The fakery of modern music: what you deserve to know

Chris Matarazzo,

Maybe it is time to shut down the music business. Just kill it. Maybe we all should stop streaming and stop buying songs and albums. Why? Because it is all a lie. ALL of it.

PinkPanthress recently went on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts and, with absolutely no sense of irony or any indication of shame, said:

“This is my first performance I’ve done with no tuning, I’ve never sung with no tuning before, so this is really scary.”

What she means, in case you aren’t hip to the tech, is that every time she has performed, whether on a recording or live, she has used software to fix any bad notes that she sings, either in post-production or during a live situation.

But let’s not put all the blame on her. At least she told the truth about her… well… deceptions.

To quote Timon, from The Lion King: “And… everybody’s okay with this?” Some are, because they just don’t care; but some music consumers are not aware of the extent of fakery that goes on in the music business.

You can make your purchasing or non-purchasing choices after I fill you in. If I am “ruining Santa” for you, don’t keep reading, but I think you deserve to know (unless a recording is pre-90s) that you are not listening to real performances when you purchase or stream music or maybe even when you see a live show. You are being deceived (to various extents).

On recordings, two major things are happening: “quantizing” and “tuning.”

With quantizing, everything is being locked-in to a perfect, computer-controlled beat. The producer or engineer might, for instance, highlight a drummer’s performance and then click “quantize”—and shazam, the rhythm is perfect, whether the drummer has good time (the most basic requirement of a drummer) or not. (That, by the way, is if we are lucky enough to actually have a real drummer on the track and not a sampled one, programmed in by a producer.)

Quantizing can be done with anything—a bass part… a singing phrase… a guitar riff. All perfect with a click.

Skill, shmill, right?

And tuning is being used everywhere. Everyone from some kid in his bedroom with a computer to PinkPanthress to Sting is using “autotune” these days. No one is ever off pitch. If you have an “ear,” listen back to old recordings. You’ll hear Billy Joel hit a few clunkers. Robert plant sort of saw pitch as more of a guideline than a rule. You hear Elton John strategically bending notes up or down to avoid accidental wavering. (Say what you want about him, though, I defy you to find a bad note from Phil Collins. His intonation was scary good.)

Live—I am pretty sure Sting and some other seasoned pros don’t use tuning, but I’ll bet Taylor Swift is—just a guess—and I know (made obvious by our statement above) many, many younger artists are using it in concert, real time. They could stink on ice, but you’d never know it.

In live music, there are other tricks. For decades, artists, have used “click tracks.” Either the drummer or the whole band will have a metronome clicking  in their in-ear monitors (like really expensive earbuds) in order to keep tempos like the ones on the record and to keep them consistent. Further, there might be “backing tracks” that require a “click” to keep them synchronized with the rest of the band.

Backing tracks are a matter of debate, even among musicians. If one song, for instance, has a string section on it, a band would have to either hire a string section each night for that one song, or do without. But with “tracks,” the show sounds more like the record and it sort of side steps the impracticality of bringing in a string section for just one song. Still, some people dismiss a practice in deception. You decide… but… the truth is the truth. This has been happening for decades, as well.

As for recording studio tricks…look, in the earliest days a whole orchestra would play around one microphone and if one musician “clammed” a note, the whole “take” had to be done again until it was perfect. Then, “multitrack” tape was invented, and people could replay just their own parts or “punch in” to fix mistakes. So, since just after the single microphone days, there have been tricks happening. (Rumor has it that some high-register male singers would record vocal parts with the tape slowed down, which would lower the pitch, so that they could sing in a lower register and sound like vocal phenomena when the tape was brought back up to speed.)

The key difference, though, is this: back then, pre autotune and quantizing, everyone’s performance was his or her performance. Sure, it became easier to fix mistakes over time, but the artist had to fix them personally—either re-sing or replay. Even if a musician “punched in” to fix a mistake, he was still obligated to play the notes well.

Now, a singer can basically barf into the microphone and someone with a Mac and a mouse can make it a Grammy-winning performance. You could literally come to my little studio and speak the words to your favorite songs and I could make them into the melody. (But I will not, so don’t ask.)

So, what, exactly, are we buying? I say, we just shut it down. Musicians are not making much on streaming anyway (in fact, it is a crime how little we are making). Sometimes things need to be wiped away. Music could use a massive commercial apocalypse. I mean, yeah, I will lose the lifetime .000093 cents I have earned from streaming, but I’ll just get a part time job (for three seconds in a Cracker Barrel kitchen) to make up for it.

Not that it will help. Now everyone thinks it’s a brilliant idea to have A.I. write and perform the music. So, who cares, anyway? We have already paved the path to complete dehumanization of art.

In fact, we have paved the way to the complete dehumanization of humans. We’re the only species that ever became determined to replace itself. Maybe we can eventually figure out a way to bypass the pesky task of having sex. Surely, the machines can take care of that. The physical communication of love and the mutual transcendence of the orgasm is so last century.

Chris Matarazzo

Chris Matarazzo is a writer, composer, musician and teacher of literature and writing on the college and high school levels. His music is available on all streaming services and on his YouTube channel. Chris is also the composer of the score to the off-beat independent film Surrender Dorothy and he performs frequently in the Philadelphia area with the King Richard Band and Mysterious Ways. He's also a relatively prolific novelist, even if no one seems to care yet. His Hats and Rabbits blog continues in its latest incarnation on Substack.

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