Return to Sender

What an incredible proliferation of Autotuned vocals we’re being subjected to in this day and age. Seriously, aren’t we over it yet? And we haven’t heard boo out of Cher in God-knows-how-long (which is probably a very good thing…) since she started this whole fiasco with her abhorrent single ‘Believe’ way back when. Yep, this whole Godawful trend was kickstarted by that fine piece of work. Sure, Autotune had existed for quite some time prior to that but it was used rather more sneakily, as a tool for crafty producers to make their underwhelming clients sound a little closer to acceptable. But ‘Believe’ was the first time Autotune had ever been used so brazenly that it ceased to be a band-aid and became an effect.

And now quite literally every song you hear on mainstream radio is tuned. Even perfectly competent singers like Lady Gaga (love her or hate her, the girl can sing) are tuning their vocals just so they can sound like everything else that’s selling, which leads me to the concept of Time Stamping. I’m sure lots of people have been aware of this concept for ages but the first person I ever heard talking about it outside of my circle was Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. Time Stamping is something Trent is smart enough to recognize and avoid, and something which pretty much everyone in Pop right now is up to their necks in.

The idea is that when a certain sound becomes popular and everyone jumps on the bandwagon, you end up having an absolute saturation of that sound. What inevitably happens is people eventually get so sick of hearing that sound that there’s a backlash and it becomes a trend to not use said sound. The result of this is that anything made that utilized that (now outdated) sound is Time Stamped. So in the years to come, the moment someone hears an Autotuned-to-fuck vocal they can laugh and reminisce about the era we’re currently in, hopefully with the added glee in knowing that no one in their right mind would ever do that to their vocals ever again.

Some classic examples of Time Stamping come to mind: that ultra-reverberant snare drum sound that saturated productions of all genres in the eighties, the immensely tacky synth patches that were used in every early nineties techno song, the General MIDI sound of the programming on every Industrial record from 1981 onwards, the tape-flanging effect that was discovered by a Beatles engineer and subsequently used on just about every hit song between 1967 and 1969… At least The Beatles had the foresight to use it subtly and so not detract from the timeless quality their catalog from Rubber Soul onwards has.

Some artists have used Time Stamping to their advantage by bathing their productions in certain tones so as to immediately give the listener the feeling that they’ve heard the song before, or to dredge up nostalgic feelings of their childhood. Some of the more tasteful examples of this would be M83’s Saturdays=Youth and Goldfrapp’s Black Cherry, both of which draw from eighties Synth-Pop. Indeed, the eighties probably had more Time Stamping than any other era – take any classic record of the time (Tears For Fears’ immortal Songs From the Big Chair, for example) and three seconds in you’re aware that it could only have been made in the eighties.

I guess if we take nothing else from this, we can rest assured that Autotune will eventually be considered “uncool” - here’s hoping it’s sooner rather than later!