This is a two-part STORYTIME.
Part I begins in 2009 with Kanye West, Auto-Tune, and a blogspot post (yeah, I had one) I wrote called “Hmm... Man vs Machine.”
Part II ends with me playing Negrodamus and low-key predicting the present day.
PART I:
I’ve been a Dissect evangelist since Season 1. Emphatically.
A few weeks ago I was listening to an episode of my favorite podcast Dissect. The episode was about Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.” This was the episode this season I was most excited about. This is my FAVORITE Daft Punk song, specifically the Neptunes Remix. I LOVED THIS SONG. So much so that I eventually got Luna into it too. Which was no small feat because I first had to get her off that silly ass “Whopper Whopper Whopper Whopper” version.
Cole Cuchna began forensically dissecting the song. The further he got in I started getting chills.
After the masterful musical breakdown he began on the conceptual ideas. I recognized the observations. I knew the language. I hoped I knew where the conversation was headed.
Seventeen years ago, I wrote a blog post on hello-human.me called “Hmm…Man vs Machine.”
The date was December 9, 2009.
I was listening to Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak a lot. At the time, much of the conversation around the album centered on the Auto-Tune.
Whether it was good or bad. Whether it was ruining music.
That wasn’t what I was thinking about.
As I listened to the episode, I kept hearing echoes of that post I had written in 2009.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Before I tell you why, I can show you better than I can tell you…
I’ll include it here in full. I’ve changed nothing.
Unedited. A snapshot of where my head was on December 9, 2009.
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2009
Hmmm...Man vs Machine.
Okay I am gonna throw myself on the chopping block for this one. And I may not be the first to even make this statement. In fact, I am sure of it.
I was riding home from work tonite on the train. I have my iPod on’Shuffle Albums’. (Which I highly recommend if you have a ton of music and you rarely ever give proper listen to an LP) Kanye West’s 808s andHeartbreak came on. I may be alone in this, but some of the songs are really good irregardless of the current state of Auto-Tune Hate. But I am listening, and it is sounding so good to me. I almost hear what he was thinking and feeling. And I kinda begin to see a little brillance in the album. I am starting to get it.
Let me begin by opining on something. Machine was created to ease the workload and burden of man. At first I think it was merely created to ease, then as time passed the expectations changed to efficiency and productivity. Quality control kicked in and then perfection was added to the list of expectations. The human ideal is perfection. We can’t be it, so we have high expectations of machines, which we created for this purpose. To achieve it.
Fast forward a few generations and here comes Auto-tune. Designed to correct the pitch of a human’s voice to make it appear perfect when it falls a little short. Some of us have perfect pitch in spades. But in the spirit of ‘We can’t be perfect’, those that have perfection in some areas, tend fall short in many other. (Whitney, sorry had to throw that in there)
Modern society and western culture places a high regard and expectations on the famed. Celebrities hold so much value and weight in our society, that they are expected to be “Perfect”. Perfect in the sense that they are expected to give us product (entertainment), consistently, efficiently and without flaw. Entertain us, consistently, regularly and without moral blemishes. Like a machine essentially. Churning out goodness and ideals and perfection. It’s even interesting, that when a machine messes up, we discard the product and throw it out. Or send it T.J. Maxxx to be marked down. Haha. But the tolerance for a machine messing up is exponentially higher than the tolerance we have for our celebrities. The machines we created to entertain us. Let’s face it. A tv is cool and all. But it’s just a box without “celebrities” to look at. I mean PBS and History channel only goes so far.
So on to my point in all this.
So I am listening, I hear a Robot singing the emotions of a human. Emotions such as pain, loss, embarrassment, and weaknesses. A machine. A technology- an old one, but technology indeed. And it dawns on me the social commentary that is being laid out here.
With that expectation of perfection, they are at fault-by us, their public, when they display any type of vulnerability -i.e. veering off the path of the ‘Perfect and Narrow’.
Think about the pressure you feel about underperforming at work. What is your boss gonna think of you? Your co-worker? And you don’t have millions of fans. No one interviewed you on ET for putting together a killer Powerpoint. The tabloids didn’t cover the story of you saying the wrong thing in a client meeting and costing the company a few ten thousand in revenue.
So I hear Kanye singing in this robotic voice. Essentially masking the pains of human existence. Real life shit. Realer celebrity shit. The commentary becomes a bit clearer on the “Pinocchio story”. He is singing as if he is a machine. Human emotions. Throwing his public fora loop, because these emotions can’t be real. They are coming from amachine. Right? Our celebrity machine. Machines don’t feel. And every now and then just like the defect products that come off of the machines that we created to make perfect little things, celebrity machines defect and mess up.
All that to say, I hear a commentary there. Why do we expect so much from our celebrities? Why do we expect our fame machines to perfect?This point is driven home with the last song on the cd. Ironically- it’s the only song on the cd sans Auto-Tune. He is a human again, speaking the pain now. And it’s live. A live track. ALIVE. Human. A real boy.
That’s my piece. I’m just saying…
-Rodney
Listening to this episode of Dissect all these years later, what struck me wasn’t simply the overlap in ideas.
It was how closely the observations rhymed.
Through Daft Punk, Cole explores the relationship between humanity and machinery.
Through Kanye, I was exploring the expectation that humanity perform like machinery.
Different artists. Similar technologies. The same orbit of tension.
We weren’t asking exactly the same question. We had simply arrived at the same intersection from opposite directions.
My observation began with Kanye - A human being filtered through a machine. Cole’s began with Daft Punk - Machines filtered through humanity.
One asks what happens when human beings are measured against machine standards. The other asks what happens when machines begin exihibiting human qualities.
Different starting points. The same canal.
One boat had a human in it. The other had two robots. Both headed toward the same shore.
I keep returning to a few lines from that old blog post to illustrate this.
“I hear a Robot singing the emotions of a human.”
At the time, I was talking about Auto-Tune. Cole was talking about vocoders. Both observations point toward something larger.
Technology has a strange way of revealing the humanity it appears to conceal.
What struck me most, though, was the role the machine/robot was playing.
In that blog post, I opined that celebrities are expected to entertain us consistently, efficiently, and without flaw. We rewarded productivity. We rewarded reliability. We rewarded perfection.
Under those conditions, vulnerability starts to look like a defect. The expectation of perfection leaves very little room for being human. The robotic voice mattered because it created distance.
The grief was there. The loneliness was there. The embarrassment was there. The heartbreak was there.
The Auto-Tune didn’t remove those things. It made them acceptable. Palatable. Smuggling it into a culture that preferred its celebrities polished, productive, reliable, and seemingly invulnerable.
That’s what I hear in 808s & Heartbreak.
And what I hear in the inverse underneath Daft Punk’s catalog.
For all the conversation about vocoders, Auto-Tune, robots, helmets (masks), and technology, both artists seem interested in the same question:
What happens when humanity meets machine standards? And vice-versa.
Productivity. Efficiency. Consistency. Perfection.
Seventeen years later, that question feels even more relevant.
The vice has versa’d.
Back then, the humanity was masked by the machine. But it leaked out anyway.
Today, the humanity isn’t hidden by the machine.
It’s feeds the machine.
And we’ll get into that in Part II.
*For good measure here are screen captures of the post.
As always…In divine time.
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