It's Lit
The Democracy of a Distorted Voice
If you’ve followed the general movement of music criticism in the past eight years or so, you’ve doubtless encountered the roiling debate over autotune. The vocal effect is essentially a tool used by vocalists to lay their voices atop a predetermined framework of notes and has been hailed as both the standard of music’s avant-garde and one of the four horsemen of music’s apocalypse. Opponents argue that autotune is a crutch and a flashy mask for concealing a lack of true musical talent; proponents counter is that autotune facilitates a new form of expression that opens up new avenues for voices that wouldn’t otherwise be heard. The fight over autotune expresses one of the Internet age’s central conflicts: the struggle between one’s own voice and the voices that fill one’s environment.
The critical consensus has moved decisively in recent years towards an acceptance of autotune’s legitimacy. While Kanye West’s “808s and Heartbreak” received mixed reviews on its release (largely for its departure from traditional rapping and its use of autotune), it has since been recognized as an important demonstration of the effect’s value. In the past year alone, everyone from swaggering West protégé Travi$ Scott to earnest, melancholy Brooklyn cult favorites Porches has released critically acclaimed albums using autotune. Autotune at its most useful is a tool for mapping one’s voice systematically and forcefully onto another form of meaning—that of melody and harmony. In this respect, the musical trend points toward a larger trend in digital culture: the appropriation of expression from others to find one’s own.
The Life of 'The Life of Pablo'
Kanye West’s most recent album, “The Life of Pablo,” is his most amorphous release yet. The LP roves through different registers and is characterized largely by a frustrating aimlessness. The rollout of the album was maddeningly noncommittal as well; for months it was unclear whether it would sound more like a follow up to 2013’s “Yeezus” or like Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” While this uncertainty is exhausting, it’s also exactly the point. “The Life of Pablo” as a phenomenon is focused on the possibilities of what it might—and could—be.
Let’s just take a moment to take stock of the different media involved in the rollout of Kanye West’s “The Life of Pablo.” Months before the album saw the light of day (and long before it was finished), back when its name was still “Swish,” there were already rumors of backroom listening sessions in the form of some late-night tweets from freewheeling Yeezy protégé Theophilus London and a Seth Myers interview with the Kanye-parodying Seth Rogen. We had the slow continuation of Kanye’s unraveling in the public sphere through what could be termed a month-long Twitter rant. Punctuating that messy Twitter chaos were glimpses of his studio, largely through a legal pad scrawled with celebrity signatures and an ever-changing, always-messy tracklist. We had the multiple SoundCloud singles, which, though normally a standard element of the album rollout process, nonetheless kicked off with the seemingly disastrous, confusing, petty, myopic track “Facts.”
Webcomics, Macro Memes, and the Continued Destruction of Things Highbrow
To countless children who grew up in the age of the newspaper, the Sunday comics constituted a sacred space. Even though people kind of sell comics short—they aren’t really given much weight either on the pop-culture playing field or in the curated realm of what one might call high art—the medium has demonstrated a remarkable and singular expressiveness as a popular form. Specifically, comics are uniquely capable of mixing both highbrow and lowbrow themes through their mix of often-whimsical illustration and text. Bill Watterson’s “Calvin and Hobbes” put the words of philosophers into the mouth of an irreverent, precocious six-year-old. Charles Schulz’s “Charlie Brown” was as much a chronicle of a round-headed, yellow-shirted, continual existential crisis as it was a fun-loving story about an average boy. For almost as long as they have existed, comics have concerned themselves with mashing together aesthetics associated with high and low culture, thus exposing those cultures as in many ways equivalent. Who’s to say Charlie Brown’s anguish is any less deep than that of Jay Gatsby? Who’s to say a green glob’s “To be, or not to be” is any less compelling than a performance by Richard Burbage?
As print media moved towards the digital world, though, the status of comics was inherently threatened. Without the widely syndicated platform of a newspaper comics page, how could comics maintain the same mode of cultural commentary in such a broadly accessible way? Beyond the obvious counter that the internet is the most broadly accessible thing in human history, how could a comic on the web attract a new, sufficiently large audience in order to have the same kind of subversive influence? The past decade of webcomics has revealed some surprising new conduits for the medium, which has discovered a byway in one of internet pop culture’s most powerful nascent forms: the meme.
What We've Done With the Great Gray Space
Depending on whom you ask, in 2016, we could be witnessing the doomsday of recorded music or the birth of music as a truly liberated artform. The meteoric rise of streaming services—and the persistent disruptivity of the internet in general—has forced the industry to evolve into something almost unrecognizable. The late pop titan David Bowie, in a firmly enthusiastic interview with BBC in 1999, predicted the internet’s widespread force. “I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable,” Bowie said. The immediacy of content available via the internet is certainly terrifying, both for label execs and for artists who are paid cents a month for thousands of plays. While greater availability radically democratizes people’s access to music, it can compromise the valuation of the music itself, and the ease of consumption can cut into the uniqueness of a person’s music library. Shelves of well-loved, weathered albums are largely giving way to an ever-shifting repertoire of digital tracks “available offline.”
On the flip side, those same streaming services give artists a potential immediate audience of billions. Bowie recognized, even prior to the ubiquity of the internet, the importance of the interface between creator and listener, stressing, “The piece of work is not finished until the audience come to it and add their own interpretation. What the piece of art is about is the gray space in the middle.” Bowie identified that space, in which the audience’s engagement with artist and art begins to control the work itself, as the 21st century’s artistic focus.
Album Art’s Subtle Sidestep
The album cover has carried cultural weight for a long time. Some of recorded music’s highest triumphs have been largely defined and identified in pop culture by the visuals that accompanied them: The unshakeable cool behind the album covers of Blue Note’s 1500 series helped spur a new generation of jazz innovators towards international stardom; The Beatles made a crosswalk one of London’s most famous landmarks with their cover for “Abbey Road”; Pink Floyd gave generations of stoners and dreamers a visual touchstone with the prism of “Dark Side of the Moon”; everyone from Phil Collins to Art Garfunkel to Madonna piped 12-by-12 inch images of their faces into millions of American homes on their LP sleeves.
Digital music’s rise to ubiquity at the beginning of the 21st century forced the meaning surrounding an album cover to evolve in subtle ways. An album’s cover art was no longer associated with the music itself in such a close, physical sense; freed from CDs and vinyl, music no longer depended so heavily on the jewel cases and LP sleeves plastered with art that had accompanied it for so long. While album art still traveled with music wherever it went, a small image in the corner of your iTunes window is obviously less attention-grabbing than a 12-inch sleeve or even a CD-sized insert.