Exactly. But as long as such artists as Shannon are out there, I am going to support them, and try to turn on to them as many people as I can, I don’t need them to be on top of the charts to feel better, I’d only want them to be there so I don’t have to feel smug and snobbish and isolated in my tastes while everybody is listening to and ‘bonding’ over some Rihannas.
Here’s Shannon with Charlie Faye, another great singer of her own, and Will Sexton.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlezhD1nu5k
I think there’s hope because of the underground, be it for her type of music or esoteric electro-whatever. Much as I cant deal with hipster types, pretensious aholes that they are, There’s a ton of them and I think their aversiion to all things mainstream (their idea of it if not the reality of it) is rubbing off beyond their Brooklyn borders.
I see a lot of hate on production forums for the autotuning to death of everything. There are a lot more wannabee bedroom producers on those forums than real ones and there’s a growing movement away from 100% on the beat gridded and quantized music even in the people who MAKE 100% gridded and quantized music like trance/techno etc. The buzzwords are analog and a more ‘human feel’.
The vocals themselves are included in said backlash with more people discussing minimizing the use of autorune because in their own words “it all sounds too perfect”.
I have Melodyne and some other autotune software and I’ll tell you that you may not be able to make Vanilla Ice sound like Kate Smith, but you could get him damn close if you are a talented user of the program. Pitch/formant/length/tambre and more are all adjustable to extremes.
But the way it’s used in reality, a marginal singer can be made ‘sellable’ and that’s all that matters now. But that ‘sellable’ comes at a cost. Perfect pitch singing is more unnatural sounding than bad singing since it just can’t happen in nature. It sounds ‘wrong’. And the fact that it’s nearly ‘all’ perfect pitch now means it’s generic/boring. So people seek out ‘the next big thing.
Hopefully that’s dynamic and minimal/no autotuned singing (and they autotune bass/guitar/piano etc too for anyone that doesn’t know so the same applies there.)
Can’t say it will happen, but people ARE tiring of ‘perfection’.