Saturday, February 12, 2011

#11: how to be unoriginal

popular music, nowadays, is becoming increasingly unoriginal because copying, synthesizing, and sampling are becoming being chosen in favor of good ol' creativity and hard work. and the main enemy to all of our hearing pleasure is - autotune(ing).

think of autotune as mcdonalds for your ears. autotune.. it automatically fixes and smooths out shifts in your pitch and tone - even if you don't have the remotest of abilities to discern pitch or tone. and that seems wrong. just like it's wrong to fill everything with corn and corn byproducts and call it food, because food, it is not. ergo, it's wrong to fill songs with autotunes and synthesized everything.

what  happened after bob dylan and  the beatles? where did the emphasis on quality go? because  everything i hear on the radio today is  aural garbage. and before you go and say  something like, "hyuk - but he'sa  justa talking  about them there pop musics". i  got one word for you - micahel. oh wait, that's ambiguous.. ahem, i got two words  for you - michael jackson.

and that's because even michael jackson - the king of pop, was so over reaching with his desire to make a stunning album that he and producer quincy jones created over 30 songs for thriller and then cut it down to 9. nowadays i don't even think artists like britney spears or t-pain spend more than 9 minutes in the studio creating their albums. and it shows.

if you are creative in this day and age, you're immediately relegated to the indie music genre. and that's not fair. "oh-em-gee. violins mixed with pianos mixed with a banjo?! that's so indie.. i'd rather listen to scintillating lyrics like, 'if i said i want your body now, would you hold it against me?'.."

but eventually and in reality, easy to listen cookie-cutter music will always win out over crafted lyrics and sound. why? because most commoners just want noise in their ears.. a simple extra value meal to digest. they don't want to spend their time or brain energy dissecting or evaluating what they're listening to. and that's a shame. a real shi-aauy-aowweaweeiia-aahaeem.

sorry, had the autotune on.

saturday musings

2 comments:

Great post. I agree and I've been feeling this way for the past few weeks... most of today's music is garbage. It bothers me there's a new generation growing up to the likes of shitty artists: Gaga, Ke$Ha, Bieber, B.E.P., etc.. It's sad when people hear a song like "I Got A Woman" and automatically think Jamie Foxx. Sometimes I wish I was born to a different generation, just so I could fully appreciate some of the best music I've ever heard. There's a wealth of great music out there that can be heard for free (thank god for YouTube); I challenge people to go find it, experience it, and share it. In regards to auto-tuning, Jay-Z says it best in his song D.O.A.: "Get back to [music], you're T-Paining too much".

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