If you look at the Billboard Top 100 anytime soon, you’ll find popular songs such as “Like a G6,” “Only Girl” and “Just a Dream” dominating the top 10.
As popular as the songs have to be in order to clear such a benchmark, their respective “artists” display minimal skill and cover up their talent with studio “tools” like Auto-Tune.
Producers use electronic instrument tracks and the program made famous by T-Pain to generate musically bland and skillfully barren songs for the public to “enjoy.”
Thanks to Auto-Tune and studio electronics, popular music is little more than a pretty puppet show these days.
A glaring example is when Kanye West displayed his beautifully mediocre abilities on a Christmas episode of Saturday Night Live.
West chose to perform his songs without Auto-Tune because it was a live performance. He sang the song “Heartless” without sounding smooth, articulate, melodic or generally good. When he sang “Love Lockdown,” he was consistently out of tune and had to defer high notes to one of his female backup singers.
He was at the same level as the guy who sang “Chocolate Rain” on YouTube years ago.
As a musician, West should be tremendously embarrassed, which he may be, but he is tenaciously popular because of his flashy personality and controversial media appearances.
Herein lies the problem.
Because the uneducated ear of the public doesn’t hear talent, skill or difficulty, the “artist” who can produce songs with the most extreme shock value and similarity to other songs gains the most popularity — like Lady GaGa.
Axis of Awesome, a comedy band, displays how similar many songs are in their piece “Four Chord Song.”
It goes through a tremendous number of excerpts from compositions that follow the same chord progression yet reached the masses with magnificent popularity.
The band highlights the similarity between productions like “Don’t Stop Believing,” “You’re Beautiful,” “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” and even “Let it Be.”
Musicians don’t need to be original anymore.
They can just change lyrics and melody, and millions of fans will gobble up the familiar garbage put out by the so-called “artists.”
Originality is out of the picture now, but talent counts for something.
If “artists” are singing other people’s songs really well, they deserve some credit for their musical ability and practice. But with electronic banks of instruments and Auto-Tune, skill, talent and practice are not so necessary.
Look at “Auto-Tune the News” on YouTube to see my point.
I could record a conversation between David Vitter and his escorts, Auto-Tune it and draw the attention of millions of viewers on YouTube to the catchiness of the hit rather than to the substance of the music.
Substance, depth and talent have dissolved in the acid that is public opinion, which drives the musical economy.
Music is unoriginal and superficial at best. Talent isn’t rising to the top of the music industry.
There are numerous students in our School of Music who can sing far better than Kanye West or Alicia Keys or play piano better than OneRepublic.
Unfortunately, the countless hours they put into practice don’t matter because they don’t know the “right people” or want to “sell out” by producing mediocre music that compromises the skill and work they’ve invested.
My colleague Marcelo Vieira played and sang an interpretation of “Clarity” by John Mayer for The Daily Reveille’s opinion staff recently.
I would listen to him any day of the week before Mayer because of the raw emotion, passion and skill evident in his playing.
It’s easy to spot those lacking talent when broken equipment exposes their true voices or songs make people sound like melodic robots.
But, because of the prevalence of Auto-Tune and electronic instruments, we can no longer tell who are actually practiced, good musicians — even in live performances.
Matt Lousteau is a 21-year-old mechanical engineering senior from LaPlace. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_Mlousteau.
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Contact Matt Lousteau at [email protected]