alt Hacker NewsI remember in the late 00s when making fun of autotune was a common joke, and a way to attack "bad" or "lazy" singers / musicians. Probably just because some bands were using it stylistically (T-Pain most notoriously).
It was around the same time there was a backlash against the (rather egregious) use of Photoshop in advertising. But for better or worse, in both cases, the use of these and similar tools have become ubiquitous, just in a way that's more subtle.
Nowadays, hearing a band that isn't pitch corrected and quantized to all hell is refreshing, similar to seeing an actor with imperfect teeth. It feels like, for probably a whole host of reasons, almost every art form has been trending toward removing all the imperfections that make human art feel "human" and interesting. I don't expect this will get better now that we have AI.
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I just looked up that Shaboozey song on Youtube, because I hadn't heard of it and wondered how different it might sound from usual modern pop. I liked the start of it - not modern-pop-styled at all. Then after a few lines of the verse, the autotune hit me like a brick in the face. Autotune feels like it hurts my ears. It's like nails on a blackboard. I wonder if there's a non-Autotuned live recording of it somewhere - refreshing would be the right word. Probably not though, even live recordings have the life Autotuned out of them.
> I remember in the late 00s when making fun of autotune was a common joke, and a way to attack "bad" or "lazy" singers / musicians. Probably just because some bands were using it stylistically (T-Pain most notoriously).
I always thought T-Pain and Cher did it as a way to help normies hear the autotune that was everywhere in that moment.