The Glade 4.0

And it was a . . . surreal experience.

I mean, here you have this 13 year old performing hip-hop (a decidedly adult genre) singing about first crushes and puppy love. It's like, I knew what I was watching, but my brain was just saying "no . . . this is . . . wrong somehow."

One of the major road blocks of child/tween musicians, is that you are instantly limited in the subject matter of which you can sing about (and still remain socially appropriate). Drugs and sex are out, obviously, so you are left with emasculated, watered-down caricatures of subject matters (i.e. sex becomes just general "love" and pre-sexual dating) which appeal primarily to a certain (non-wage-earning) age group, thus limiting your audience.

While adult hip-hop acts like The Beastie Boys are incorporating such elements as giant robots fighting Cthulhu, cops with fros beating up suspects, beer, and hot chicks dancing in silver ribbons, Justin is stuck with freshly-grown pubic hair and bowling alleys, hanging with other kids his age wearing styles from the early 90's.

Now, all that said, I will have to begrudgingly admit that:

1.) His songs do have some nice beats to them, although I doubt Justin has anything to do with their arrangement.

2.) Say what you will about him, he seems to actually have talent. Undeveloped talent, of course, but the seeds of talent nonetheless.

While his music is not really for me, it will be interesting to see him in about 10 years when he can start really singing about more mature subjects. That is if his star doesn't burn out by that time.

Hey, 10:1 says when he gets older he goes completely hardcore and turns into the next Eminem.

I haven't even listened to a Justin Beiber song yet, so I can't rag on you for it. But I so want to.

_________________
"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

Autotune makes everyone sound good.

Even dogs...I saw a YouTube video with a dog howling and they used their ipad to autotune... It was amazing ! Sounds just like the Beiber

_________________


Dream as if you'll live forever...
...Live as if you'll die tomorrow

Vivere Senza Rimpianti

[youtube]Mk4bmK-acEM[/youtube]

Oh my goodness that's hilarious!

_________________
"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

Thankfully for him, this is all the subject matter you need. Also thankfully for him, parents have money. No idea what sort of recording contracts he gets... I would expect kinda poor ones given that he was basically made by the industry. Tickets for shows, however... I suspect he fits in nicely with that Disney crowd, which regularly sells a bazillion tickets to clearly-too-rich parents for pretty crazy sums. He's already made far more money than I'll ever see. :p



I give him a few more years, at which point his current fans will have outgrown him and he won't be a new cool thing for potential new fans... at which point he can go the route of so many other similar people and fade out of the public eye with his piles and piles of money.

The above post has been brought to you by someone with a 10 year old niece.

edit: I totally love Auto-Tune.

Yeah, I'll dispute that.

What talent?

Music consists of two elements: music and lyrics.

His "music" is so auto-tuned that if he has any singing ability, it's completely superfluous. At this point, auto-tune literally can make a passable "singer" out of a virtual voice (or, perhaps, a dog). What is he (Bieber) providing?

Songwriting talent? Nonexistent.

So how then, exactly, is he to be considered a musician?

Our director of programming here at the network has the irritating habit of referring to music as "product," as in "Have we received any new product (i.e. 'music videos')?" This annoys me to no end, but to be honest, there's exceptionally little broadly-accessible music being released. It is just that...product. There's no heart, no soul, no driving desire to communicate insights about the human experience. Music has been boiled down so much that all artistic merit has fallen off of the bone. It's a liability now. Instead, you have the catchy rhythms and undemanding lyrics (the latter being totally optional) that are hammered into one's head so often (through record labels' stranglehold on radio) that the audience confuses enjoyment with mere recognition.

I will grant that if Bieber has a talent, it is solely his ability to sell, through his androgynous appearance and nonthreatening presence, a highly marketable image of castrated "luv" (holy crap, the spellchecker in Chrome recognizes that as a real word) to a demanding prepubescent audience too afraid or immature to experience the real thing. The Bieber-luvvers of today will grow into the fans of chintzy "R&B" with out-of-whack romantic ideas and overly-sexualized lyrics of tomorrow.

I don't blame the kid for riding his gravy train to the last stop. I just lament the environment that gave him a free ticket.

Edit: Boy, I got all soapbox-y there, didn't I? Sorry.

Biebs is this year's Jonas Brothers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ring_(South_Park)

_________________

Holy shitsnacks!

Normally, my wife and I listen to the Alternative Rock and/or Hard Rock stations. The other night, we had the kids in the truck with us, and we decided to listen to the local pop station. We literally listened to 4 songs, and I could not tell any of them apart. They all sounded exactly the same: same beats, too much auto-tune, and completely forgettable subject matter. I finally just turned the radio off.

_________________
"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

It sounds like more musicians need to sign up for Bootsy's school.

_________________
Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

As far as the talent I mentioned above -- I think he has a decent voice for his age, but as already pointed out, how much of that is really manufactured?

Of course, by that line of thinking, other major pop stars like Lady Gaga could be completely manufactured, as well. But she has much less hate than Bieber.

That is one reason why I prefer flawed musicians (i.e. non-perfect voices, unconventional use of sound), because their music seems more authentic. See: Kurt Cobain (and Nirvana), Jim Morrison (and The Doors), Tom Waits, Shane MacGowan (and The Pogues)

I only listen to the sound of jet engines blasting. It's the sound of freedom. The sound of... AMERICA.

