ICONS: Patti LaBelle's Gospel ABC

Passion Pit's "The Reeling"

For Wanda & Steve (cuz I think they'd like this):

Passion Pit - The Reeling from phantomcolor on Vimeo.

Mashups: Pogo's "Expialidocious"

Did I post this already? Don't think so...have loved it for the last several months:



It's less a true mashup (which mixes multiple tunes) than cutting something musically apart and reconstructing it. Whatever it is, I think it is quite brilliant!

Stunning

In my humble opinion, it doesn't get much better than this:



And no Auto-Tune in sight!

FAIL! Whitney Houston's "I Look to You"

The breathless raves that have greeted Whitney Houston's first album in six years have really gotten under my skin and I've spent a few days trying to sort out why this is so. At heart, I think the massive lovefest greeting this release reveals the cynical (i.e. solely profit-driven) nature of the American music business these last many decades. Whitney, Britney, and Mariah are nothing more than corporate brands; that none of them can "sing" in a way that I define that word, means nothing more than I'm a lonely audiophile curmudgeon shaking my fists at their lavish success to no avail.

Truly, though, there seems to me something profoundly wrong with an industry that celebrates a performer who spent the last decade destroying her voice (likely through drug abuse) and making a public ass of herself (doodie bubbles, anyone?). No amount of slobbering press can change the effect of listening to Whitney's album: that is to feel that what's left of her once-powerhouse (and justly celebrated) voice is auto-tuned throughout the entire album. How this is supposed to sound different than an insipid, sing-along Karaoke disc is utterly beyond me.

A quick lesson on auto-tune, for those of you who have no clue what I'm talking about. As defined by Wikipedia: Auto-Tune is a proprietary audio processor...that uses a phase vocoder to correct pitch in vocal and instrumental performances. It is used to disguise inaccuracies and mistakes, and has allowed many artists to produce more precisely tuned recordings. The term "autotune" [also refers] to pitch correction technologies...being used to subtly change pitch, with some settings it can be used as an effect to deliberately distort the human voice.

The most familiar--and one of the most exaggerated--examples of AutoTune (or vocoder) usage in pop music occurs in Cher's "Believe" (1998). In the video below, the first blatant use of AutoTune comes at the 0:36 mark with the lyrics "...can't break through" :

Cher - Believe


If you think it sounds like Cher is singing through a tin can from the moment she opens her mouth, you're not crazy, but that's not necessarily AutoTune usage; it could just be a producer's effect choice. I initially loathed "Believe" and was really jarred by the AutoTune-d verses, but I'm a rigid, change-resistant Leo (a fixed sign, as the astrology buffs will attest); what do I know?

"Believe" was, of course, a massive worldwide hit, and obviously Cher's producers were onto something with that sound and everybody and their dog began to flaunt the use of AutoTune on their tracks. Especially dance tracks, where it often comes off as a fun vocal sound effect. Flash forward 10 years, and performers at the top of the charts include T-Pain and Daft Punk, both of whom rely heavily on vocoded technologies to achieve their signature sounds. Were these artists to sing in their natural voices, it's unlikely we would know who they were (and we'd likely tune them right out.)

To this day, recordings that rely too heavily on AutoTune sound to my ear like Cylons from TV's Battlestar Galactica in the 1980s:



"Believe" is an easy target but it's the best one I know of to indicate a seismic shift in the usage of AutoTune in American pop music. AutoTune (and, no doubt, earlier recording technologies) had certainly been used to tweak vocal imperfections for decades, but the guiding rule seemed to be "do no harm" to the vocals in question. Use such tweaks sparingly and no one was likely to elicit that a given singer had been assisted in the studio.

Helping a vocalist stay on pitch electronically quickly becomes a slippery slope. I'd posit that the more electronics are used to "enhance" a given track, the more remote the end result for the listening ear, the less "human" the quality of the final experience. Think of listening to any number of New Wave bands from the 1980s: Eurythmics, New Order, O.M.D: great bands, all, but their music (even if not AutoTuned) is awash in electronica and part of the experience of their music is a smooth, chilly remoteness. Now think of Maria Callas--or Billie Holiday--two great, terrifically "imperfect" voices with cracks and crevices, voices that communicate great urgency and sorrow in a way those New Wave artists simply could not deliver.

Call me a purist, but I think if you're going to call yourself a great singer (or if the industry or your fans are going to celebrate you as such) then you should sing with the voice god gave you. And if you've built your career on the wonders of your vocals, you might want to do what's necessary to protect that voice, no? Lest your brand suffer irreparable harm? Which brings me back to Whitney.

The release of Whitney's new album, "I Look To You", coincided with a "live" television performance in Central Park, hosted by the smarmy sycophants at ABC's "Good Morning America" (paging Diane Sawyer; urp.) I put the "live" in quotes because unlike GMA's usual performance series which is actually broadcast live to East Coast viewers, while a performer is performing in real-time, ABC apparently agreed to Whitney's team's demands that the concert be pre-recorded on Tuesday afternoon for a Wednesday morning airing. This doesn't bode well. Aside from suggesting doubts that Whitney can actually still perform live, you can bet the audio for the Tuesday concert was being touched up within an inch of its life before airing on Wednesday.

I watched part of the Wednesday concert (for whatever reason, I can't look away from this train wreck) and I have to say: Whitney sucked. I admit that I find her personality kind of repellent: her addict's swagger (and deep denial) has been apparent since the skin-crawling "crack is wack" TV interview she granted (to Diane Sawyer, natch) in 2002.



