There Are No Girls on the Internet - What the History of Autotune Tells Us About the Future of AI

Episode Date: August 8, 2023

It's the 50th anniversary of hip hop, and that’s a great opportunity for Bridget to dig into one of her favorite subjects to nerd out about: trends in audio. In this episode, she breaks down the history of auto-tune. Today it’s incredibly common, but when musicians first started using it there was a huge backlash. Prominent musicians said it was ruining music, and Time Magazine put it on their list of “50 Worst Inventions.” Yet artists like T-Pain and Cher used it to create new sounds that listeners loved, and today it is widely accepted as a valuable tool for legitimate artists to use for making music. The disruptive history of auto-tune, originally derided as a toy before innovators embraced it to create something new, offers lessons for how we should understand AI in 2023. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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business. Call 844-844-I-Hart. There are No Girls on the Internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. It's the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, and that is a great opportunity to dig into one of my favorite subjects to nerd out about, which is audio and kind of trends in audio, how we respond to those trends and what it says about us as a culture. The history of autotune is a fascinating one, and I think it really explains why I'm so hung up on audio trends as like a nerdy little side interest. So when I say autotune, Mike, what comes to mind for you? Was there any one person that comes to mind when you think about autotune? Yeah, I mean, I'm no auto tune expert, but I think T-Pain really is the artist who took it and ran with it and made it like his thing. Yes, great answer.

I recently watched the T-Pain NPR Tiny Desk concert, which is like a masterpiece. People should definitely watch it. But it kind of made me happy to see T-Pain kind of coming full circle. and kind of getting the flowers that he so richly deserves for being an innovator when it comes to Autotune. And the history of how Autotune went from this, like, kind of niche thing to being everywhere, to being hated, to now being, like, commonplace, I think is such an interesting one.

And the reason that I want to tell this story now, in addition to being the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, is that I think the conversation that we're having around technology and how it intersects with art and creativity, really mirrors the conversation that we had around Autotune. I'm specifically thinking here about conversations around AI. You know, how will AI shape things like hip-hop is a question that we are seeing artists grapple with in real time.

And I think that's kind of because hip-hop has always had this particular unique relationship to technology. It's always been this medium grounded in technology. And so historically, rappers and hip-hop artists can't really shy away from embracing technology. hip hop has always been about innovation and trying new things and using technology to create something totally new. So I really feel that if anybody can use new technology like AI to do something that does not feel like exploitation or derivative or lazy, it is hip hop artists. Because the creativity and innovation of traditionally marginalized voices is that powerful. So here's a little bit of a rundown of how hip-hop artists are grappling with that question around technology and AI and how it will impact

hip-hop today. Rapper Lupe Fiosco just announced a partnership with Google for a program called TextFX, which he says is meant to help artists during the songwriting process through the use of generating alternative meanings, spellings, and phrases to words initially chosen by the human songwriter. It kind of sounds like an AI-powered rhyming dictionary for rappers. And Lupe really says that this partnership was really grounded in the relationship that rap has always has this technology, saying rap is born out of technology. Rap wouldn't exist if not for technological advancements.

It kind of sounds like this tool is not meant to replace rappers or songwriters, but rather be a supplement to a human songwriter. Lupé explained, It does require you to do the work. It's not doing the work for you. It's just providing you with different opportunities and workflow for being efficient and offloading certain things so that your mind can focus on other things. And then you have producers like Timbaland.

who is exploring with making songs using AI-generated versions of rappers who have died, so that those more established rappers can be on tracks with up-and-coming artists. Obviously, this kind of thing has gotten a lot of negative attention as being disrespectful or just plain creepy. But Timbalin told Forbes that he feels the industry and consumers need to see a more serious, well-intentioned, and transparent effort to integrate AI technology into hip-hop, saying, I don't want to be afraid of what's going on. I want to be the guy to figures out a solution. But on the other hand, you have rappers like Ice Cube,

who said that AI will make artists lazier and less creative and threatened to sue any platform or person who promotes an artificial intelligence-generated version of his voice or likeness. And then there's Little Wayne, who I think had the best response to the rise of AI and hip-hop, which is basically, bring it on. Little Wayne said, I'm like, is this AI thing going to be amazing too? Because I am naturally, organically amazing.

I am one of a kind. So actually, I would love to see that thing try to duplicate this motherfucker. I think the variety of responses to AI and hip-hop that we're seeing now really mirrors the conversation that artists were having back in the 2000s about the use of autotune and music. Will it make musicians lazy, less creative?

