The Awesome Button

My Jeep was in for rear caliper upgrades last week, forcing me to log time in a 2002 Dodge Intrepid SE. On the back of my second stint with this model, I declare Chrysler's LH platform the worst since the K-Car. Interior build quality is horrifying, the transmission is a throwback to the days of freewheeling, and cornering response beyond a 15° angle is at par with a Gulfstream 232 on Strawberry Shortcake BMX wheels. This thing had less than 15,000 miles on it, and I not only peeled but spun out taking a 90° turn at 2800RPM.

The greater downside to this experience was having to deal with Boston-area FM radio. Our dominant "alternative rock" provider is the commercially-operated/Brown University-staffed mega-station 95.5 WBRU out of Providence, which, along with foundering behemoth 104.1 WBCN, has ruled the region since it went alternative/modern rock in 1988. A smaller-wattage outfit in Boston-proper, 101.7 WFNX, has a better reputation for truly "alternative" playlists, but suffers from atrocious regional coverage as they are intelligently broadcast from the top of One Financial Center, meaning that +50% of their signal goes out to sea. All of these stations are embarrassments to their historical reputations; their playlists have barely changed over the last fifteen years. I guarantee that if you listen to WBRU for at least one hour, you will hear Jane's Addiction's "Jane Says", Nirvana's "Lithium", and/or the Smashing Pumpkins' "Today". That is a mortal lock.

The inability (or unwillingness) to draw lines around the guitar rock of the 1990s has bestowed post-Nirvana acts with a kind of infinite shelf life, an extended perception of their modernity. This stasis has been gnawing at me for weeks, as I've been more frequently exposed to recent material like Apocalyptica's "I Don't Care" and—am I really typing this?—Red Jumpsuit Apparatus' "Face Down" at my local gym. This stuff is not very different from 3 Doors Down or Godsmack, though it is markedly dumber and more obvious, lyrically speaking. But I'll come back to this argument later.

The programming sequence that really set me off began when WBRU's DJ played Linkin Park's 2001 single "Crawling", a song and band that have been FM radio mainstays from day one. But I noticed something new listening to "Crawling" yesterday, something that had never stood out before: the secret to their sound is how high in the mix they seat Chester Bennington's whisper track.

Whisper tracks are a not-at-all uncommon sweetening technique designed to accentuate raspy tones as well as consonant-inflection in well-to-overproduced music: the singer whispers the lyrics, and they're mixed beneath normal-volume takes that mostly drown them out. The entire passage is more detailed for the concentrated high-end from the whisper, and the wave-shearing from their breath. In "Crawling", though, the whisper track is audible as a separate stream of sound. Once you recognize this, it completely unseats the sonic palette of the piece, standing out to the point where you can distinguish between Bennington's mouth in your ear and the song itself, somewhere else in stereo space, like a second radio in the background. Pretty radical and apparently intentional; I've gone through their other singles and this technique's used on all of them ("Numb", "In the End").

Sonically, Linkin Park's approach was a static, flattened-out redux of the Ross Robinson formula: track upon track of detuned 7-string buzz-saw barre chords offset by dark "breakdown" flourishes. No more cookie-cutter than a Beatles track, structurally, but hugely reliant on a particular set of effects: octave/pitch shadowing, gating, excited compression and of course DRC. This ushered in a frighteningly monotonous production conformity that continues unabated.

I tend to get analytical when I'm stuck listening to obvious music like Linkin Park's, to focus on what made it stand out, made them popular. Because if you look back at rock music's biggest successes since the 1980s, it's surprisingly not been about good looks. Predominantly, it's been about attitude and content. Which, you would think, could be viewed as a positive trend, artistically speaking. Limp Bizkit, Staind, and the Deftones did not boast traditionally "sexy" front-men, though theatrics and image were key components for acts like KoRn and Slipknot. Chester Bennington's appeal is debatable, but like most of these bands, Linkin Park's success stems from the reception of their self-martyring, self-righteous rage, which still resonates today. That is why FM radio can play rock music from ten years ago alongside new releases without any notable incongruity: the unifying undercurrent shared by artists as apparently diverse as Nickelback and Evanescence is that they all speak from the perspective of an indomitable victim.

There is a wonderful quote I carry with me, from a film director who summarized his unhappy experience with a particular Oscar-winner thus: "When you constantly make yourself out to be a victim, it is easy to feel righteous. This breeds baseless indignation, and finally arrogance." That selfish, solipsist arrogance has infected all forms of popular music over the last ten to fifteen years, and the sustaining factor is that there's an audience for it. I don't know which end of that see-saw is more depressing, but rebellion, independence, confidence, longing, and especially happiness are increasingly absent from pop anthems. No artist more dramatically and singularly embodies this shift in popular culture than Eminem, who was interpreted and sold as a rebel by the media, but was in fact a whining adult child.

