035/ last thoughts on Charli, 'Reddit detective pop' and pitch correction
This week The Quietus published my review of the phenomenal new Charli XCX album Brat. You can read it here. But I had more thoughts that I left out of the review, or didn’t occur to me til later. And — mainly — a sidebar about how the casual listener misunderstands pitch correction.
Each time Charli XCX sings “three-sixty…” on her album opener ‘360’, what I hear is “Seasick Steve”. And funnily enough, the actual Seasick Steve has his own new album out this month and is playing a bunch of festivals. He should absolutely use ‘360’ as his walk-on music. I’ll Insta him later.
The other line in ‘360’ that I mis-hear is “put the camouflage on” which, at least according to the lyric video, turns out to be “put the camera flash on”. That one’s so neat and near identical in pronunciation, I wonder if she knows it and did it on purpose. Both versions work magically, in context.
My favourite review of Brat isn’t mine: it was written by Meaghan Garvey for Pitchfork. I’ve not encountered her before — but now I’m a fan. Meaghan’s prose is rich food and her bigger picture analysis is fantastic. She either coined, or uncovered, the beautiful phrase ‘Reddit detective pop’, for the current vogue in songwriting of purposely stoking fandom’s gossip obsession (that thrives in the churn of Reddit threads) by including ‘easter egg’ type references to the singer’s public/personal life. I need to write about this phenomenon, it’s fascinating: how it relates to authentic real-life sincerity in song, and where the grey areas are between the two. Far beyond the pop genres, deep in alternative and underground worlds, artists are strongly pushed to reveal themselves, expose their life story and trauma, as part of music marketing. Also, to figure out if Beyoncé brought ‘Reddit stoking’ to the mainstream on Lemonade, back in 2016, or if it was already a thing before then, in major label songwriting circles.
Maybe it’s time to uncomfortably re-follow gossip queen Deux Moi on Instagram, after weaning myself off her feed a couple of years ago.
By the way, I read Meaghan’s piece — and some other Charli reviews — only after I’d submitted mine. Usually you can’t read other reviews first, because they’re all published at roughly the same time. But also, I mustn’t ever read other critics on something I’m reviewing — I’m far too susceptible to reacting where I disagree, and warping my article into an argument with theirs. Worse, you risk filing away some perfect phrase or sentence and becoming an accidental plagiarist, which would be horrible.
I tend to submit a review, then read a couple of others, then get all annoyed at myself for the insights I’ve missed. Not so much this time, I was pleased with this one. Charli’s late night set at Primavera Sound was an outstanding festival highlight and I knew I’d love the record as a fan, but didn’t guess how objectively brilliant it would be from a (wannabe) neutral critic’s standpoint. I wrote the review on the very comfortable train, heading north along the Mediterranean coast, out of Catalonia, back up into southern France. It’s quite a romantic, misty train ride: large chunks of the journey feel like the train is skimming over water, like in Spirited Away.
The day after Brat came out, Charli did the current trendy (annoying) thing and dropped three bonus tracks. Two are pretty great but honestly they could’ve perfectly easily waited for a November ‘special edition’ to hit the Christmas market. ‘Hello Goodbye’ is a solid anthemic jam but emotionally basic, compared to the bulk of the record, just summing up — less cleverly — things she’s already analysed better elsewhere. ‘Guess’ is at the most ickily sexual, snarky tease end of Charli’s work (“you wanna guess the colour of my underwear”) so it made me feel unsettled, though it’s funny too. ‘Spring Breakers’ is a great cheerleader hip hop chant that almost be Megan Thee Stallion and earns its place. So that’s them.
