Brow Beat: Slate's Culture Blog

NBC's "The Sing-Off"

In its premiere episode last night, NBC's new competition series, The Sing-Off, provided a public service that the world did not yet know it needed—namely, a sure-fire way to test whether you do, indeed, like a cappella, despite your better judgment. In the opening number, all eight vocal ensembles participating in the four-night event joined in a rendition of the Queen/David Bowie jam "Under Pressure." If you don't find yourself grinning like a fool by the end of this number, then congratulations: You, like my boyfriend (who spent last night barricaded in the dining room with his noise-canceling headphones), are immune to a cappella. 

Sadly, none of the following performances quite lived up to that first one. Despite the range of groups on display—a quartet of sassy suburban moms, an R & B group from hardscrabble Omaha, a zany guys' group from Tufts—nearly all sounded too thin, too bright, and too boppy. Most also had noticeable pitch issues, which I hope will smooth out once everyone stops being so nervous.

My favorite group so far is Noteworthy, from BYU. They sounded like a hot mess on Aretha Franklin's "Think"—like many all-women's groups, they can sound screechy and piercing when they go full-blast—but I liked their moxie. They know how to convey a sense that they take themselves seriously while embracing the essentially campy nature of the genre.

We will not harp on the inadequacies of host Nick Lachey or judge Nicole Scherzinger or their shared, grating habit of insisting how cool a cappella is. ("When you hear that barbershop style you think, ‘That's dope!' ") Instead, let's celebrate the presence of the dashing Shawn Stockman, from Boyz II Men, and of Ben Folds, who, despite his uncanny resemblance to Austin Powers, provided the evening's most useful, insightful musical critiques.

The little scenes where we get to visit the groups' campuses and hometowns also provided some lovely grace notes. All the groups seem very close-knit, and none of the camaraderie seems forced. A cappella is first and foremost about fellowship, and I thought those interludes captured that quite well.

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Anatomy of a Murder: Jay-Z's "DOA (Death of Auto-Tune)"

Jay-Z may or may not have actual convictions about Auto-Tune, the pitch-correction technology that has made robotic vocal hiccups ubiquitous on hit radio. He definitely knows that publicity stunts are good for business. Which, presumably, is why he recorded "DOA (Death of Auto-Tune)," the broadside that premiered Friday night on New York's rap radio powerhouse Hot 97 and instantly became the talk of hip-hop.

Musically, "DOA" is a snooze. The beat, by (prime Auto-Tune Offender) Chicago producer No ID*, has walloping snare drum hits and soprano saxophone noodling—a stock old-school sound that signifies we are about to receive a schoolmarm's lesson in Real Hip-Hop. Which is what Jay-Z provides, or tries to, in a notably slack and witless recitation of would-be zinger-couplets: "I know we facing a recession/ But the music y'all making go'n' make it the Great Depression"; "This is just violent/ This is Death of Auto-Tune, moment of silence"; "This ain't a No. 1 record/ This is practically assault with a deadly weapon"; etc. To drive home the point that the track is Auto-Tune-free, the rapper's verses are interspersed with some painfully off-key warbling of the refrain from "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye."

Who exactly Jay-Z is taking on in this polemic is unclear. You would assume his targets are Kanye West, Lil Wayne, and T-Pain—the highest-profile Auto-Tune freaks—but in an interview on Hot 97, he excused those three on the grounds that their music has "great melodies." (Whether this is a virtue is complicated by a boast in "DOA": "My raps don't have melodies.") In lieu of picking a fight with human beings, Jay-Z disses technology itself, calling out not just pitch-correction software but iTunes and ringtones.  (We await the release of the rapper's forthcoming Blueprint 3 album for Jay-Z's rants against the cotton gin and the steam engine.)

In other words, Jay-Z has slipped on his backpack and is playing the curmudgeonly hip-hop purist.  This is usually a bad omen—the sign of a rap career in precipitous decline—but Jay-Z is strategically astute. In an interview with MTV, Kanye let slip: "We actually removed all the songs [from Blueprint 3] with Auto-Tune to make the point that this is an anti-Auto-Tune album." Evidently, Jay-Z's disdain for Auto-Tune is late-breaking. Did he listen to his Auto-Tune-slathered new songs, realize he sounded silly—like an old man huffing and puffing to keep up with the kids—and opt to turn this shortcoming to his advantage? Production crazes in hip-hop have notoriously short shelf lives; with or without "DOA," Auto-Tune will soon fall out of favor and die of natural causes. But clever ol' Jay-Z has positioned himself to claim credit for a murder. 

Correction, June 8, 2009: The post originally stated that the beat was also produced by Kanye West. Contrary to many published accounts, West had no role in "DOA."

The Oldest Oldie, Revisited

On March 28, 2008, American audio historians David Giovannoni and Patrick Feaster announced that they had unearthed a recording of the human voice made in April 1860, predating Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades. The find was epochal, toppling paradigms and reconfiguring the history of recorded sound. It was also romantic, with a backstory fit for a steam-punk fairy tale. The recording was made by an obscure Parisian typesetter and inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, using a contraption called the phonautograph, which rendered sound in visual form. (Lab scientists in Berkeley used a "virtual stylus" to extract sound from Scott's soundwave tracings.) The result was a startling sonic resuscitation: a haunting young woman's voice, drifting out of a fog bank of static, crooning a snippet of the French folk song "Au Clair de la Lune."

Giovannoni and Feaster have continued digging in Paris archives for Scott's phonautograph recordings, or "phonautograms," and last week, at the annual meeting of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, they unveiled some more astonishing finds, including a poetic recitation in Italian, the earliest audible record of recognizable human speech, dating from sometime in April or May 1860. They also announced a revision to their "Au Clair de la Lune" discovery. Because of a miscalculation in playback speed, the phonautogram released in 2008 was a kind of Chipmunks version of the original. In fact, the performer captured by Scott's machine on April 9, 1860, was not a young woman after all but a man, singing deliberately, a bit haltingly—in all likelihood, the voice of Léon Scott. (All of the phonautograms can be heard on Giovanonni and Feaster's Web site.)

I have played the March 2008 version of the phonautogram hundreds of times in the last year, always relishing the image of a young lady, in a corset and funny hat, warbling into Scott's phonautograph horn. Turns out, the ghostly girl-singer was just that—a phantasm. But the new, slower "Au Claire de la Lune" gives us another, perhaps even more romantic scene to savor: the inventor himself, fiddling with the gizmo that, eventually, would change history.