Auto-Tune’s signature use erases flaws for hyperbolically enhanced normality

Evidence

North is like Kanye West’s 2008 album 808s and Heartbreak with all the gloss removed. There is the same method melancholia, the same anchoring in early 80s synthpop, explicitly flagged in 808’s case by the cover design’s echo of Peter Saville’s sleeves for New Order’s Blue Monday and Power, Corruption and Lies. The opening track ‘Say You Will’ sounds like it has been worked up out of the crisp synthetic chill of Joy Division’s ‘Atmosphere’ and the funereal drum tattoo of New Order’s ‘In A Lonely Place’. As with North, though, the 80s parallels are disrupted by the digital effects used on the voice. 808s and Heartbreak pioneered the use of Auto–Tune, which would subsequently come to dominate R&B and hip-hop from the late 00s onwards. In a sense, the conspicuous use of Auto-Tune – that is to say, its use as an effect, as opposed to its official purpose as a device to correct a singer’s pitch – was a 90s throwback, since this was popularised by Cher on her 1998 single ‘Believe’. Auto-Tune is in many ways the sonic equivalent of digital airbrushing, and the (over) use of the two technologies (alongside the increasing prevalence of cosmetic surgery) result in a look and feel that is hyperbolically enhanced rather than conspicuously artificial. If anything is the signature of 21st century consumer culture, is this feeling of a digitally upgraded normality – a perverse yet ultra-banal normality, from which all flaws have been erased. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 453

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to prior hauntology chapters framing digital nostalgia; Auto-Tune-as-airbrushing ties to the book’s recurring theme of a ‘digitally upgraded normality’ as consumer culture’s signature.