Bdbgs Rpup #1: Ben

It's "wrap up" and "rip up" for a reason -- Tumblr's a good place to get ideas out (quickly) but it's not really a great place to have, say, hundred-plus deep comment threads that may or may not completely debunk, expand on, or otherwise comment on a main post. I still view the format as a kind of glorified post-it-noting, so I'll try to keep the Real Blog going to at least summarize what's been up in my notes roughly for the previous month, though I'll do it intermittently for Jan-Feb. (In no particular order.)

1. So apparently when you use the word RACIST to describe a public gesture from an otherwise unremarkable, just-doing-his-thing sorta guy, people get upset. Which I guess is understandable. But here's what happened:

Ben Gibbard and Death Cab for Cutie went to the Grammys with blue awareness ribbons on their lapels. Gibbard had a series of brief, somewhat confusing remarks about how the cause was Autotune Awareness. Autotune, he claimed, was destroying the "blue note," and subsequently music's soulfulness.

This was, charitably, a regrettable way of putting it. First, he's wrong -- Autotune, even in its most robotic overdrive modes, doesn't destroy blue notes. His point about taking away the "human" quality of the voice is I suppose valid, though the interesting thing about Autotune is, in comparison to other vocal manipulation methods, how much of the original voice it actually preserves. So (and again, this is being charitable) it may be that Ben and I just see things from different perspectives: to me, Autotune, when used as a tool to purposely defamiliarize the human voice, is fundamentally electronic, like a drum machine, and its humanness is a secondary characteristic. So I see it as bringing the human into the realm of the electronic (NOT suggesting "electronic" and "human" are opposed, more like suggesting it's finding an interesting middle ground between the "grain" of the voice and something that is wholly electronically manipulated). Whereas Ben sees it as the electronic sullying something that was (presumably) once human.

Thing is, this wasn't an issue of taste: as Mike Barthel pointed out, "he’s making a big, agressive, public show of his taste, with the ribbons and all, walking into a room full of people who do use Autotune as a kind of nyah-nyah anti-Grammy statement." Those people in the room are important: Marc Hogan suggested in the comments box,

Why is it any more about race than it is about, say, your stance on big, poorly run corporations and what they think people will buy? I think that's more the cultural value at play here-- individuality vs. homogeneity, mom and pop vs. Starbucks, the sound of a person singing in a room vs. the sound of a person singing in a room tweaked by a particular, conglomerate-preferred bit of software that takes out some of those personal idiosyncrasies (idiosyncrasies which are still intact on lots of old records, by white people and African Americans and every other race and ethnicity).

But as I see it, the people in the room choosing to use Autotune in this way don't necessarily have any industry mandate for what they're doing; if the industry "pushes" for anything, it's the same tropes of "humanness" and "soulfulness" that Gibbard is embracing here: Simon Cowell's bread and butter, the belief that "raw talent" needs to be harnessed with an industry apparatus to create something friggin' huge. It's what gives us 90's Mariah/Whitney throwbacks like Leona Lewis and, perhaps, the post-Amy Winehouse surge of neo-soul. Autotune experiments, by comparison, feel a bit fringey -- they happen within the industry, once artists are comfortable enough to try our new sounds without worrying about industry input. T-Pain's rise still seems like a bit of a fluke, and of course Kanye's experiments were seen widely as an auteur move, while Lil' Wayne, it would seem, gets to do whatever the fuck he wants at this point.

There is an industry standard for Autotune that reaches beyond these artists; that is the use of Autotune as touch-up device. However, that use of Autotune doesn't connect with what DCFC are suggesting here (oblique as they are about it):

"A little use is OK, but there is a difference between ‘use’ and ‘abuse,’" Gibbard said. “And I feel we’re getting to a point of abuse at this point.”

Of course, as little sense as the gambit makes in the first place, it makes no sense when we project common (usually assumed and unfounded) arguments about Autotuning (e.g. "it does the work for singers," "bad singers sound good," etc.): when used "appropriately" one's voice doesn't sound manipulated at all. It has absolutely no perceptible bearing on how notes are sung, etc., whatsoever.

So let's go back to those "people in the room": T-Pain, Kanye, Lil' Wayne, say. Gibbard is, essentially, telling them that their own aesthetic choices have robbed their music of a certain human element, of a soulfulness that music might have otherwise had (if they had just bothered to "learn how to sing"). I really don't think it's completely misplaced to find an interesting discussion to be had about socioeconomic and racial implications of what "soul" is in this case (somewhat ironic, since stuff like the use of blue notes were not considered "valid" in music when they were actually being practiced outside of a mainstream music culture, and very well might have been met with a "you should learn how to sing properly" argument at the time, but I won't speculate on it since my knowledge of the history is way too weak to support the argument).

And if we really wanna talk about the racial disparities at the Grammys worth talking about, the only categories that don't seem to have any representation from non-white-male type people are rock categories, including Best Rock Song, which Death Cab was nominated for. This is probably not all that interesting/significant, though; in fact, aside from rock acts, white men are kind of a minority as far as artists go at the Grammys.