Is Terrible Music Journalism Killing Music Journalism?
My entirely necessary comment:
Between the wild, link-baiting proclamation of the title and the fact that the rest is nearly a full year behind the most recent event mentioned, this article is horrendously simplistic.
“But wait, this is pop music. Isn’t it supposed to sound manufactured? And who cares? As it turns out, many people. Major labels’ sales continue to slump.” - talk about a leap of faith in logic. Auto-tune and the decline in music sales both started around the year 2000, so there MUST be a correlation! Forget Napster and music piracy and the recession!
Oh, and Jay-Z was rallying against auto-tune being used as a gimmick, which is NOT auto-tune in its entirety - in fact, Kanye produced about half the tracks on the Blueprint 3. Here’s a less one-sided quote from Jay-Z:
“”The guys who did it, did it great. T-Pain, he does great melodies. If you listen to Kanye, great melodies. If you listen to [West’s] ‘Say You Will’ or ‘Heartless,’ great melodies. [Lil Wayne’s] ‘Lollipop’ was a fantastic melody. Everybody can’t do it. Let them guys do it. They got their little niche, let’s move on. That’s just my opinion. I don’t know if everybody feels the same way.”
PLEASE, do your research and it might not come off so simplistically… there’s no such thing as pro- or anti-auto-tune - merely artistically effective and lazy uses of it. It’s a genuinely complex issue.