Will it displace authentic vocalists? We're basically seeing artists have that very same conversation they were having about AutoTune in the 2000s now with AI. And the story of Autotune is one where I think something that was once perceived as being a gimmick at best or at worst, a way to manipulate human artistry in a way that kind of creates this vibe that like, oh, like humans are expected to sound like perfect machines.

I think that was like a big concern that folks were grappling with around Autotune. There was this big concern that Autotune was going to de-tune. was going to de-incentivize artists kind of needing to be good or needing to work on their craft or perfect their craft, because you could just hit a button on a computer. But today, nobody thinks of Autotune as just a gimmick. Nobody thinks of Autotune as something that de-incentivizes artists to be creative or perfect their craft. It's just something that is totally commonplace in audio today. It's used in all kinds of interesting and creative ways because in the end, creative artists were able to make something cool and innovative to create a cool. cultural shift. And so I think that story, as we talk about things like the intersection of music and AI, that story seems even more relevant right now. So let's talk about how Autotune came to be. Autotune was originally developed by Dr. Andy Hildebrand, a research engineer, and weirdly enough, he was not working in the music industry when he came up with the idea for auto tune. He was working in the gas industry. He worked for Exxon and created a complex set of

algorithms to interpret sonar-generated data to locate oil deposits deep underground. But he was also a musician, a flute player, and he always wanted to find a way to be more involved in the audio space. Him creating autotune was kind of a fluke. A wife of his colleague was joking about how bad her singing voices, and she was like, oh, if only there was a technology I could sing into that would help me sing in tune. And I guess this idea really stayed with him. And he got to thinking, could the tool that he used in the oil industry also help correct pitch? The answer was yes. So you might be wondering, why is this such a big deal? Well, before Autotune, there were ways to correct pitch, but it was so time-consuming that it was generally not considered to be worth it. Meanwhile, Autotune was incredibly good, easy, and fast

to correct pitch. So it was a total game changer. This is something that kind of comes up in podcasting a lot too. You know, when you're podcasting, the best take is generally your like most natural take. And so when you say something and it just sounds so right, but maybe you cough or stumble or, you know, trip over your words a little bit. If you redo it, it's never going to sound as good. And so one of the reasons why this technology is such a game changer is that it allows you to keep that natural first best take, but just polish the parts that don't work. As you described to NPR, the singer's first take is often their best. It's full of vitality and emotion. After their take, the producer will announce, great, but the second phrase was pitchy, so let's do it again.

Well, now the singer's worried about pitch and has to focus on intonation, and the vitality and emotion are gone from their performance. What autotune lets the producer do is fix the first take, which makes a lot of sense. In 1996, he implemented the algorithm on a custom Macintosh computer and presented the results at the National Association of Music Merchants, a trade show for audio professionals, where it was instantly a massive hit. I can understand why because, yeah, the frustration of having to completely redo a take because you're not able to just go in and perfect it is very frustrating. So I can understand why when this was released, people were like, oh my God, huge game changer. So Autotune becomes a thing. But at this point, it's kind of treated like a trade secret. Engineers were using Autotune to discreetly correct pitch without really advertising it until someone sweeps in in 1998.

with shimmer and bangles and flowing long black hair, can you guess who I am talking about? It's Cher. It's Cher. So, Cher's believe in 1998 was the song of the late 90s, right? Not only was it a musical departure for Cher as an artist, but it's a song about transformations. So she as an artist is going through,

transformation in her career, but also singing about the importance of transformation. And I think it's an arguable that Believe is Cher's most important song. I think it would be really easy for an artist-like Cher to kind of become a nostalgia act from her Sunny and Share days of the 70s. But she didn't. She kept evolving and kept innovating. At the Grammys that year, the song was nominated for Record of the Year and Best Dance Record, winning the latter. And it was a huge commercial hit, too. Believe is one of the best best-selling singles in music history. And this is actually something that is, like, pretty hard to do.

The music scene of the late 90s was really fragmented, but Believe broke through as this global smash. It's also just really endured culturally. Like, there's a Sex and the City episode where Charlotte thinks her boyfriend might secretly be gay. And one of the pieces of evidence that is that he puts on shares believe when they're, like, in the kitchen. And so I think it's important to really highlight what a big deal this song is.

