Nothing Natural About Vocal Skill

In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler writes about drag performance: “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency” (175). By transposing the performance of female gender onto a male body (or vice versa), drag performers highlight how gender is performed in everyday life, and most importantly, how contingent genders are.

In The New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones says of Auto-Tune: “[Makeup] is an apt analogy: there is nothing natural about recorded music.” Frere-Jones situates Auto-Tune as part of a continuing history of sound manipulation—a history that includes all of recorded pop music, but goes all the way back to the very beginning of recording. The recording process itself is a manipulation, even (and especially) when it doesn’t sound like a manipulation at all.

Much has been written about the way Auto-Tune complicates the relationship between performer and technology (and that SF-J article is over a year old), and the topic has been nearly beaten to death over the past year, but I wanted to write a little about reception. What makes Auto-Tune so displeasing to some people?

Aside from the basic reasons to dislike something (“It sucks,” “I don’t like rap,” “It sounds like a gerbil”), one reason stands out: a concern about skill.

Drag provokes unease in those who are invested in traditional gender roles, Auto-Tune in those invested in traditional vocal skills. The man in the video above (and others, like Neko Case) think that Auto-Tune makes singing too easy. Where drag dislocates external appearance from biological sex, Autotune dislocates the ability to hit notes from the ability to sing.

Now, in its most obvious “Cher effect” incarnation Auto-tune does more than just make someone who can’t sing hit the right notes. It conveys a human-machine fusion, a matching of precision with imprecision, and it does so in a way that is legible. You know that T-Pain is singing through Auto-Tune, and you won’t mistake him for a very precisely melismatic singer. In drag, the signifiers of female (or male) gender are performed, but in a way that highlights their performance.

The legible use of Auto-Tune can be so discomforting to those invested in vocal skill because it denies the need for skill, but also because it always refers back to the intended use of the tool. Every T-Pain warble points to the imperceptibly smoothed-out pop single; you clearly do not need conventional vocal skill to sing like T-Pain, but you may not even need it to sound like Mariah Carey. (Or at least like Mariah Carey before she started flirting with legible Auto-Tune use.)

The fear of the transvestite in the Skepta video at the top of this post reflects a similar concern with authenticity; if a man can look like a woman, and a talentless hack can sound like a pop star, how do we know what’s real anymore?

Judith Butler’s point, of course, is that there is nothing “real” about gender. ”Genders can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived” (180). Gender play takes this argument and revels in it, deploying and mixing gender signifiers at will. As Sasha Frere-Jones points out, borrowing the fitting example of makeup from Auto-Tune creator Andy Hildebrand, there is nothing “real” about vocal recording either. From the earliest days of recording, singers have adapted their voices to the technology they use (and adapted technology to the voice), and there is no reason to think that the kind of skill that is valued by some in contemporary Western singing is the only kind of skill.

There is nothing natural about vocal skill; looking at singing in other cultures, one can see a variety of ways it might have been (and even how those other ways interface with Auto-Tune). Performing with Auto-Tune can be seen as a kind of skill play; when Lil Wayne raps in his lazy style through it, he is calling into question a whole host of common ideas about what it means to have vocal skill/talent/whatever you might call it.

With Auto-Tune the stakes are obviously lower than with drag; while there is still compulsory sex-identification in mainstream society, there is no compulsory vocal ability. “Skill” occupies a middle ground where some people are admired for being “born with it,” while others might be admired for “working for it.” Gender is supposedly a “born-with” trait, but writers like Judith Butler do an excellent job of elaborating the ways in which you really do have to “work for it.” The parallels between gender/skill and drag/Auto-Tune are certainly generative, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say they operate in entirely the same way. It is interesting, though, that the first popular (mis)use of Auto-Tune was in a song aimed at a gay youth subculture…

[there used to be a video of Cher here, but it was taken away by the pop culture police]