WTF is Justin Beiber? Answer: I don't care.

_________________
"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Well, the major difference there, at least in the case you mentioned, is that Lady Gaga manufactured herself. People interested in manufacturing stars don't dress you up like Lady Gaga and put you on stage. That just isn't how it works. She did all that **** herself. Lady Gaga is too **** far gone for that to be anybody else's work but her. She has a talent. I don't know what that talent is, but she has a talent. She's also nobody's fool.

We saw this before back in the '80s, and that's why everyone brings up Madonna. If you haven't noticed, Madonna's still around. She wasn't the best singer of all the '80s female pop stars (although she might've been one of the better dancers). Janet Jackson also wasn't the best singer out of that era. Janet and Madonna are still around. Most of the people who were better singers aren't.

_________________
Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I have not seen anything about lady gaga that actually seems rebeliose, without appearing so contrived and forced. It's like a madona re-tread. Nice singing voice as far as I can tell, but the antics scream "Look at me, look how rebeliose I am, now buy my stuff to be as rebeliose!"

_________________
"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

That isn't exactly the point. What I'm saying is she manufactured herself. Her songs and shows are primarily her work. (I say primarily because no musician puts on a performance of that magnitude entirely by himself or herself - it takes a stage crew, sound engineers, etc.). It may appear as contrived or forced rebellion, but there's a reason for that. Contrived rebellion is what gets her in the public eye, and gets people into her shows. When it stops, she'll have a different show that packs arenas.

The actual "manufactured" pop stars really don't make that switch. Look at Britney Spears. She lasted what, five years before she had her meltdown and the music industry was done with her? Now look at Michael Jackson. He went crazy, and packed venues for the next twenty years. He knew how to entertain people. He knew how to take what he had, and turn it into a show people wanted to see.

_________________
Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

The Onion: Justin Bieber Found to Be Cleverly Disguised 51-Year-Old Pedophile

"...cannot erase the memories of being abused by the synthetic teenage pervert..."

ROFL.

In support of this assessment:

_________________
Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

Fun with auto-tune:



The first 1:20 is the original video/audio which is interesting to compare to the 'song' that starts after that. It makes you wonder what some of today's auto-tune 'stars' really sound like.

That husky was awesome...

I so need to enroll in that school. Hell every human being who listens to music should enroll in THAT school.

_________________
Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

That store robbery backin' up song was by the Auto-tune the News people (also the Double Rainbow one that got quite popular). I'm pretty sure that they also pitch shift a lot of stuff, however, so it isn't just Auto-Tune at work there. While the technique could be used a bit more subtlelike in a studio recording, I doubt you could accomplish anything similar in a live performance.

Now granted, a live singer -- even a bad one -- would be more than close enough for Auto-Tune to work fine and all, but the results in those Auto-Tune the News guys (and girl) videos are a bit more than they first appear.

That and they're friggin awesome. I love me this one a lot. Got to #3 on some iTunes chart or other.



You might want to watch this link first, which is another YouTube video of the news story that they pulled the stuff from. Helps to understand what's going on a bit, and this way you get to experience the before and after so you can appreciate the magic they work!

edit: And I realize now that this post only goes to show... someone not even trying to sing + much audio computer magic = #3 song on iTunes. Granted this is more of a just-for-fun song than trying to be passed off as serious music, but it still says something! :p

I would settle for every human being that plays music.

_________________
Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

There's not really a difference. Autotune is pitch shifting. It's just an "intelligent" pitch shifting algorithm based on human vocal harmonics. The news video is just an instance of applying it to an extreme case of an out-of-tune voice (i.e. someone who wasn't even singing in the first place).


That might matter if any of these people actually performed live. They don't. Mass produced "musicians" like these lip-sync their live performances. But in any case, with a good beat-detection algorithm, you could probably autotune a live performance, too.

The reality is that the pop music business is entirely about image and branding. What you're being sold is just that -- an image, not a musician.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I think my point was more of a warning -- you see a huge effect in those Auto-Tune the News videos, but it's only achieved through Auto-Tune + a huge amount of (probably manual) pitch shifting to turn talking into singing. This is obvious enough in some senses, but definitely should be kept in mind.

Auto-Tune is already being used in live performances, however. I'm not sure what percentage of pop music acts don't lip synch... I suspect it's higher than people give it credit for. What percentage of those don't use pitch correction software during their live performances, though? A better-trained ear than mine can pick it up fairly easily when you look at a vocalist sliding from note to note, as Auto-Tune tends to sort of terrace that climb/drop instead of have it be smooth or almost analog... though knowing when a vocalist intends that anyway or not may be tricky, I suppose.

It's easy enough to tell if a live performance is actually just a recording being played back, especially if it's the actual studio recording from the album that people have heard often before, but this Auto-Tune on live performances is a bit more insidious. To stay on topic, I could easily enough go find a few clips of Bieber on YouTube and see if it's studio recording or a live performance, but it would probably take some effort to pin down any use of Auto-Tune.

In any case, I don't really disagree with what you said regardless. Just trying to clarify some stuffs here. I'm sure if I had the right face for it I could sell millions of dollars of albums too. :p