Sunday, July 26, 2009

Death of Autotune



"I know we facing a recession, but the music y’all making going make it the great depression."
Hip Hop is dying, the music genre is going the way of Jazz, Blues, and all the other Black American forms of music. It may still be the voice of the people around the globe but in the US corporate hip hop no longer sounds like the wide creativity of our urban centers.
This is anti autotune, death of the ringtone,
This ain’t for iTunes, this ain’t for sing alongs.”
Autotune is what artists have used to correct songs when recording. It helps if the artists who go flat on a note correct in production.

As artists have become more pop person than actual talent it has been turned up. It allowed Ashlee Simpson to get famous and Paris Hilton to pretend she can sing. It was famously used by Cher and now it is being employed on every Hip Hop song on the corporate radio.

But this is more then just Autotune this is calling out the future of Hip Hop. The corporate media is only making music that literally all is the same. It doesn't cover the wide breadth of urban society that Hip Hop once spoke to. Yes there was gangsta rap, but Hip Hop had funny DJs, call and response, dance hits, political calls to action, personal pleas mixed in with different artists and often on a good record. B.I.G could talk about how poverty wanted to make him kill himself to getting up on beautiful women in the club. It was the personal experience with the bravado of the street that made him so good.

Today its superficial bullshit, with rhymes that don't even make sense anymore. With lessons that NO ONE can relate to, and images that not even the artists themselves believe in.

Autotune represents this, it took the Rapper out of Hip Hop and made everyone into T-Pain, a mix of empty Rap with bad R&B over the tract by the same person.
You rappers singing too much, get back to rap you t-paining too much.
What J is calling out is the industry. He is saying get back to what made Hip Hop the voice of the street. Good beats over ill poetry we call rhymes.

My only worry is it may be to late; Hip Hop may already be dead and we are just arguing over how its slow march will look like.

Defenders of the current Pop culture boy band Hip Hop claim that this is simply where the genre is going.

But with complete corporate control of the industry this isn't simply a convergence of chance that ALL the rappers sound the same. This is what happens when a few very rich White elite men control urban art.

They make it a caricature, make it look like the fantasy land they believe Black culture to be, so they can sell this false image to White surburban kids. If they can also sell that image back to Black America and tell us that is what we look like, even better.

I mean Black America would never make a song "Whip It Like a Slave," but White corporate executive men would.

I’m a multi-millionaire so how is it I’m still the hardest here,
I don’t be in the project hallway talking about how I be in the project all day
That sound stupid to me, if you a gangsta this is how you prove it to me.
This is actually a great song by Jay-Z I only hope he follows it up with a real album aimed at taking back the game. Or Hip Hop may really be dead.

http://blackjew.blogspot.com/atom.xmlRSS Digg!

1 comments:

Brochures said...

IMO, there's no such thing as a dead genre. It's only waiting for the next big artist that will put it on the map again. As for hip-hop, there are actually a lot of artists under that genre, but like you said, most of them are too mediocre.