so it’s festival season and a heap of bands i’ve never heard of but probably heard plenty of times on the radio are coming over. these are the alternative bands, the ones that do festivals, get an album of the week on JJJ etc.

I’m watching ‘rage’ at the moment, i usually like watching music videos (as long as i can avoid the booty-shaking women-are-a-piece of meat videos) so it’s a lot of mid paced ballads over a dance beat at the moment, the contenders for the mainstream charts.

And it’s all AUTOTUNE, CHORUS and COMPRESSION on the vocals, every single video. Well, particularly the American ones, as though they got these pretty people that can’t actually sing but look good in a video, so they’ll just put all these effects on 11 and you wont even be able to recognise if they’re male or female, let alone which singer they are. The only ones that seem to be spared the AUTOTUNE are winners of the Australian Idol competition and the Black Eyed Peas, but they still get the CHORUS and COMPRESSION on 11.

AUTOTUNE makes singers sound like robots singing in a box.

So i guess it’s apt for the mainstream music sound.

People often told me I couldn’t be a performer cos I don’t sing well enough (yeah those little comments you make to musicians, we never forget them), but it’s just that I don’t use vocal effects. How the fuck are all these artists going to perform live without their CHORUS and AUTOTUNE?

but you watch a video from some ‘indie’ festival band and it looks more over produced than a Black Eyed Peas video, with alice in wonderland costumes and elaborate sets and every girl is shout-singing because Karen O can do it, only they need COMPRESSION and all their instruments are PROGRAMMED IN. and shit i can’t tell the different between these supposed indie acts that sent $50,000 on their video and the mainstream acts that spent $200,000.

None of it feels real, none of it feels like theres a musician behind it. or that there might be a genuine enthusiasm and love for playing and entertaining their audience.

They all look like puppets.

All the songs sound the same.

What really concerns me is that truly independent music gets totally pushed out by the Laura Marlings and Passion Pits that try to keep it under wraps how heavily backed they are by their major labels because it would sap all their indie cool and they’d just look like lame ass acts that aren’t quite good enough to crack the mainstream.

seeing all this stuff, seeing their videos, albums, the massive promotions even for the supposedly little bands, their pretensions laid out in front of me. it doesn’t make me want to fight against it, it demotivates me, makes me want to crawl away and die and never make music again.