The smokers' voice synthesizer is my Rosetta Stone for unpacking the aesthetics of Auto-tune. The android voice is the sound of a broken human. Cyborg augmentation signifies weakness, not strength—the Droid 2 commercials are lies. The mechanized human is that whose living body is no longer self-sustaining. Remember "Fitter Happier." Auto-tune signifies the human being unable to break free from the inhuman rectilinearity of quantization. Digitization is mutilation. Auto-tune is the muffled voice of a circle stuffed into a square. It is the cry of the organism that is too damaged to express its pain.
Remember Darth Vader. The significance of the mask is only revealed at the very end, when we discover the secret: the whole time, behind the mask, he had kind eyes. The prequels weren't that bad (except for Attack of the Clones, which was) but as far as I'm concerned they don't count. Ewan McGregor was more than good enough as the young Obi-Wan, but the role of Anakin was fatally miscast: Hayden Christensen just looks like a douche. You can tell from the very beginning that he will go down the dark path, and you don't care. His fall to the dark side has no tragic resonance. And a friend once told me that Star Wars was originally titled The Tragedy of Darth Vader.
Darth Vader is no simple villain. People forget that he never comes off as that evil. Sure, he is ruthless and brutal, but unlike the Emperor he shows no signs of sadism. Even Grand Moff Tarkin takes visible pleasure in the prospect of wiping out the Rebellion. But Darth Vader never laughs. On some level, he must have known that the Rebels were going to win the Battle of Yavin 4. That was why he joined the battle in his fighter: he was escaping. Tarkin, a bureaucrat and politician who has probably never flown a starship in his life, scoffed at the notion of evacuating in his hour of triumph seconds before being vaporized along with the rest of the Death Star. Darth Vader does not have a villain's mad hubris. He is not a villain; he is a tragic hero whom we only meet once he has already fallen.
I ought to rephrase what I just said about Auto-Tune. It implies that I have a problem with Auto-Tune—nothing could be further from the truth. I love Auto-Tune, because it represents for me the redemption of quanization. The circle, although stuffed into a square, may represent its pain via various regular polygons. The human creature is made inhuman, denied even the ability to express its pain, but even as it is denied humanity it is nonetheless granted the transhuman right to music. It is no longer human; it is nothing but pain; but this pain may sing the song of itself in the world of regularity which is the only world available to it now that it has been robbed of its aliveness
MY FAVORITE AUTO-TUNE SONGS:
I will explain why I like them so much sometime later.
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