Auto-Tune Forever

2008 was no doubt the year of Auto-Tune. Since T-Pain’s 2006 hit release of I’m N Luv With A Stripper, I had heard Auto-Tune gradually emerge in the popular music scene, mostly through the voice of T-Pain himself, but also a few others. 2008 rolled in with a plethora of Auto-Tuned tracks, performed by artists all throughout the Hip Hop and R&B arena, and also into some other genres. With so much saturation of one unique sound, it was bound for backlash, and that came as soon as 2009. It’s still routinely heard on the radio this year, but what about the future of Auto-Tune?

Hip Hop has been a part of my life since I can remember. I didn’t always like it. Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre were household names in the early 90’s, at least in my neighborhood, but I still didn’t listen to them until I got older. Perhaps it was even as early as middle school when the musical style started to grow on me, with interesting acts such as Busta Rhymes and some of the underground groups like Blackalicious. I never took mainstream Hip Hop too seriously, and I often hated on it throughout high school, despite the fact that everyone was sternly into it. Then the mainstream stuff really started to grow on me after I started dancing to it, but that may be owed to the acceptance of grinding, where a teenage boy could get a whole lot of excitement from a girl with no shame in front of everyone in a club or school dance. I still love the mainstream stuff now, but more often than not, it’s for the same reason I like to watch professional wrestling. The dramatics, the flashiness, the phony machismo. It’s simply entertaining and with no doubt, hilarious.

Hip Hop’s popular sounds have always been evolving and recycling. The Crunk sound seemed to take over following the success of Lil Jon & The Eastside Boys in 2003 with Get Low. 2005 and 2006 stuck out to me as a time when underrepresented sounds in the Hip Hop world came into the main stage. First off was Houston’s unique flavor of Hip Hop, which notoriously includes Screw music.

Chopped-N-Screwed, Screwed-N-Chopped, Sliced-N-Slowed, Slowed-N-Throwed. Whatever you want to call it, it involves slowing down records to a low bpm and throwing in some mixes and blends and other forms of turntabalism to give a real slow and spaced out sound, going hand in hand with the popularity of sipping prescription codeine based cough syrup recreationally in Houston. DJ Screw pioneered the sound in the 90’s, and it continued locally until it reached the entire nation with 2005’s Still Tippin’ by Mike Jones, Slim Thug, and Paul Wall.

With Crunk’s persistent success and the mainstream’s recognition of Screw music, it was only a matter of time that the Hyphy movement seek popular recognition. The Oakland Bay Area’s veteran rapper and slang-banger, E-40, pushed for this movement’s acknowledgement with 2006’s Tell Me When To Go featuring Oakland associate rapper Keak Da Sneak.

It wasn’t long for these two distinct styles to fade out of the limelight. 2007 was dawn to yet another era, bringing in more electronic music based sounds into the world of Hip Hop and R&B. T-Pain released his second studio album, Epiphany, that summer with several hits on radio play well into 2008. Akon’s mutual interest in this new sound brought in even more hits of the same fashion. You could say that this was a mere revival of the talk box sound that was made popular in the 1980’s by artists such as Zapp & Roger, and its later revival in 1995’s California Love by 2pac and Dr. Dre; but this robotic voice sound has stepped into a more sophisticated age, where artists and sound engineers can experiment further than was possible before.

There seems to be little awareness to how much Auto-Tune is actually used in the music industry. Regardless of the formal software, techniques have been used in studios to alter the tune and tone of singers for decades now. It’s just more blatant now that Auto-Tune itself is being used as an instrument, where one’s voice is clearly altered and artificial sounding. Studios don’t always have the time to record so many takes of one song so long as the mistakes are at a minimum. Techniques like speeding the tape up were used in more primitive times, but nowadays, Auto-Tune is used in just about all music that is heard on the radio.

Auto-Tune began to be more clearly used as an instrument around 2002 and 2003 in the Dancehall scene, which can most notably be heard in songs like Beenie Man’s Dude and T.O.K.’s Gal You Ah Lead. T-Pain used the sound more subtlety in I’m N Luv With A Stripper than you may recognize in his later songs; and thanks to T-Pain, by the end of 2007, the sound was in the consciousness of the entire nation with hits such as Bartender, Buy You A Drank, and Chris Brown’s Kiss Kiss.

I was working at a Chinese restaurant in Amherst Massachusetts, doing deliveries to UMass on a snowy winter night in early 2008 when I turned on the radio to hear Lil Wayne’s Lollipop for the first time. Although given the unsophisticated nature of the song, it blew me away so to speak, and left me wanting more Auto-Tune, and especially more Auto-Tune coming from Wayne himself. By springtime of that year, I was even hearing G-Unit utilizing Auto-Tune for the “T-Pain Effect” on their release of Rider Pt. 2.

