2009 Pop Conference Bios/Abstracts

Carl Wilson

Carl Wilson is a member of this year''s program committee. His book in the 33 1/3 series, Let''s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, about class, mass culture and Celine Dion, expanded on a 2006 paper at EMP|SFM, where he''s also spoken on "bandonyms," disaster songs and critics'' roles in music scenes. He is a features editor at The Globe and Mail in Toronto, has written for The New York Times, Slate, Blender and many other venues, and runs the music blog Zoilus.com, all of which has seen him thrice-anthologized in the Da Capo Best Music Writing yearly series.Panel(s):
Sex Machines
Saturday, April 18, 2009, 3:15 - 4:45

Moderator:
Songs of Intimacy
Sunday, April 19, 2009, 9:00 - 10:30Abstract:

"T-Pain & The Real Girl: The Autoerotics of Autotune, Falsetto & Other (Un)Manly Modes of Oral Self-Gratification"
Pitch-correction software is the latest technology to be "misused" for sonic gain, the double-naughts'' version of turntablism in the eighties or glitch in the nineties, in which singers Autotune away not only their bum notes but their "natural" vocal tones. Florida-born singer-producer Faheem Najm, aka T-Pain, charted fistfuls of pitch-corrected hits in 2007 and 2008, matched only by fellow Autotune addict Akon. Meanwhile, perhaps the most divisive lateral move in pop was Kanye West''s 808s and Heartbreak, in which the superstar rapper sank into a hyper-filtered sulk that far out-moodied the most highly lauded indie-folk album - as Bon Iver seems to have noticed, if the Autotune on the new Blood Bank EP is any hint.

The kneejerk knock is that Autotune is a gimmick that denudes the voice of "personality" and "soul." Novelty it may be, but right now it''s a strip show that adds more than it peels. Women have made their own complex abuses of the software, but the current sine wave of Automachismo falls into a long line of vocal effects -- from country yodeling to falsetto in heavy metal and soul/R&B, 70s vocoders and talk boxes (not just in funk but in Kraftwerk and Neil Young''s Trans, the forerunner of Kanye''s 808s), Roy Orbison''s croon, Prince''s "Camille" vocal mask and all the way back to Catholic choirboy castrati. Here, gender bends as the notes do and singers are stranded in wobbly subject positions as at once vector and object of desire, seducer and seduced, solitary man and sex-doll cyber-mannequin. With audiovisual samples and, if you behave, live demonstration, I''ll explore the uncanny poignancy of the Autotune era''s auto-erotic domination scenes, in which the robot gets to cum only if the robot will cry.