Like, if you've ever been on a dance floor and heard Believe come on, it is like an emotionally resonant experience to be dancing to believe on a dance floor. Like, the song just does something to you when you hear it. And I also think it's interesting in that it's a song about someone who has been dumped, but that act of being dumped is like a badge of honor. It is like usually in a love song, the person who has been dumped is like sad or, you know, grieving a lost relationship, grieving that they weren't enough for this person who dumped them. But in Believe, she is like righteous. She is not saying like, I am sad, I'll get over this.

She is saying, I will transform. This moment is going to be a moment of transformation for me. And it's just one of those things like the line, do you believe in life after love? It's just, it's one of those lines that I can't believe is not an established phrase or idiom because it just hits so perfectly. So in the song, Believe, Autotune was used to create unnaturally rapid corrections and shares vocals. They basically removed that natural slide between pitches and singing. In effect, creating that kind of robotic voice that you hear in the song. Belief's producer, Mark Taylor, originally did not want to tell people that he had used Autotune to get that sound. no, not because Autotune had a negative connotation yet,

but because he wanted to protect the method as a trade secret. So the team initially came up with a whole cover story that if they were asked, they were going to say that they got that robotic vocal effect by using a vocoder pedal. A vocoder, if you don't know what that is, it's similar to Autotune but different. Apparently, Scher's label wanted her to remove the Autotune effect

and she flat out refused. They even started calling Autotune the Share effect. So while all of this is going down in 1999, T-Pain is just starting his musical career. So when T-Pain was three, he got interested in music because a family friend, jazz singer and producer Ben Tankard, allowed him to spend time, quote, twisting knobs at his recording studio. At age 10, T-Pain turned his entire bedroom into a little music studio with a beat machine and a keyboard and everything. T-Pain actually got his start as a rapper, but after being discovered, he decided that he wanted to sing instead of rap.

It's the early 2000s, and T. Payne had been looking for a way to make his voice stand out. He hears the Dark Child remix of the 1999 song, If You Had My Love by Jennifer Lopez, which, by the way, I love that song, which uses a little bit of auto tune. He's also really inspired by the R&B greats like Teddy Riley, who use things like talk boxes and vocoders, which are kind of similar to auto tune, but a little bit different. T. T. Payne records his debut album, Rapa, Tert, Singa, in 2006. and it gets to 33 on the Billboard 200 and a certified gold. He releases his second album, Epiphany, which is kind of like T-Pain's magnum opus. It's his thriller.

It's like the album that you think of when you think of T-Pain. The album includes the song, Buy You a Drink, which is probably his biggest hit. The song peaked at number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, making it his highest charting single as a lead artist. So something to know about this is that when that album first came out, It wasn't like people were criticizing T-Pain as like a gimmicky artist. The reviews were admittedly mixed, but people were talking about him as a serious artist to watch,

not like some kind of a joke, one-trick pony. You know, something that you really need to know about T-Pain is that he legitimately saw Autotune as his thing, right? He did not see Autotune as popping onto a trend or a gimmick or a joke because it was his way of exploring his own voice as a singer. But everybody sees how successful T-Pain is at doing AutoTune, and they all start jumping on the bandwagon. Snoop Dog does it in 2007 on his song, Central Seduction. Lowell Wayne does it in 2008 with his song Lollipop. Kanye West releases the album 808s and Heartbreak in 2008, a project that T-Pain actually worked on.

What's interesting about that is that I've heard T-Pain talk about 808s and heartbreak, even though he was, I think, a consultant on the album. I think he felt some type of way about how that album was received. He talks about how he didn't feel like Kanye West did Auto-Tune correctly on that album. It sounds like T-Pain thought that the critical praise that 808 and Heartbreak got

should have gone to him as a pioneer of the technology. What's interesting about this is that people associated T-Pain specifically with Autotune and a kind of cheapening of the music industry in general, but he was legitimately trying to use this technology, to create something unique as an artist, just like Cher was. He said it in an interview, it's not like I was telling other artists to do this. I was the one doing it.

