August 23, 2010 – 3:17 pm
Never thought I’d blog about X Factor. I don’t own a telly, and so I don’t watch it, and the very idea of the show is utterly repugnant. Seriously – I despise everything the X Factor stands for. But last night, record numbers of people did watch the show – and lots of them are complaining that autotune was applied to the vocals.
Some people see it as cheating. Comments like “but it’s a singing contest!” abound – both in mainstream media and on the internet. In fact, it’s probably the most talked about thing of the day. People are genuinely outraged.
And while it’s incredibly significant that X Factor has been autotuned… it’s sure as hell not important – and here’s why.
1) Singing is not just an ability to hit a note perfectly. Use autotune or don’t use autotune. I don’t care. If it’s a singing contest with autotune, then maybe the performances themselves will matter, rather than pitch-perfection, and the contestants really getting inside the lyrics and meaning them will start to count for something. I doubt it, but it’s possible.
But then, I’m a fan of Tom Waits, Barry Andrews, Marianne Faithful, Lloyd Cole, Rickie Lee Jones, Joe Strummer, Bob Dylan, Kim Gordon, Thom Yorke, Betty Carter, Lou Reed, Kim Deal, Robert Smith… In fact, now I think of it, most of my favourite vocalists have a fairly liberal approach to actually hitting the note perfectly every time.
2) X Factor is not a singing competition any more than Big Brother is a television programme about ‘reality’.
3) The only reason the autotune was used was so that there would be outrage. Make no mistake. No professional television audio engineer would be that hamfisted with autotune unless they wanted you to notice it.
Their voices weren’t manipulated – ours were
This last point is the important one here. Autotune is not being used in X Factor to enhance the music or improve the singing. It’s being used as a metanarrative device.
Its sole purpose is to get us talking about it on Twitter, on Facebook, on the radio, television and the press.
The whole point here was to have a media furore, and bring the X Factor to the top of the media agenda. If you failed to spot that, then you fail Media Literacy 101. It was clever. It was manipulative. And it worked brilliantly.
Even I’m talking about it – if only to say ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’.
Now let’s not mention it again. It only encourages them.
Tagged: autotune, television
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6 Comments
Re: 3) – I’m usually fairly cynical, but I struggle to believe that X-Factor would deliberately create a story that portrays them in such a poor light.
Regardless of what you think of X-Factor, you’d have to admit that their PR team is pretty good. They get blanket coverage across all the tabloids for four months per year (miles more coverage than an equivalent programme like Big Brother) and this has always resulted in a massively-successful series and, until last year, a Christmas number one.
So I find it difficult to see that they’d deliberately engineer a situation that puts them in such a negative light just to get coverage. They don’t need to do it. Eleven million people watched Saturday’s show, which is up by over a million on last year. By doing it they risk alienating their core audience – those who swallow all the sob stories and vote every week, believing everything that Simon Cowell says. These are the people who had never heard of autotune before Saturday, and, for the first time, may now be thinking negatively about the show. Why risk that for some negative press coverage?
Agree with Andrew *148* per cent
(I am going to autotune this comment so it may have surprising consequences)
Nath
Not cycnical enough on this one I reckon.
The cliche “all publicity is good publicity” is not only true but, when it comes to this X Factor stuff et al, it is an out-of-control raison d’etre.
Camfots,
I’m not convinced by “all publicity is good publicity”. I’ve worked in arts marketing/PR for more than a few years and the only area where that’s really true is when you’re deliberately trying to make an artist seem more ‘edgy’ by cultivating a ‘bad’ reputation for them. (For example, I once put on a gig by the NME’s favourite ‘bad boy’ indie band of the time. When they arrived at the venue, their only request was for a regular supply of cups of tea to be delivered to their dressing room!)
As I said, X-Factor’s PR team do a good enough job that they could easily have spun some good news story about some ‘poor girl done good’ from the audition stage that would thrill their fanbase. Why deliberately put out a story that makes the programme look worse? Especially given that they always refute any claims that the show is fixed, or that there’s an agenda behind it, or that it isn’t ‘all about the singing’, etc etc…
i do not agree very good with tihs
I have a TV but don’t watch these kind of show.
I don’t read tabloids and don’t surf page that Add-block can’t suppress.
The point I’m trying to make is that the current generation of Music and Xfactor, American Idol lovers have little to no taste and opinions on most things in life, they need others to fill them in, pre-chew their food as you will :)
just longing for the days long gone of real artist and meaningful lyrics.
Auto tune ? yep great device, might start a singing career myself ………………………