The reason I started this blog was to document the road trip I took out in the American West with two of my best high school buddies in June of 2008. We rented a mini-SUV from Thrifty in San Francisco, and by pleasant surprise, the vehicle came equipped with Sirius Satellite Radio. We kept it tuned to Hot Jamz (now known as The Heat on channel 50), the popular Hip Hop/R&B station, where a deluge of Auto-Tuned voices beat on our eardrums.

Another hit from Lil Wayne’s The Carter III, Got Money featuring T-Pain, had both Wayne and Pain going hard on the Auto-Tune with constant radio play all that summer. The next song we might have heard on the radio was Yung Berg’s The Business featuring Casha; a thug love duet, all of course, in an extreme state of Auto-Tune. The remix to Lollipop with an Auto-Tuned Kanye West might have come on after that, followed by Rick Ross’s The Boss with T-Pain, and then perhaps I Luv Your Girl by The Dream, which uses a much smoother form of the so called “T-Pain Effect.”

Snoop Dogg surprised me that year with Sexual Eruption (or Sensual Seduction), a fast paced club track with an overwhelming use of Snoopy singing in Auto-Tune. There was also a nice Auto-Tune surprise in Young Jeezy’s Put On, which also featured Kanye using the effect, like in some sort of prelude to 808’s & Heartbreaks. T-Pain and Wayne wrapped up that summer with their sugar daddy anthem, Can’t Believe It, where again, the two complement each other with their different interpretations of the sound.

2008 also seemed to be the year I heard about strippers in music a little too often; yet another trend brought on by 2006’s I’m N Luv With A Stripper. Strip-Hop, if you will, seemed to blend perfectly with Auto-Tune, most noteworthy being Baby Bash’s Cyclone with T-Pain, and yet another T-Pain feature, She Got It by 2 Pistols, and arguably as well as Flo Rida’s Low which also features Pain. Dolla’s Who The Fuck Is That and Three 6 Mafia’s Lolli Lolli (Pop That Body) also subsume the blend of strip club themes and T-Pain’s glorious use of Auto-Tune on the chorus.

Some say Kanye West took it too far, making an entire album in Auto-Tune with 2008’s 808’s & Heartbreaks. Kanye’s rapping style has always bored me. His production has done no less than impress me, so when he replaces his mundane flow with some Auto-Tuned singing, I find his music to be a lot more tolerable.

2009 welcomed even more Auto-Tuned bangers. At this point it was like everyone was doing it. Still though, the Auto-Tune headliners seemed to be the usual suspects: T-Pain, Akon, Lil Wayne, and Kanye West. 2009 also proved that Auto-Tune isn’t necessarily easy and can be done wrong, prime example being Ron Browz on tracks like Jumpin’ Out The Window and Pop Champagne featuring Jim Jones. I do enjoy Pop Champagne, but his style is a little too monotone for Auto-Tune. DJ Webstar seemed to make the same mistake with his release of Dancin’ On Me, also featuring Jim Jones, which sounds almost identical to Browz’s take on the style.

T-Pain came back with some new tracks of his own in 2009, like the bittersweet Chopped ‘N’ Screwed featuring Ludacris. He was also featured on some of the heaviest Hip Hop and R&B tracks of the year like Jamie Foxx’s Blame It, Maino’s All of the Above, and DJ Khaled’s Out Here Grindin’. And who can forget The Lonely Island’s I’m On A Boat? Probably the best goofy white-boy satire of Hip Hop ever created. The SNL trio executes rap clichés to a T, and the best part is that it’s not a direct parody of any particular song. T-Pain on the hook reinforces the clichés of the time, and he does a hell of a job making fun of his own style.

All the while, Lil Wayne brought Auto-Tune to his own record label, Young Money, on quite possibly the most addictive track of 2009, Every Girl, where everyone on the song employed the technique to the max. Drake, or Jimmy from Degrassi as I like to call him, debuted on Young Money in 2009 with another Auto-Tune summer jam of the year, Best I Ever Had.

Bringing Auto-Tune out of the Hip Hop/R&B spectrum and into the pop/dance scene, the Black Eyed Peas introduced I Gotta Feeling and Boom Boom Pow. Flo Rida’s Available, another dance friendly track applied Auto-Tune to its female vocals. Then, Lil Wayne introduced another side of himself with his new rockin’ persona, continuing his Auto-Tune techniques with a rock twist on Prom Queen.

