The stress has piled up on West over the past couple years. A couple months ago West famously labeled Auto-Tune “the funnest thing to use.” And since he is at the point of his career where he can do whatever the hell he damn well wants, 808s and Hearbreak, fifty minutes of Auto-Tune, drum machines, and synthesizers hits shelves today.īut as happy as Auto-Tune makes Kanye West, 808s and Heartbreak is anything but light-hearted. Plus, they’ll probably forget all about it in a couple months when they discover what helium will do to their voice.Īnd Kanye West is the poster-child for big goofy kids screwing around with Auto-Tune. Guys like Lil Wayne gargling their lyrics through Auto-Tune is kind of the equivalent of your kid making Darth Vader voices into a fan it can get obnoxious, but it’s also endearing to see them playing around and having fun. And since rap by its very nature is meant to be funny, the majority of these kids are goofballs. With all the controversy that surrounds the entire rap scene it is often easy to forget that most rappers are kids. But even as it is overused there is a lot to enjoy about this trend. So I have decided that Auto-Tune is an interesting trend that is occasionally very enjoyable, though it probably goes without saying that we’ve seen some overkill in 2008. We are the ones who invest far more time and money in rap than sanity would dictate, yet are forward-thinking enough to be continuously irked by whiny old-school hip hop purists (and that may have sounded a bit conceited, but if this review has been up for more than a few hours I’m sure scrolling to the bottom of the review will reveal several comments demonstrating who I’m talking about.) Since we don’t subscribe to either side of the “real hip hop” argument we have to make up our own minds when it comes to trends like Auto-Tune. Then there are people like me who have no freaking idea what to make of Auto-Tune.
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85 percent of the public falls into one of these two categories. If rap is just something you listen to in your car or at the club you probably don’t see what all the fuss is about. If you pride yourself on your advanced intellect and being “true” to “real” hip hop, you probably consider Auto-Tune a joke of a fad fit only for pop radio rap and the kids who will listen to whatever MTV tells them to. Whether you like it or not, if you pay attention to hip hop at all, you more than likely have a strong opinion on the matter. For better or worse, 2008 is going to be remembered as the Year of the Auto-Tune.