As "Crawling" drew to a close, my music-anticipation cortex expected something from the '80s to lighten the mood. "I Melt With You", "She Sells Sanctuary"—one of those great, grey Anglican classics. Instead, the DJ came on and said, "Here's something new by a band called Phoenix, this song is called '1901'," with an unmistakable air of "These guys are from England and who gives a shit."

I spent more time in 2007 with It's Never Been Like That than I had with any new release since Radiohead's Hail to Thief. Significantly, I did so for personal rather than editorial reasons. Enjoying the band from that perspective, I am consumed by violent urges when conflicted lifestyle consumers guised in critics' robes try to drive a wedge between It's Never Been Like That and Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. I don't know what the fuck is going on with American society that ABC and NBC are nurturing this Most Insufferable Dickhead contest between Dan Harris and Brian Williams, but somebody with half a brain and a legitimate business pedigree needs to sit both networks' marketing directors down and slap the shit out of them. There is no real or even social currency at stake in this arena.

Phoenix were just as good three years ago if not better than they are on Wolfgang Amadeus. I'm drawn to argue as much by the exploding chorus of "Napoleon Says", and the bum chord as it ends; by the deliberate and pensive "One Time Too Many" (nicely improved as "Rome" on the new LP). The chord-crushing crescendo that closes "Long Distance Call", and Thomas Mars' divine delivery of the line, "I remember this young guy died and I took his part." The last band I submitted to this completely was probably the fucking Smiths. Obviously Phoenix are not in the same class, but they are driving an ambulance with rock n' roll in the back, on life-support. And I'm chasing it along with the rest of you.

What struck me about the transition from Linkin Park to Phoenix was that, despite my ebullience where this band is concerned, it didn't work, and I had thought that it could, hoped that Wolfgang Amadeus would break through to radio. At the very least I thought it would elevate them away from dead-end subservience to film soundtracks, the unquantifiable collapsing feedback loop of the Internet, and/or Apple, whose propagandist thought-crime appropriation of clever young bands—as well as said bands' eager submission—has disturbed me the entire decade.

It's still possible, but "1901" sounded so small and peculiar in the context of FM radio, it was as if the song were turning its back to me, turning its back on the listener. Or that it was embarrassed to be there, like Phoenix were sharing a bill with Kenny Chesney, propped up in front of an unreceptive audience. Initially I felt bad, because they can't possibly lift the intellectual siege FM radio is under and are doomed to flop in that space. That hopeless resolve, of a band undefeated but unaccepted, was somehow audible as the song wound down.

Without introduction or comment, the DJ cut to "My Own Worst Enemy", by Lit. Using Phoenix, my current proxy for rock n' roll optimism, as a bridge, he'd taken me from downtrodden social rumination to ground-zero for the running debate on honesty and integrity in music. Studio vets and gear-heads know exactly where I'm going here, but, a lot of people don't.

"My Own Worst Enemy" is the first volley in the Auto-Tune war, as far as its use to mask a lack of talent. Pundits who broach this topic always invoke Cher's "Believe", which is historically probably the best talking point on dramatic early use and breadth of impact. Sasha Frere-Jones' meekly conspiratorial piece in the New Yorker last year rolled out said barrel, though to his credit, S/FJ is always up-front about the ubiquity of pitch-correction in studio environments going back to the Beatles, and favors the most agreeable defense for its use: it costs a lot of money and time to bang out perfect takes (even in the digital age, you're only saving on rewind time).

"Believe" is a massively-layered house anthem, a synthetic, ecstatic dance track; it uses Auto-Tune as an effect, an accentuation, not as some underhanded trick to boost Cher beyond her limits on her twenty-third album. Lit's "My Own Worst Enemy" did exactly that: it employed Auto-Tune egregiously to sell a band past its talent. This was a toes-in-the-water moment for popular music, and nobody blinked. "My Own Worst Enemy" sat at #1 on the Billboard Modern Rock chart for 11 weeks. To listen to the first pitch sweep over the line "Please tell me why" today, it sounds like something out of the movie Tron. The digital squelches on the words "please" and "me" are hilariously obvious, to the extent that their producer tried to mask them with bursts of guitar feedback. In concert, Lit not only used Auto-Tune, but avoided the line in question whenever possible by begging the audience to sing it for them. Ten years ago, nobody knew the audio footprint of auto-tuning, and Lit got away with using it for the wrong reasons. But Lit did not start this fire: Auto-Tune was already rampantly in use.