Other people started doing it. I didn't tell them to do that. It's not my fault that this became a trend. In a really good long read about auto tune and pitchwork that we'll link to in the show notes, they talk about how this kind of put T-Pain in this very weird position. He was at once a pioneer of this technology, but also a critic of the way that other people were using it. The piece points out that he claimed that he spent two years. years researching Autotune and thinking about it, including meeting with Dr. Hildbrand before attempting

to use it. So when T-Pain is compared to other artists who are jumping on the auto-tune trend, he actually feels offended by this. He says, a lot of math went into that shit. It would take us a billion fucking minutes to explain to regular motherfuckers, but I really studied that shit. I know why it catches certain notes and why it doesn't catch other notes. So T-Pain really saw himself as like someone who was learning about a craft to explore his own artistry. And when other people saw this as a bandwagon to jump on, he became the punching bag for it. People associating T-Pain negatively with Autotune was something that he really struggled with. He's talked about this in interviews, that there was this moment where he meets Usher, the singer Usher, and that

Usher is the singer that he really respects. And Usher essentially personally blames him for, I negative shift in the music industry. He says that Usher told him that he messed up music for real singers and that Usher, as this great vocalist who T. Payne really respected, in an interview, he said, that is the very moment. And I don't even think I realized this for a long time, but that very moment started a four-year depression for me. And just FYI, Usher famously used Autotune in his song, Oh My God. So it definitely is a thing where artists who vocally criticize Autotune even before it was so commonplace, also use auto tune.

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And we're back. So I knew that Autotune was like notoriously controversial in the music industry. When I was first doing the research for this episode, I thought, oh, people just find it a little bit lazy or a little bit gimmicky. Or they just have a negative perception of it. What I did not realize is how much of an organized negative publicity campaign surrounded Autotune in the 2000s. At the Grammys in 2009, the band Death Cab for Cutie showed up wearing blue ribbons on their lapels to protest the use of auto tune in the music industry. This sounds kind of funny, but it was very serious. There's an MTV.com article about it titled, Death Cab for Cutie raise awareness about auto tune abuse.

Enough is enough. And in the article, Ben Gibbard, the lead of Death Cab for Cutie says, we're here to raise awareness about auto tune abuse. I think it's over the last 10 years we've seen good musicians being affected by the this new found digital manipulation of the human voice, and we feel enough is enough. Let's raise awareness. Let's stop this. Let's bring back the blue note, and let's really try to get music back to its roots of having

actual people who sound like actual human beings. I read a quote from the singer Nico Case, who I know you really like Nico Case, right? That's true. I do, and to my knowledge, I've never heard of use Autotune, so I'm a little concerned where you're going with this. Well, Nico Case does not use AutoTune, and in 2006, she told Pitchfork, quote, I'm not a perfect note hitter either, but I'm not going to cover it up with Autotune. Everybody uses it too. I once asked a studio guy in Toronto, how many people don't use Autotune? And he said, you and Nellie Furtado are the only two people who've never used it in here. Even though I'm not into Nellie Furtado, it kind of made me respect her. It's cool that she has some integrity. And so I think what we really are seeing here is like Autotune being connected. to a lack of integrity or a lack of authenticity. This was the 2000s at a time where I think that there was a real

binary between, quote, real musicians, real artists, and like pop-poppy bubble gummy kind of like gimmicks. And so I think part of the backlash was about this, was a response to people being like, oh, no, these new fake musicians, they're not real musicians. They're using auto tune. and they're fakers, real music is like real music, people using their real voice. And I can understand that sentiment, but honestly, there's nothing natural about the human singing voice.

Like, your voice is a tool, it's an instrument. And so this idea that any manipulation of that means that you're like not a real artist, I find sort of interesting. Yeah, that adjective real comes up on the show a lot, right? just to separate us from them pretty often. Kind of makes you wonder who's the us and who's the them in that scenario. So in 2009, the same year that Death Cab for Cudy shows up wearing those blue lapel pens to protest AutoTune, Jay-Z released the lead single of his album, The Blueprint 3, DOA, Death of Autotune.

And he said that he thought that Autotune was like an overused gimmick. In that song, he calls T-Pain out by name. Also, in 2010, Time Magazine includes Autotune in their list of the 50 worst inventions, on the same list with Agent Orange and Subprime Mortgages. Not Agent Orange. It's pretty harsh. I feel like Agent Orange has been responsible for more harm in the world than Automian. Yeah, like it literally killed a lot of people horrifically and caused,

a lot of cancer. I mean, I don't think Autotune's killed anybody. Time. So, just like in conversations that we're having around AI and whether or not images that have been manipulated using AI should be labeled, which, by the way, we think they should, there was even a call to have it be labeled whenever a live performance used Autotune.

