Death of Auto-tune

[neomanxl]

So Jay-Z recently released a new street single for his upcoming album.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8z13AjI8n4I

So what do AnimeSuki members think about Auto-tune and its recent rise in popularity?

[Westlo]

Jay's my fav MC but this comes across as him hoping a backlash against autotune starts soon so he can be seen to set another trend. Not feeling the beat that much too and I was excited to hear it was by No I.D at the start. Honestly if I was going to listen to commercial hiphop at this stage I'll rather listen to Drake's upcoming album than Jay-Z's Blueprint 3. Jay's last album in American Gangster was great but I don't think he'll surpass that from this point onwards.

As for autotune I don't mind it in small doses, club songs and for some hooks but stuff like Kanye's album is way too much.

[wOoOzZy]

Autotune is fine when used for minor corrections to an overall good performance. But it's gotten to the point where producers put someone who really can't sing on a track and make them sound flawless. When used like that it's disgraceful to real singers and dishonest to the listener. As far as using autotune to get that 'robotic' sound like T-Payne/Kanye, it was cool in the 90s when K-Ci & JoJo did it. Now it's just a gimmick.

But I'm a musician so I probably feel differently than someone who's a casual listener and doesn't give a f*** if the person they're listening to can actually sing.

As for the song, it's good. It's obviously meant to be kind of dissonant and out of tune in places which fits the song. I'd probably like it more if I was a fan of rap.

[TooPurePureBoy]

Does this mean Kanye is out of the will?

[Dilla]

Kanye is producing some of The Blueprint 3 and he helped make sure to remove any songs with auto-tune from the album. So, I guess that's a 'no'. I think that Kanye West's last album was an experiment anyway, though I could be wrong. It's just that he said that he had the college-boy theme going as a tetralogy that ended with A Good Ass Job, so 808s and Heartbreak's release threw me a bit of a loop.

Originally Posted by Westlo

Jay's my fav MC but this comes across as him hoping a backlash against autotune starts soon so he can be seen to set another trend.

Yeah, that does sound like something he would do( in fact, I think that is exactly what he is doing), but he has said that he appreciates the tech well enough, but he thinks that too many people is using it for a crutch, which is correct. And he said that the last straw was when he saw a Wendy's commercial use Auto-tune, so yeah, I get his reasoning.

I think the popularity of Auto-tune is already starting to fall even with mainstream music listeners. 808s and Heartbreak, while it still went platinum, was Kanye's lowest selling worldwide released album to date. And T-Pain's Thr33 Ringz album only went gold and sold less than half of his buys from Epiphany.

It makes for a nice hook, which is why Lil' Wayne and T-Pain is in every song as a featured artist this days, but full songs and albums of it is way too much.