poptimists | Autotune and Blue Notes

Thought the Poptimists might be interested in a conversation that's brewing over on my Tumblr re: Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie decrying Autotune's desecration of the blue note -- those are notes in a scale that are close to key notes -- the root, the third, and the fifth, but a half-step or so off, creating a distinctive bluesy sound.

Here's what Gibbard said:

"We just want to raise awareness while we’re here and try to bring back the blue note… The note that’s not so perfectly in pitch and just gives the recording some soul and some kind of real character. It’s how people really sing."

I called him (in a reactionary and not 100% honest way, as Matt Fluxblog pointed out) "racist" for implying that he was in any way right to judge the soulfulness or lack thereof of modern pop music. I don't actually mean that he's a racist, of course (in the same way that it's reductive to call Disco Sucks people "racist" for denying the cultural merits of disco), but my point is that he seems to be talking about a specific strand of Autotuning. I find it hard to believe he's decrying the lack of blue notes in, say, Lady Gaga (even though he'd be wrong since there ARE blue notes in just about anything you might care to call "a symptom" of Gibbard's diagnosis here).

Matt's critique: "Really? A racist? Are you actually gonna be that stupid, Dave?

There's two kinds of autotune, really -- the kind that T-Pain and Kayne do, which is a valid artistic style, and then there's the kind you get on the more bloodless pop records, which just feels empty, generic, and soulless. I think Gibbard probably has more of an issue with the latter, and his position comes more from wanting people to own their voices rather than sweeten it for the market.

But look, if you want to be a reactionary, go ahead!"

My response was that Gibbard's not TALKING about the latter style of Autotuning, since that would require Gibbard to believe that "bloodless pop" (not sure what that encompasses, exactly!) is capable of achieving soulfulness and that the only thing stopping it is Autotune. Whereas I could easily see someone making the (bankrupt) argument that "R&B once had soul, but now Autotune has robbed it of its soulfulness."

Anyway, the funny thing is that Ben Gibbard is wrong no matter how you slice it: T-Pain and Lady Gaga BOTH employ blue notes frequently. One thing that makes it difficult to notice the blue-ness is that many of their songs are in a minor key, or the blue notes themselves aren't hammered but merely suggested. When T-Pain sings "take it out your pocket and show it" in "Get Money," he's going between the fifth and the fourth note of a minor scale. The note in between those, which Autotune hits for him when he doesn't actually sing it, is a blue note, a raised fourth. When Lady Gaga sings "I just can't shut my Playboy mouth," she ends on a flat seventh, a blue note, but in a minor scale that note is a normal note in the scale. But the overall effect is of singing a blue note -- it's just not what Gibbard has in mind when he thinks "blue note." (Another reason I think he's more likely referring to T-Pain than Britney Spears.)