A bit more on the death of pop music

I think I sort of went off on current pop yesterday. Just to clarify, the point I was making is that pop music today is not just bad, but jaw-droppingly stupid as well. I understand that it is very hard to be original in a pop format at this point in time, but for God's sake, you can at least try. I listened to the hits station again today and had the same reaction- could we have even a shred of originality here?

One of the reasons, I think, why this is harder than it used to be, and if I may go further, one of the reasons that pop music is collapsing, is autotune. For those of you who don't know or care, autotune is software that can take a vocal performance and match it to the music. The simplest versions just takes whatever note is coming out of the singer's mouth and move it to the nearest actual note, sort of like rounding decimals. There are more subtle versions too, but they all use frequency analysis to match pitch.

The problem with this is that it makes everything sound the same. I was listening to a song by a guy named Glen Hansard, who was the lead and the actual songwriter of the movie (now a Broadway show) Once. He has a good, but not great voice and a huge vocal range, and as I listened something struck me, unconsciously at first but then more overtly. I could here notes where he was slightly subtly off-pitch. It wasn't anything that sounded bad, but a human voice is not a pure tone, and it's the impurities that make voices individual. And I realized I was listening to an actual human being singing, not a computer generated simulation. And it sounded great. And it connected to me. And it felt alive.

You can't say that about most everyone you hear on the radio. The only pop star I'm pretty sure doesn't use it is Pink, which is why she is awesome and why she connects with audiences in the way she does. You hear the slightly off 1% and it makes the other 99% sound better.

!!!!

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