Auto-Tune being abused: Why every Kanye West and T-Pain song sounds completely ridiculous.
It was kind of neat the first few times, now it's just annoying.
It was kind of neat the first few times, now it's just annoying.
This completely the opposite of Kanye West's past work all the way back to Jay-Z's Blueprint album.
One big critique of Auto-Tune is that it kills emotion by making pitch too perfect.
You can't say this about 808s and Heartbreaks. The album sounds like nails on a chalkboard. And it's supposed to. The album was created in the context of him breaking up with his fiance and his mother dying.
You can call Kanye West a lot of things, but disingenuous is not one of them. The use of Auto-Tune wasn't meant to be disingenuous in this one particular case.
(I can't believe I just deconstructed a Kanye West album on Hacker News.)
It's an interesting sound, it's just overused recently. There's basically two ways to use Auto-Tune: the intended way, cleaning up the pitch of vocals; and as a deliberate distortion effect, a la T-Pain / Kanye's recent songs. The latter produces a very distinct sound that gets old, fast.
Thing is, people say it gets old because they think that all voices filtered through Auto-Tune sound the same, but that's not true. Kanye's voice through Auto-Tune sounds a lot different than T-Pain's, and you have to be talented to make it sound good. Can it be a cheesy effect? Absolutely. But if tuned correctly, can really add a cold, robotic color to a track.
Personally, I love it. Kanye uses differently than T-Pain and they are very distinct styles I enjoy.
It's a damn fun thing to play around with, too. :P
It entered my top 5 favorite rap album list, and I listen to a lot of rap. Maybe even number 1.
It is like a Pink Floyd album in terms of continual flow and quality, and I don't say that lightly.
I listened to his new album once and never again. It is great in terms of style, but trashed with the voice effects and over the top attempt at being 80's.
In the style of Zapp & Roger.