"Britney Spears" has always been a marketing construction. In the early days of the brand, it made a bold impression. We knew who this character was and what she stood for: She was the ing�nue, on the cusp of adulthood and wrestling with her grown-up desires. She had control of her life, but the screws were loose and the platform was wobbly, and the handle always seemed ready to break off.
She wasn?t a girl and she wasn?t yet a woman. She was something beautiful and terrible and all-too-human, caught in between.
As Spears? life began to resemble the fiction constructed around her, a funny thing started happening to her music. That personality, so sharply (some would say garishly) drawn earlier on, began to disappear. On "Femme Fatale," her latest chart-topping album, the eclipse becomes total. Spears has been swapped out for a robotic version of herself who feeds typical dance-floor injunctions into a computer processor.
In the right hands, AutoTune software can enhance the personality of a pop singer. Consider Kanye West?s groundbreaking work on "808s and Heartbreak" or T-Pain?s playful "Chopped and Screwed." This is the computer as an instrument of the producer?s whims; software as a playground for a digital provocateur.
Ke$ha, never short on cartoonish personality, co-wrote "Till the World Ends," the lead-off track on "Femme Fatale" and a current Top 10 hit. On her 2009 hit "TiK ToK," she and her producers used AutoTune to augment the narrator?s giddiness. The unnatural, computer-generated melodic leaps in the chorus couldn?t have happened without the software, but they also couldn?t have happened without Ke$ha herself. Like Cher on "Believe," this was the pop star as cyborg ? half giggling schoolyard seductress, half robot girlfriend.
"Till the World Ends" is another thing entirely.
The song?s hook employs artificially generated negative space: Split-second silences are inserted between the sung notes. The inhuman sound of the chorus is undeniably ear-catching. "Femme Fatale" has been described as a producer?s showcase, but it isn?t Dr. Luke?s personality inscribed in this mix. It?s not Ke$ha?s, either, and it?s certainly not that of Spears, whose relationship to the track feels tangential at best.
If there?s any personality on "Till the World Ends," it?s that of the software programmers who created the computer plug-in that processes Spears? signal beyond recognition.
We don?t like to think that our hit songs are being cooked up by white-coats. When we rock out, we prefer to believe we?re responding to human talent, not laboratory science. Technophobia accounts for much of the hysterical reaction to AutoTune and signal processing in general, but the charts don?t lie: we?re getting comfortable with it.
"Till the World Ends" is pop designed by algorithm on a spreadsheet, but that doesn?t mean it?s a bad song. It might even be a great one ? and a harbinger of the depersonalized pop future we don?t want to embrace, but that?s coming at us with the speed of a Eurodisco backbeat.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMEx4dSdxwI
Songs of the Day are posted Mon.-Thu. at 3 p.m. Songs of the Week, which will focus on contemporary chart hits, will be posted on Friday. For past Songs of the Day, click here
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