Fresh Cherries from Yakima

dear rappers,

anyone who has listened to a fresh cherries from yakima song in its entirety knows one thing: douglas martin can’t really sing for shit. it is a fact that i really don’t try to hide whatsoever when i’m singing and strumming my acoustic guitar. in fact, i usually find it kind of charming when a singer doesn’t exactly hit that note that they’re aiming for. as david berman, a long-known hero of mine once uttered in song, “all my favorite singers couldn’t sing.”

i remember back in the days when rappers would, you know, get an actual singer to sing their hooks for them. on occasion, you’d get a rapper brave enough to tackle his own choruses. in 1997, a song called “player hater,” by the late great notorious b.i.g., changed the way rappers looked at singing on tracks. “player hater” was humorous. “player hater” was fun. “player hater” became those things because christopher wallace knew that he couldn’t really sing, but, apparently blunted out of his mind, thought it would be a hoot to try such a thing. and for that reason, “player hater” became a signature track on an double-album chock full of signature tracks.

over the course of the past year, you guys have been following a ridiculous trend; on the back of the wildly uncharacteristic success of t-pain (although, i will admit, “sprung” was the jam, especially the opening line about “washing the dishes”), and using an effect (seemingly from pro tools, one would assume) that makes your voice sound like a vocoder. let me get to the point: this is not cutting edge or groundbreaking.

you guys using autotune is sort of like a kid who gets one of those weird little robot megaphone toys that makes your voice sound all wacky; it’s cool for the first few days after christmas, but eventually it gets old, and your parents are remembering why those stupid things were still sitting on the shelf on christmas eve. if you’re going to sing at all, at least do it in an endearingly off-key way, like ghostface did on the middle-eight of mixtape classic “my guitar” (which you might recognize in a diluted state on 8 diagrams).

what’s even worse is that most of you talented souls are replacing, um, ill rhymes, with this autotune shit, and really, that’s what pisses me off the most. remember the olden days, when a lot of mainstream rappers actually had skills and challenged their audience and peers by spitting thought-provoking shit? now, our eardrums are being challenged by a computerized effect that should have never escaped the realm of britney spears and paris hilton’s ill-fated pop album. there are far better ways to sound artful while doing your art, like actually writing great raps.

rappers, i’m being hard on you because i love you all. AUTOTUNE IS NOT YOUR FRIEND. please go back to actually rapping. thank you.

sincerely,
douglas martin

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 10:47 pm and is filed under WTF, "meaningful" essayism, hip-hop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.