When viewed within the scope of its intended purpose, Auto-Tune is a simplification, a rationalization of more arduous processes that have been in place since the 1960s. Most of the second-wave "Girl Groups", for example, relied on multi-tracking to improve their lead vocals, if not the entire product. The clearest example is probably the Shangri-Las, who are also my favorite group of this era for a variety of reasons (including the clever if sometimes cynical marketing that surrounded them). Mary and Betty Weiss, and especially the Ganser twins, were fine singers, but were barely past puberty at the peak of their fame. Physically and experientially, none of them were studio-class vocalists. The Weiss sisters' tracks were the most notably swelled by double-tracking, equalization and reverb, which had a desired melodramatic effect, but on cuts like the definitive "Out in the Streets" and more disposable "What's a Girl Supposed to Do?", one can deduce that Shadow Morton was also smoothing out some rough edges. This is the same reason George Martin double-tracked and phased John Lennon's vocals (at Lennon's request): producers used studio techniques to augment a singer's talent, not manufacture it wholesale. My go-to case for the benefits of studio enhancement is Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven is a Place on Earth". There's a lot going on in those vocal tracks. And it's all awesome.

Pitch correction is a distinct action, separate from the kinds of sweetening techniques I've mentioned. Christmas With the Brady Bunch, from 1970, is the most famous example of early experimentation with pitch correction going too far. The album was loudly remarked-upon at the time as an unsettling listening experience, and even casual consumers complained that the children, who had no musical training, sounded "like robots". I'm not aware of any technical breakdown of how the pitching on this record was accomplished, but I would assume most of it was based on tape speed manipulation, which in a slippery-slope sense is not all that different from a band tuning to a particular key nearer their singer's range. The Smiths, invoked earlier, did this constantly; almost every band has. The problem facing the producers in charge of Christmas With the Brady Bunch was that the kids couldn't carry a tune, meaning that their pitch would swing wildly from phrase to phrase, word to word. And so tape speed, ultimately, was not a practical solution, as you would need to constantly vary the speed to match the kids' mistakes, and mapping that with notational scotch tape and paper time grids was an untenable undertaking. Instead the producers punted, and did the best they could to set the vocals in tune using chorus, phase-shifting and tape speeds that shifted the music into the their sustainable ranges.

Auto-Tune, Melodyne, and their software ilk are descended from a specific progenitor that vastly improved producers' ability to buttress bad singers: the Eventide H910 Harmonizer. Harmonizers and pitch-correction plugins are all post-effects applied to a clean signal in order to bend the waveform algorithmically, on the fly, and produce an end result, in real time, that is artificially closer to pitch. Harmonizers entered the music landscape not as a means of vocal correction (because they weren't complex enough to handle this transparently), but of correcting bum notes in instrumental passages that would be difficult to re-record completely, or punch in on a subsequent pass. These devices took care of little mistakes, and saved everyone a lot of time and money. Their use crept into concert rigs, helping guitar gods of the 1970s give their fans more for their money. Gradually, as music became more about personality than performance, harmonizers were used to sinister advantage, helping very good-looking people pass themselves off as singers.

The distinction is clear: a guitarist plays an incredible solo with a couple of flubs; the harmonizer acts as a safety net, and rescues them from having to do it all over again, possibly making a different and more overt mistake, ad infinitum, studio bill mounting. And provided the player is worthy of their status, it improves the less-forgiving concert experience for fans. For the artificial element of pitch correction, the dexterity, memory and creativity behind the solo is largely intact.

As applied to vocals, harmonizers helped make household names of preening new wave poseurs and misogynistic hair metal oafs who otherwise had no shot on the radio. It would be grossly unfair to crucify a single artist for the sins of their age, but there's a one-two punch that shortens the discussion nicely: Andy Taylor's "Take it Easy". This single launched Taylor's solo career following the cocaine-fueled breakup of Duran Duran in 1985, and his confidence-building turn in one of the decade's most successful super-groups, The Power Station. Andy Taylor, it should be noted, did not sing in either band.

Drunk on the L.A. rock scene of the mid-80s and egged on by more-than-drunk Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones, Taylor snorted enough powder-bravado to attain egomaniac Nirvana: "Anything I do is great, because I am great." Since it was never mentioned or aired without the prefix "from former Duran Duran guitarist Andy Taylor," name recognition and rampant chart manipulation launched "Take it Easy"—probably the fiftieth or sixtieth rehash of T. Rex's "Bang a Gong" to that point—into the Billboard Top 40. That it peaked at #27 is actually a glaring failure in 1980s terms.

