It's hard out there for the pimps who like Auto-Tuning: I have come to the defense of the practice and it's practioners for a while now and most of the time my peers look at me as if I suggested that we all drink the Kool-Aid. I came down hard at the beginning like most tried and true hip hoppers, decrying the practice as somehow the antithesis of what real hip hop was about. It didn't help that the first exposure to Auto-Tuning that I actually remembered was T-Pain "Buy You a Drink", which I thought was a reprehensible tricking anthem. It also bothered me that it sounded precariously close to the vocoder, which I didn't really like that much either. Any manipulation of the voice seemed to take away from real singing or good gracious, real rapping.

Everything changed when I started to listen to a lot of old house and disco, which features a gross amount of vocal manipulation. The inclusion of a measurable amount of post-rock, a genre where the words seemingly melt into the instrutmentals to be almost indistinguishable also openned my mind to the possibilities of the voice. Then I learned that the first known use of extreme Auto-Tuning was done by Cher, not a hip hop artist. Then it all suddenly clicked when I was listening to Jethro Tull, of all artist. Vocal manipulation had been in music for ages, I had just been ignorant of all the possibilites about using the human voice as a musical instrutment and not merely the vessel for deliverance of an important messages. So by the time that Kayne and Wayne started to experiment with Auto-Tuning, my viewpoints had changed.

Kayne and Wayne also pointed out the difference between Auto-Tuning and the use of a vocoder: while the vocoder changed the nature of the singer's voice, Auto-Tuning is a tool used for correction of a singer's mistakes. Everyone who uses Auto-Tuning is going to sound different depending on the character of their voice. While Wayne's guttural drawl becomes a high pitch wail under the influence of Auto-Tuning, Kayne's more measured use of the tool reveals a sense of hidden emotion behind the robot voice. By the time T-Pain's "Circus" hit late last year, I was ready to accept what he had to bring to the world, although that was most helped by a slight change in tone from the artist also.

I started to think of the matter as another tool such as a wah-wah pedal for guitarist. Some guitarist overuse the wah wah pedal and some of them use it poorly. That doesn't mean that the tool should be blamed. This is sort of like when people got angry at Dylan for going electric: you can't slow down technological advances, even in music. This is just another example of the "lazy genius" of blacks, a term that I got from a description of chopping and screwing, which takes no more skill than Auto-Tuning, yet doesn't suffer the same amount of backlash. I'm not going to say that every use of Auto-Tuning is a masterpiece: I adhord Akon, really dislike "Alcohol" by Jamie Foxx, and still get migraines when I listen to the early T-Pain singles. But I'm not going to right off the practice wholesale when it has so many applications.