After Gorilla Zoe stepped out of the box with his delusional street single “Lost,” I just assumed he would resort to his old hood figga’ ways for the rest of his upcoming album, Don’t Feed Da Animals.

Boy, was I completely wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

The music industry needs to be quarantined for infectious disease. Send its faux-Vocoder crap raft down river to Betty Ford for severe addiction to voice alteration.

Now that three-quarters of BET’s line-up is saturated with AutoTune pipe smoke, I was a tidbit beside myself to hear Kanye invoke the program on “Love Lockdown.” Kanye has generally thought outside the box with eloquence, but digitizing your voice just isn’t what’s popping on the originality front anymore. It’d make more sense for Ye, and the likes, to go full-boar throwback and just embrace the delicacies of gawdawful sangin’ à la Biz Markie.

Now, Kanye is a can-do-no-wrong artist in my eyes so I shall say no more about his latest single. But the fact that he took it there has sparked much Net conversation, and TSS is no exception. Crew member Sam Cadet and I began a dialogue inspired by Mr. West, revealing an intense list of artists over the years who have robotically altered the quality of their voice for music.

As Phonte told TSS in reference to his alter-ego Tay-Pain, there are varying levels of vocal manipulation. Sam Cadet and I took an all-things-considered approach, narrowing our list of synthesizers to a baker’s dozen and ranking them from Best to Worst use or abuse of alteration.

1) Zapp & Roger – Computer Love

LC Weber: See, this is how to do it. Make a two-steppin’ love song about computers, sounding like a computer.
Sam Cadet: This song predates all of the I/G/AIM/Yahoo/MSN chat boo lovin’ that you kids do these days.

Rank: Perfect Than A Mug. Read the rest of this entry »