A video has been posted on Youtube matching Britney Spears performance
at her recent HBO special with what they (convincingly) claim
is actual unprocessed audio from her microphone.
The results are not pretty ... in aural terms at least.
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Britney shows plenty of skin and tackles the dance routines with the enthusiasm
of a poledancing cheerleader but all the while she huffs, puffs, mutters ‘omigods'
and sings along tunelessly to her own backing track.
This is the true face of modern pop.
In the studio, any pretty face can have a vocal spliced
(whereby multiple vocal takes are cut up and edited together to ensure only correct notes survive)
and autotuned (a process where notes are digitially moved up and down the scale
until it is perfectly in tune with the backing track) until it sounds like the most tone
deaf amateur can sing like a bird. Or at least like a robot, since it does tend
to lend a slightly synthetic tone to vocals.
Autotune has become such a standard tool that a producer I know even adds it
to vocalists who can actually sing, because he says it just doesn't sound
like a modern pop record without it.
Studios have always been the home of trickery.
The only rule is that there are no rules. But at least there was a time when the artist
had to be able to pull it off in front of an audience.
The live arena was where you separated the talented from the wannabes,
where true musical art was allowed to shine.
Now, aided by all kinds of triggering and sequencing, the worst singer can mime away
to their own vocals with a live band while demonstrating acrobatic dance moves
that should leave them as breathless as their salivating audience.
We all know this ... still, its amusing to have the illusion so cruelly exposed.
Many of the greatest artists of popular music can't really sing either
(Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Nick Cave to name a few).
But they never felt the need to pretend, they let their fragile authentic voices
carry the human emotion at the core of their art.
We get the pop stars we deserve. If what you really want is cheap sensation:
midriff, lapdancing and lowest common denominator machine tooled pop assembled
by industry hacks then what does it matter if the pin up of your choice
has the musical talent of an X Factor reject.
But maybe, just to keep the playing field level, we need a new advisory sticker
for our records: No Autotune Was Used In The Recording of This Song.
Neil McCormick
(Telegraph)
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