Singer-songwriter David Mendel started the Live Means Live campaign, and he wanted there to be a logo that said, Live means live, to let the audience know that when that person, is performing, no auto tune is being used, no backing track is being used, it is 100% live. And I think that goes back to what we were just talking about. Like in the 2000s, there was this, I would argue, false dichotomy between authentic musicians and inauthentic musicians. You know, you had a lot of rappers calling other rappers, quote, ringtone rappers, which was like a negative term for a rapper that was like too poppy, two.

bubble gum just trying to get money, as opposed to like real rappers who are doing something else entirely. You have a lot of artists being called out for using, you know, backup vocals tracks in their in their live performances. In 2013, Beyonce famously was lip-sinking to a vocal track when she performed at Obama's inauguration. And then she had to do a press conference where she belts out the national anthem acapella and is like, any questions just to prove that she actually can do it, which, by the way, I've often found conversations around, you know, having a backtrack going for a live performance. Like, that inauguration, I was at that inauguration and it was a very cold day. The weather does stuff to your voice. Like, I don't know,

I feel like if you're performing at an outdoor important inauguration, there's no shame in using a backtrack for a big moment like an inauguration to just need to sound perfect. And if you use a backtrack to accomplish that, I don't think it's the end of the. world. Like, I think it's sometimes the accusations are a little much. And I do think that some of this climate around inauthentic and authentic musicians does to me to seem like a way to criticize black musicians and poppy women musicians. Like, you can't help but see people who see themselves as like real authentic rockers calling out people who use autotune. And it's curious to me who got caught up in the auto-tune criticism.

Because, like, in Radiohead's 2001 album Amnesiac, they use Autotune. Tom York described the use of Autotune on that album as, quote, Autotune desperately tries to search for the music in your speech and produces notes at random. If you've assigned it a key, you've got music. Right? And so nobody was calling out, when all this auto-tune criticism was happening, nobody was calling out Radiohead for using it.

It was interesting to me who got called out publicly and who didn't. In that really good pitchwork piece I mentioned, they put it this way. Much of this anti-autone sentiment presented the idea that the technology is a dehumanizing deception voiced it upon the public. Attempting to deflect this angle of attack, Hildbrand once offered up an analogy with a generally accepted form of everyday artifice, asking, My wife wears makeup, does that make her evil? Perhaps because of Cher's involvement in Autotune's debut on the World Pop Stage, critics have often connected pitch correction and cosmetic surgery, comparing the effects to Botox, face peals,

collagen injections, and the rest. In the video for Believe, Cher actually looks how Autotune sounds, the combination of three levels of enhancement, surgery, makeup, and that old trick of bright lights that flatten the skin surface into a blank dazzle means that her face and her voice seem to be made out of the same immaterial substance. If the believed promo was produced today, a fourth level of falsification would be routinely applied. Digital post-production procedures like motion retouching or colorizing that operate at the levels of pixels rather than pores,

fundamentally altering the integrity of the image. The taste for these effects and the revulsion against them are part of the same syndrome, reflecting a deeply conflicted confusion in our desires, simultaneously craving the real and the true while continuing to be seduced by digital's perfection. and the facility and flexibility of use that it offers. That's why young hipsters buy overpriced vinyl for the aura of authenticity and analog warms, but in practice, use the download codes to listen to the music on an everyday level. So I definitely agree with that take, and I think that our response to auto tune and the rise of auto tune culturally does say something about us that we want it both ways.

We want the slickness of something that is clearly digitized, while also being able to call it out for being inauthentic or being repulsed by it. It's like this real duality of like, we want this, we crave this, we have been trained as audiences to like this and respond to this, but also we find that very dynamic to be repulsive. But here's my thing, because Sharon T-Pain were innovators. Today, Autotune is so commonplace that I would be willing to bet that most people don't even know that they're hearing songs that have been pitch-corrected by Autotune when they hear it. It is commonplace across all genres of music, even though we associate it more heavily with hip-hop. It is in all different kinds of music. And autotune is not only used for things like

pitch correction or making a singer sound better. Artists also use autotune in all kinds of unique ways. One of my favorites is the Kate Bush song, A Deeper Understanding, which was originally released back in 1998. Kate Bush has said that the song is a critique about our relationship with technology, saying, this is about people, well, about the modern situation where more and more people are having less and less contact with human beings. We spend all day with machines, all night with machines, you know, all day you're on the phone and all night you're watching the telly. Press a button and this happens. And this idea of someone who spends all their time with the computer and like a lot of people, they spent an obsessive amount of time with their computers. People really build up heavy relationships with their computers.