As creepy as I find Whitney's imperious public persona, I should also point out that she's delivered the goods in live performance as recently as 2004, at the World Music Awards where she performed a 7-minute set of apparently live vocals, concluding in a pretty kick-ass rendition of her (tired) monster hit "I Will Always Love You" complete with impressive trills and riffs in true grand diva fashion.

For GMA, she opened with her new single, "Million Dollar Bill" but to say "she sang it" would be a stretch indeed, since she spent most of the time shouting "I love you too"s at the audience and letting her (far more) talented backup singers do not just the "heavy lifting" (i.e. hitting the high notes that Whitney only dreams of reaching ever again) but letting them do ALL THE SINGING! She didn't even pretend to know the lyrics or bother singing much outside the chorus. Instead, Whitney spent her time waving at the audience like she just woke up and noticed a bunch of friendly peasants outside cheering on her back lawn.

OK, the album: strictly MOR-radio approach (no surprise there) but the famous Whitney pipes are ravaged. "Reedy" is the first word that comes to mind, with a new smokiness in the quality of sound (think Gladys Knight). In my opinion, reedy is a quality Whitney could easily take to the bank, but to do it she'd need to be able to sell a song without relying on all the electronic assistance of the studio; as GMA proved, she's not able to do that. She's older, so of course it's perfectly natural that her range would fall somewhat lower, but it ultimately sounds restricted to a lower range, or more accurately: constricted. Even some of the biggest wet-kiss reviews have suggested that her voice is "more glottal" (I think that is supposed to be a nice way of saying we can hear Whitney's windpipe in action. That's for damn sure; at times it's hard not to worry that all systems are gonna shut down and she's gonna face-plant on the boards of the recording studio.)

She does stretch up occasionally, notably in the first single "I Look To You" but remember that Cylon-quality of AutoTuning? It's there in abundance, through all her transitions and certainly any truly sustained notes. The human voice just doesn't do perfection, despite generations of singers attempting it. If you're listening closely, you can hear Whitney's tones being run through that tight electronic funnel, holding a given note within the prescribed range and yet stripping that essential quality of "real". Sure, she must have gotten up there close to the notes she needed, but clearly not with either the strength or accuracy required for a listenable recording.

Are there exceptions? Maybe. The Cylon-essence falls below my ear's ability to identify it on a few moments of "I Didn't Know My Own Strength" (an entirely predictable Diane Warren-penned power ballad) although each time she rises up to grab a higher note or build to real vocal power, AutoTune returns to nudge Whitney where she needs to be pitch- and tone-wise. The raggedy, non-Cylon edges on this track are the most appealing part of the entire album--for those brief moments I can believe she cares enough to bother selling the song to us, but only for a second or two at a time.

The real AutoTune jackpot, though, comes via a pointless cover of Leon Russell's "A Song for You," one of the tackiest songs ever written. Everyone born before 1980 knows the song, and nearly everyone has sung it: Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark, The Carpenters, Aretha Franklin, The Temptations, Peggy Lee, Andy Williams, and (best ever) Cher. This is clearly Whitney's bid for the boys at the local gay discos (do any still exist?) and I've no doubt we'll be downloading umpteen pounding mixes within the month. Still, she might as well have sung it through a SIMON game, so laughably are her vocals vocoded into slick, electronic "perfection".



Most of the album bubbles along pleasantly enough for a dentist's office; it's certainly slickly produced. But it's throwaway stuff; completely generic. There have been far more distinguished albums from any number of R&B, pop, and soul singers in the past year, certainly dozens within the past 6 years Whitney's been away. And hold up: this is a woman who is delivering just the second album of six due on a $100 million recording contract!

And therein lies the rub for me. As with the degree of overcompensation paid to professional football players, I just can't buy in. (Yet I did buy in: I bought the album so I could review it! Who can spell S-U-C-K-A-H?!)

I get it: brand Whitney doesn't have to deliver quality--she just needs to deliver heat for the brand, and if she now does that better via tabloid headlines and farkakte performances or mediocre albums, so be it. There are gazillions of people in the world who want to get swept up in her saga and get off on forgiving her her perceived sins (or want to get swept up in the ratings the brand is sure to deliver; Oprah this means you, Miss Open-Your-Season with the first big Whitney interview.)

Yet none of that means Whitney remains either a compelling (or even adequate) singer. She's not. It's painful to listen to tracks from "I Look to You" and follow them by listening to tracks from Whitney's heyday: "Saving All My Love For You"? "I Have Nothing"? Homegirl had pipes for days (and they weren't yet crack pipes.) She wasn't pitch perfect on those early tunes, by the way, but she could sing the f**k out of the phone book. What a voice! It's the imperfections in those recordings that are so spectacularly fun to listen to, even the songs that are total pop tripe.

Maybe I'm just being ornery, but there are legions of singers who have performed decades longer than Whitney and taken care of their instruments (Keely Smith, Patti LaBelle), many who were stymied and abused by the music industry and somehow rose from the rubble (Jimmy Scott, Bettye LaVette), even those who crapped all over themselves but managed to make the best of the broken voice they were left with (Marianne Faithfull) and yes, some have had reasonable careers--though many more haven't--and every one of them is far more deserving of that $100 million.

I get it; I really do.
Life isn't fair and it often sucks.

But so does Whitney Houston.

Great Covers: David Choi sings Britney Spears' "Womanizer"

Auto-Tune the News!

I love these guys (those geese are cooked!)



You wonder what's wrong with this country? Look at Sen. (gr)Assley's "charts"--THIS is what they do in Congress all day? Why I oughta...