Even to the casual listener, Taylor's vocals sound wet, though that's not an adjective casual listeners are likely to use. In empiric terms they sound "airy" or thin in some way. This is because all of the vocal tracks have been equalized to move their sonic footprint away from the instruments, because the instruments are in tune, and the singing is not (the two waves would conflict more obviously if they shared the same frequency response). In addition, the vocals are endlessly multi-tracked, so that bad notes in one take can be overshadowed or blurred by another (it's unlikely that even a mediocre singer is going to hit the same wrong note every time). In addition to the equalization, quintupling, reverb and delay fattening the sound, a harmonizer is clearly repairing pitch fluctuation on a number of tracks underneath the overall vocal bed. When applied to a talented singer, these types of techniques produce the Jeff Lynne/Mutt Lange wall of vocal unity. In Andy Taylor's case, you are polishing a sneaker.

The punchline in Andy Taylor's defense is that producers used the same effects less overtly on Simon Le Bon, which Ian Little has gently confirmed.

Those warrants served, harmonizers did not allow someone who couldn't sing at all to pass for Simon Le Bon. In changing the pitch but not the timbre of a person's voice, Auto-Tune in large part does, and that simplification is what's stirred up so much debate, because to the untrained ear, well-produced pitch-corrected music in 2009 is very hard to recognize. Which means it is much harder to know whether or not someone has talent and took a shortcut, or relies on Auto-Tune to literally perform for them.

Just as baseball endures the black mark of a Steroid Era, rock music's reliance on performance-enhancing software should be demarcated. And we can easily pin down Year One: if you look at the Billboard Modern Rock chart for 1999, every song on it employed Auto-Tune. Every one. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' Californication, which is the most-often cited example of the Loudness War's deleterious effect on rock, is equally suspect for its heavy reliance on Auto-Tune's transformation of Anthony Kiedis from an energetic punk-funk front-man into a crooning, circa-"Cry for Love" Iggy Pop facsimile. Sugar Ray used it some, and gave way to the bolder Crazy Town, who turned the dial up one more tick, because nobody noticed. Everlast got away with moderate use, begetting the more blatant Uncle Kracker. Pop-punk acts like New Found Glory and Blink-182, whose Enema of the State was dripping with AT, polished Lit's turd, leading us to Simple Plan and finally Fall Out Boy, who have completely relied on it for their singles. Almost everyone in the mainstream rock sphere has wrapped their fingers around Antares' knobs over the last ten years, but nobody seems to mind.

Instead, the outrage is focused on hip-hop, a medium that is not rooted in melody in the first place, relying on back-up girl chorus lines and empathetic, cautionary muses. Hip-hop is almost uniformly built in a digital vacuum, from looped samples, and generally speaking leaves nothing to chance. Mainstream hip-hop is a clinical, precise product, a platform for the celebrity of its author, and has been for quite a long time. For these reasons, Auto-Tune has a very different and more cynical implication than simply making someone sound "better," because it allows rappers to sing, to lay down melodies, which is to say it allows them to participate in a genre they never could before: R&B. Everyone in hip-hop recognized this, and that's why it's so out of control. Slow jams—ballads—are where the money is, and that's true of every genre. But every rose has its thorn.

Auto-Tune is well-past its saturation point as a media talking point in 2009, a divider marginalizing its users as money and/or fame-driven frauds, and elevating abstainers as instantly more intellectually and artistically honest. This predictable puritanic panic opened up yet another window of profitability and renewed relevance for Jay-Z, an unrepentant culture vulture since 2003. In the end, hip-hop will settle on a different novelty, technique or tempo, and in six or seven years, Auto-Tune will resurface as a cutely nostalgic prom memory. Artists on both sides of the argument will have profited from its oversaturation in the latter half of this decade.

In terms of the impact to the now-disparate genres of rock and hip-hop, I favor plastic surgery as the go-to analogy. With mainstream hip-hop, Auto-Tune takes a young starlet with an athletic figure and upgrades her from a B-cup to a DD. It's absurd, it's right in your face, and there is no pretense that anything natural has transpired. As applied to commercial rock music, Auto-Tune's evolution tracks a marquee beauty who had tasteful work done early enough that it seemed natural, but, as time bore down, relied on the knife more and more, to the point of tragic distortion..