My mom always said, “My grandmother used to tell me, ‘Don’t believe everything you see, and only half of what you hear.’” I used to think my grandmother was Einstein until I realized that pretty much everyone’s Mom and Grandma said the same thing.
I’d like to revise the saying for modern times, “Don’t believe everything you see or hear. There’s probably someone altering it digitally.”
I just read that both Faith Hill and Jennifer Hudson lip-synched their performances at the Super Bowl.
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/WinterConcert/story?id=6788924&page=1
OK, call me naive. Ricky and I overwhelmingly thought Jennifer kicked Faith Hill’s a**. Now I no longer have respect for either performance.
I’ve been bitching about the “perfection” of sound in modern times and the abuse of the pitch correction devices for awhile now. It should be noted that the INVENTORS of the pitch correction device stated that they invented it to save time in the studio. When you’re recording a passage and just one or two notes are out, you don’t have to run through the whole thing again. Just fix those 2 notes and you just saved valuable studio money. The Inventors noted that the biggest abuser of their invention was the country music industry, that now uses people full-time to do nothing but adjust vocals 8 hours a day.
My question is this: What is the price we are paying for our perfection? It’s the same principle as the modeling industry airbrushing out cellulite. Gals, we all know it gets to you. Whether it hits ya at 14 or 20, you’re going to get cellulite. It’s a freaking fact of life. But you won’t see it in a magazine. It’s airbrushed out digitally. BOOM! Perfect Body.
If you listen to recordings from the 80s and earlier, you can hear flaws in recorded voices. Especially pre-1960, you can hear flaws in recorded instruments. But you won’t hear it on Top 40 radio today. It’s altered digitally. BOOM! Perfect Recording.
Here’s my beef: We give up our humanity when we give up our imperfections. It’s like that Twilight Zone episode where everybody looks exactly alike. What kind of a world would it be where our differences are erased? Have we forgotten that those differences are what make us who we are? They are what make us unique. They are TRULY what make us beautiful.
Does anyone remember Jennifer Grey from Dirty Dancing? She got a nose job and ended her career. That “big” hooked nose was what made her unique. It truly made her beautiful. She became “beautiful” and became just like another “beautiful “girl. Nothing was unique anymore.
I read a comment on a blog recently where someone said that Trisha Yearwood had “perfect pitch”. That is probably a misunderstanding of the term, since perfect pitch is the quality where you can sing any note out of thin air – without any frame of reference at all. But their meaning was that she always sings dead nuts, which is a HIGHLY unusual trait. Alison Krauss spoke one time about recording with Dolly Parton. Alison said that Dolly was the only one (in that particular studio session) who didn’t have to have the pitch correction machine used on her vocals. Hmmm. And Alison ain’t no shabby singer, folks.
Music is the BEST of our humanity. What would we have given up if we gave up singers like Lefty Frizzell, Bill Monroe, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, Ralph Stanley, etc. I propose to you that we would have given up our SOULS. And, to me, that is way too high of a price to pay.
I’m going to keep harping on this. Over and over. It’s preaching and I don’t even care anymore. We, as a society, need to find what is REAL - what is genuine. I am all for advancing technology, but when we take it and abuse it so that we give up our humanity, we are losing MUCH more than what we have gained.
I've always been a HUGE Faith Hill fan, but her love of autotuners is disappointing. So is her lip-synching that performance.
I'm starting to think LeAnn Rimes is the only mainstream artist who doesn't use an autotuner, as Reba has admitted to using one.
Posted by: Erik | February 08, 2009 at 10:42 AM