By this time, I had heard many complaints about Auto-Tune. I, in no way agreed, but people seemed to think that there was this cheapened lack of talent involved in using the technology. But it’s used in such a blatant, distorted style, that why would anyone be fooled that it’s the artist’s authentic voice? Like I said before, Auto-Tune is used on just about everything on the radio, but it’s hardly noticeable because it’s used in the way it was intended, and not as an instrument. And regardless, when was the last time a radio-friendly artist sounded anything like they do on the album when they perform live? Sound engineers will lay down forty tracks of vocals over each other to get the sound they want for a chorus or even a regular verse.

It was Jay-Z who had to “call out” Hip Hop on Auto-Tune, with his late-2009 release of D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune). I guess he was getting tired of hearing every artist try it out, and perhaps it was too late for him to jump on the bandwagon. Jay-Z prides himself on being an innovator in the scene and for “calling the shots,” like ending certain fads, the next here being Auto-Tune. But I say shame to Jay-Z! He’s not in on the fun and perhaps he legitimately doesn’t like the sound, but why be such a bossy prick about it? Because you want people to remember your significance? Jay-Z has had some good tracks and albums for that matter in his day, and in fact, some of my favorite Hip Hop songs include some of his collaborations with The Nepunes, Timbaland, and Jermaine Dupri. But that’s as late as 2003, and he hasn’t impressed me with anything since then. His voice has never been all that nice or cool sounding. His lyrical content can be clever, but I can really care less when it’s in such a boring, repetitive styled flow like in Empire State of Mind. He can thank Alicia Keys’ for making that song somewhat tolerable. He claims to be some sort of modern day Frank Sinatra, but pales in comparison in actually sounding good. Sure, he can memorize hundreds of verses and not write a thing down, but who really cares when it comes out flat. Hell, Auto-Tune would probably help the guy. I just hate that he still try’s to call these shots and that people still ride his [lap] and listen to him. I’m still hearing Auto-Tune in a lot of the music coming out this year, so all in all, maybe he just wanted the petty satisfaction of being the first to call it out publicly.

Ke$ha, gaining great popularity this year, has employed Auto-Tune flagrantly with her chart topping hit, Tik Tok, and some other songs such as Blah Blah Blah, Your Love Is My Drug, and Boy Like You. Catchy tracks, but her voice can be quite obnoxious, which I fear will bring down Auto-Tune with it when she fades from popularity. This of course, might only apply to the pop music arena, so perhaps the party will continue in Hip Hop, R&B, and electronic dance styles. Still this year and late-2009, Trey Songz’ Say Ah, Birdman’s Money To Blow, Snoop Dogg’s Gangsta Luv, and Lil Wayne’s On Fire have done quite well on the charts. Not to mention the release of Lil Wayne’s Auto-Tuned rock album, Rebirth. T-Pain even released a short cartoon film titled Freaknik on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, about a mythical singer/rapper whose voice is most always in Auto-Tune.

Although the style may begin to fade in the U.S. by the end of this year, it’s already spread overseas, explicitly gaining popularity in Korea in 2009. Tons of K-Pop tracks are all ‘Tuned out nowadays. Brown Eyed Girls’ Abracadabra, SHINEE’s Ring Ding Dong, ZE-A’s Mazeltov, and 2NE1’s Fire just to name a few. (And damn, I did not realize just how gay K-Pop is after watching the videos for both Ring Ding Dong and Mazeltov. Is this a lady-boy contest?) As these things go in Asia, what’s popular in Korea and Japan will gain popularity in China. Already, Taiwan’s boy-girl group, Dance Flow, has caught on to the trend, releasing Come On! Come On! this year. Now it’s the Mainland’s turn, so hold your breath.

Auto-Tune isn’t for everyone, but its distinct style has permeated the music industry in the past few years. It’s already peaked, but the style remains in many songs this year, mostly on the hook. I don’t see T-Pain going away anytime soon, and I can’t imagine his career being successful without the effect. But then again, when’s the last time you heard Nate Dogg on a Billboard Top 10 Hip Hop/R&B chart? Hip Hop’s hook-masters have to be retired eventually. Pharrell is hardly featured anymore, and it wasn’t that long ago when he was a commonly heard on the hook, especially when he was already producing the track as the Neptunes with his buddy Chad.

I remember in the 90’s, even as a child, hearing synthesizers in the 80’s style would always make me giggle, thinking it was so cheesy. Perhaps Auto-Tune will meet the same fate soon. I love 80’s synth now, and it’s definitely made a comeback, so fortunately, Auto-Tune could have a similar prospect if it becomes passé in the near future. But perhaps it won’t become passé anytime soon. Distortion on the guitar hasn’t gone anywhere, and this is arguably the same type of effect, just used in a more programmed method for the voice. And I really hope it does remain, because I still can’t get enough robotic voices in my music. I say Auto-Tune forever!