Mainly, I want to write something about pitch correction, or what the world still usually calls ‘autotune’. A lot of folks, especially of my generation, misunderstand the amount of — and intent behind — pitch correction on pop records. This is fine when it’s punters. It doesn’t matter what they believe is going on, all that matters is if they enjoy the music or not. But a shocking number of musicians and professional critics write, wrongly, casually, about pitch correction and vocal processing, when they ought to know better. Often, in doing so, they incorrectly normalise the notion that an artist like Charli XCX and her producers are somehow using more ‘autotune’ than other equivalent pop artists, simply because they can hear it audibly, whereas they aren’t noticing it on other records.
Here’s the problem with that notion: nowadays pitch correction is everywhere. And mostly you can’t hear it. XCX and her team use it differently, not more. Even in budget studios it’s now a ubiquitous bit of software. And it’s mostly used carefully not to be noticed, sometimes in a note-by-note fashion, intended to remain as unheard as possible. So that only experienced ears, only those listening carefully, will spot it — and often not even then.
You ought to know: every single current pop artist, and 99% of current singers across all genres, including your favourite cool alternative rock acts, are using pitch correction and other vocal treatments in the studio, regularly, all over their work, to make their voices sound as great as they can. Many (especially big name, mainstream) record producers even have an ‘always on’ approach to pitch correction software, whereby the program hums away quietly in the background the whole time, softening moments that go out of key, or at least identifying and highlighting them, so they can be quickly hand-fixed, freeing up human ears to concentrate on finding the best, most characterful vocal performances.
At least in the past decade, across all the pop and rock genres, every record you’ve heard, with a minuscule number of exceptions, has had that technology on there somewhere. And with those rare exceptions, you would usually know about it anyway, since they’re the artists and albums that advertise themselves as super-analogue, digital free, with some kind of anti-technology and anti-commerce ideology, or ‘authentic’ marketing. They revel in their process. Cynical me says, even then, they may have cheated and snuck it in here and there.
(I can only think of one significant album I’ve heard this year that I’d genuinely believe doesn’t use any pitch correction at all: Adrianne Lenker’s solo album Bright Future, because it was made as a top-to-tail analogue project. I’d love to know of others you believe have wholly eschewed it.)
So what does this mean for how we think about the glaringly obvious, multi-layered ‘autotune’ and other digital processing on certain kinds of pop vocal, such as on the Charli XCX record? Well, if you can easily, instantly make out the glitchy jumping between notes of overdriven pitch correction technology — if it’s immediately noticeable and impactful (whether you like it or not) — you ought to consider and appreciate that this has been done deliberately. It is being used as an audible effect.
So Charli and her team aren’t using more of it than other pop artists, they’re just setting it so you can hear it, because it sounds cool. Arguably this is more honest, to add a different sonic flavour to a vocal sound, as part of the vibe of each track.
Bad singers sound bad even when they’re in tune. Tuning is only one of a thousand reasons why a singer might be great, or not so great. Every singer in the history of the world occasionally slips out of tune (apart from Dolly Parton). What pitch correction does is save time. There are a pile of things that need to be fantastic, for a vocal take to make the final mix. If you add tiny pitchy moments to the list of things to worry about, it adds an enormous amount of time. This doesn’t mean I disagree with the notion that much of today’s major label mainstream music is too machine-polished, to the point that the humanity is being processed out. But one place I’d argue that it is not a problem, is in music rooted in the club, where the affectation is made obvious and audible, in order to creatively mesh with the digital vibe of the music itself.
Okay, enough Charli for now.
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By the way, if you’re in reach of Brighton, this Friday 14th June, 5pm—7pm, at Alphabet, Colin Newman and Malka Spigel (Wire, Minimal Compact, Immersion) are launching the second LP from Immersion’s ‘Nanocluster’ collaborative music project, which is a beautiful double 10” vinyl release. They worked with Cubzoa (Jack from Penelope Isles) and Thor Harris (Swans, Thor & Friends) with Holy Fuck’s Matt Schulz drumming on it.
I’ll be hosting and interviewing Colin and Malka about this fascinating project. It’s FREE entry, so come along. It’ll also be broadcast live on Slack City.