Fake Tits of the Music Industry

Below find excepts from Rolling Stone's REVIEW NEW CDS entitled: Disco-Cyborg Takeover from the Alternate Takes subsection by Jow Levy:

...You know the sound pf Auto-Tune, at least pushed to its limits, when it produces the Vocoder-like Buy You a Drank and other summer ubiquities such as Rihanna's Umbrella or Sean Kingston's Beautiful Girls. All of them deploy the digital effect that comes when vocals are tuned too tight, a quavering disco-cyborg melisma that's become the keynote of so much of the Top Forty.
Auto-Tune is infamous for making possible careers that would never exist without it, allowing the turd polishing (as producers call it) that can turn well-packaged mediocre singers into stars. But used sparingly, it allows producers to seamlessly correct flat or sharp notes - literally to pull them in line with proper pith on a computer display - and it's likely that most of what you hear today is pitch corrected in one place or another. Not because vocalist can't sing - because they can't sing perfectly [I defer dramatically here as if your pitch vacillates and as a consequence you're pitch cacophonous - leave the singing to the Jill Scotts and Omars of said genre and/or sub-genre - you remaining oblique-pitchers face a corner as I instructed Swiss Beats months back]. "Auto-Tune is like the fake tits of the music industry," says one producer. That is, it both creates and fulfills inhuman standards of beauty.
Auto-Tune is nothing new, and neither is that disco-cyborg effect, which powered Cher's Believe nine years ago. There's no more sense in complaining that it's fake than there was in bitching about drum machines twenty years ago. But it dominates the current moment, for better or worse. It merges the singer and the track, reducing everything to technology, which is perfect for ringtones or music on YouTube. It has its uses. But it rarely sustains more than a song. Try listening to Rihanna's entire album (which has sold sluggishly, despite a massive hit single)and you'll soon know the truth of the philosophy limed by Justin Timberlake in the hook of 50 Cent's new single:"I'm tired of using technology/Why don't you sit down on top of me? "Sometimes, you want the human touch, even if it's a wobbly ... vocals no one was ever supposed to hear.

+Article available at Playahata l Rolling Stone (Source)
+Zapp & Roger: the original vocorder augmentor line-steppers: Elvis Pelvis l Official Site l Rhapsody l Yahoo! Music