouds” equally as I love “Good Life.” Same canvas, different brushes. Or rather same pictures, different signatures.
Jay-Z was right though: people are breaking into T-Mart and ripping every last piece of the Auto-Tune Collection off the discount racks. Everything must go! Especially in today’s economy.
It wasn’t always like this. Auto-Tune was new and fun and weird in 2006 when T-Pain, rapper turnt sanga, emerged on the scene talking about falling in love with a stripper, the basis for a new VH1 show and/or a modern updating of Kevin Arnold’s summer for the “The Wonder Years 2009” (Winnie Cooper was potentially pole-happy). Auto-Tune evolved into a viable and critically applauded tool by Kanye West for his 808s & Heartbreak album from last winter. In 2009, Ron Browz was reimagined as a robotic NYC hitmachine after laying low for years with his underground cred after memorable work with Big L and Nas.
And then, to quote one Marcus Burnett, “the shit just got real.”
And by real, I mean “tired, deflating, formulaic and seizure-inducing.”
But so what? That’s the nature of innovation: come out with X, which generates big Y dollars, and a bunch Z’s will emerge with X-1, X-2, X-3, and so forth (see: Comics, Marvel and the X-Men franchise for a literal interpretation).
My question is this: hip hop producers have been doing the “cut-up vocals on the hook” thing for years and years. Why is Auto-Tune vilified when another beat making/hook crafting formula has been beaten to death over a longer period of time?
More people who have pillaged the Works of Mart Church of Vinyl Stabbath than there are legitimate, tangible Washington Nationals fans.
Sure, most of these guys today can’t sing.
And most these DJ’s can’t cut.
In fact, most of these producers/DJ’s are cutting up the same Royce 5’9’’ “Boom” acapella for the hook, or the same Jay-Z Black Album bars, or the same low-quality MP3 Biggie lines with the wack EQ and the overcompressed hiss of the backing track still in place. Just to keep it “hip hop”?
If every third song on urban radio today had choruses comprised solely of small phrases spit by Big L, Fat Joe, Jadakiss, and M.O.P., would there be any backlash, much less a theses nailed to the wall of Hot 97 by Martin Luther Bling?
The cut-up vocal hook is DJ Premier’s signature. He isn’t the first cat to use the formula, but he perfected it. It’s his contribution to the art form. Pete Rock has used it as well, along with DJ Revolution, Swizz Beatz, Just Blaze, Statik Selektah and countless others. Most hip hop from Houston sports hooks built entirely on screwed up 2 bar vocal hooks from other records. So why hasn’t Premo nor his ilk caught any flack?
Does hip hop win when people use time tested, user approved techniques? I think so.
No idea’s original, there’s nothing new under the sun—and that was over a Barry White break.
It doesn’t necessarily make it better or worse, it’s just people using new tools. Yes it’s overkill today, but in my glory days of Backpackin’, even I was getting tired of the 16 bar lyrical wizardy followed up by…vocal scratches for 8 bars…16 more bars of virtuoso gearikal/tearikal/lyrical/yamsearikals followed up by…vocal scratches for 8 bars.
Is DJ Premier more hip hop than T-Pain? Yes, because T-Pain is an R&B singer and Premo made “Nas is Like”—argument over. But is the scratched vocal hook more hip hop than auto tune? Hell, the hook for Bel Biv DaVoe’s biggest hit is the Bomb Squad going to work on a Kool G Rap vocal. Poison-poison-poison-poison-pa-pa-pa-pa-POISON! And that was new jack swing! No one cried foul when “Still Tippin’” introduced the screwed and chopped vocal hook to the masses in 2005. And here we are 4 years later, having fun in the studio pulling vocals down three to four octaves, breathing new life into catch phrases from other records. Every day, we’re hustlin’.
I guess the consensus laid out on Jay’s “D.O.A.” is that no, Auto-Tune, you can’t come out and play with us hip hoppers anymore. We don’t want you or your kind around. You’ve run your course in about three years. Sure, we can’t get enough of producers swiping pieces of “Ante Up” for the umpteenth time. “Make ‘em envy!” and all that good stuff. But the lines have been drawn: no sangin’ or T-Painin’ it with the Cher pre-sets from “Do You Believe”. No more artistic decisions a la “Love Lockdown” to use the software as a mask for heart break. No more Ether Boy drops. No more Roger Troutman homages. Sigh….
R.I.P. Auto-Tune.
2006-2009
