We're all probably a little sick of Auto-Tune's stranglehold on pop and urban radio thanks to Akon, T-Pain, and friends, and a title like "Auto-Tune Abuse In Pop Music" might have you expecting the long-awaited polemic against the vocal effect and its recent overuse as a gimmicky aesthetic in its own right, rather than as a studio corrective for weak performances. Yet the author of this engineering/producing blog seems to be serious with "criticisms" like this one about the production on Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls": "'OoooOver' doesn't sound human." Or from the comments: "Surely the T-Pain clip was done purposely to achieve that effect..." You think?? [
Hometracked via
Daily Swarm]
I was happy to hear that Soulja Boy has kicked Fergie's mushmouthed "Big Girls Don't Cry" as out of the
Billboard Hot 100's top spot, but then someone showed me this: "How young is Soulja Boy, the artist who has the new No. 1 song on the Hot 100? So young, that he wasn't even alive when Madonna's "Vogue" was No. 1. Soulja Boy was born July 28, 1990, and is thus the second artist born in the '90s to occupy the penthouse of the Hot 100. The first was Sean Kingston, who achieved it just six weeks ago when he captured the top spot with "Beautiful Girls." Kingston was born Feb. 3, 1990 and was 17 1/2 when he advanced to No. 1. Soulja Boy is even younger, as he is not quite 17 years and two months old." [
Billboard]
MTV's standards for Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls" seem to shift each time the song is played: Kingston's performing live on
TRL right now, and "suicidal" is coming out of my speakers, untouched by any censor's hand. Also, uh, it's quite obvious that dude is a more than a bit pitch-challenged. Nice suits on his backup singers, though. [
TRL]
Today's
TRL brings an important lesson about the word "suicidal" as it appears in Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls": It's dropped out of MTV's plays of the video, but 100% OK for commercials touting Kingston's debut album, which hits stores tomorrow.
My Chemical Romance, you know what to do! [
TRL]
Or both. Apparently when he was first starting out—i.e. around six months ago—the teen emo-dancehall robot tried to get in touch with super-producers like Dr. Dre, Swizz Beatz, and Polow Da Don through
MySpace, but they had him suicidal when he (wait for it, you'll never guess) never heard back from them. Actually, I can totally see Dre sitting around all day, updating his profile and posting sparkly "Just Thinkin Of U" graphics on Snoop's page in between bouts of "working" on
Detox. [
MTV]
All of you out there with dreams of becoming either a groupie or a morning-radio host should listen to this call between a Boston teen and a "zoo crew," in which she relays a tale of being clumsily hit on by
suicidal crooner Sean Kingston and the radio hosts mock her for various reasons, including Kingston's looks and the fact that she somehow wants to hang out with him again. [
MissInfo]
Idolator
Whether they're petroleum-based or digital downloads, singles remain pop's most fascinating format. Twice a week in Single Spin, a singles-focused twist on Second Spin, we'll take a look at a song, sound, scene, or star that we think deserves more than two lines and a Rapidshare link—whether it's CMT country, underground dance, unfriendly noise, or anything else served up one tune at a time. Today we listen to a return to form from a Finnish dub-techno master, a goofy jam from a trio of sloppy New York indie kids, and faux-reggae scourge Sean Kingston warbling through the Billy Joel songbook. Yes, you read that right.
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