So the song initially had this computer voice on the track. And the original version, it's voiced by her son. But when she revisited that song in 2011, pitchwork reports that she used Autotune to make the Siri-like voice of the computer sound like a guardian angel, offering surrogate solace and counterfeit company, saying,

Hello, I know that you're unhappy. I bring you love and deeper understanding. So she used a heavily criticized technology to critique our relationship with technology. Brilliant. So I think there's always going to be artists who find a way to use new technology in ways that are creative because that's what creative people have always done. I saw this really interesting point in Trappital, a newsletter that covers

the business of hip-hop by Dan Runcie. So Dan points out that venture capitalist Chris Dixon has this concept about disruptive technologies, that disruptive technologies always start out by looking like a toy. So when they come out, but the iPhone, I remember someone saying, I don't want to get an iPhone. It looks like a toy. It looks like a phone. It looks like a phone. that like a child would use. And I think there's something to this idea that technologies that are going to be disruptive and really take off as the next big thing,

they do often start out by looking like toys. And so when something looks like a toy, it can be dismissed while also being phased in as something that's going to be disruptive. And so I think that Autotune was dismissed as this gimmick, right? This joke. And now it's everywhere, even though so many people initially dismissed its use.

Yeah, that's a really, really interesting point, and it does really connect to the analogy you were making to AI earlier. When AI first became a big thing, we were all using Dali to create images that were like sort of jokey, and it was like similar with chat GPT, just asking it questions for novelty, for funzies, and so it really does have this quality of feeling a little bit like a toy, but I suppose, you know, quietly on laptops around the world, people are using it for much more serious purposes. Yeah, I really think the comparison between Autotune and AI as technologies

in so much that they will transform these creative industries. And I think the reason why I connect those two conversations in my head is because as we're having these conversations about how AI is going to transform the creative spaces, like hip hop, music, the arts, film, television. A lot of those conversations have been really pessimistic, and I totally get it, right? Like, the striking screenwriters and actors are not, like, not wrong to be really concerned about the way that AI will impact their industry. Those concerns are absolutely fair and grounded. However, I think that there's always going to be people who find ways to use technology to create something better. And so I think that we're at this pivotal point in the conversation around AI and how it's going to shape those fields where the question is, do we want this technology to be used to exploit or to innovate?

I think the screenwriters are saying, let's see how this technology can be used to innovate. If AI is going to help me punch up a script, that's great. The powers that be should not bake my exploitation into that model. I think that that's where we're at. And so this might surprise people, but I am kind of positive, kind of cautiously hopeful about how we see this play out. Because if there's anybody who can find a way to innovate with new technologies, it's creatives. It's hip hop artists. It's people like T-Paint and people like share. It's innovators. And so I really want those people to. to be the ones who are leading the way in terms of how new technologies do shape creative fields. Like, that's what I want to see. How can they be used to innovate, not exploit? And it really comes down to something that tech historian Claire Evans said in the very first ever episode of There Are No Girls on the internet. There have been many instances in the history of music when a new technology has come along that ostensibly is there to displace the musician. For example, the drum machine or the synthesizer, you know, these are tools that were designed to replace session

musicians with an easier, cheaper version, kind of automation of their labor. In fact, even in the 80s, like the British Musicians Union tried to ban synthesizers. But what artists and musicians did was, instead of allowing those tools to replace them, they took control of them, and, you know, they took drum machines, and they took synthesizers, and they invented Detroit Techno, and they invented New Wave, and they invented hip-hop, and they invented, you know, electronic music as it exists today, and it's many manifestations. They kind of took the thing that was threatening them with displacement and incorporated it into what they were doing and made it essential to who they were and used it to invent something new that they were integrally as human beings involved with.

And I think that that act of kind of like, I don't know, like jumping on the grenade or something is like a really beautiful thing that artists always do willingly or unwillingly when they are faced with new technology. And I think when new technology comes along, you always have that choice. Are you going to let it displace you? Are you going to let it intimidate you? Or are you going to take it, you know, jump on it, find some new use for it, and make it part of who you are, and give it back to the world in a new form. That is all, that choice is always present. And I think that's what I try to do in my work across the board. And I think it's the only way that we're going to kind of keep on top of all this technology. And I think it's also very human. I think

it's what people always do. We are always trying to create systems of meaning and beauty out of what is coming up ahead. And I think that will never change. Claire really put that so beautifully. And that is an sentiment that is echoed by one of my favorite bands, Daff Punk, who used Autotune in their song one more time. They said, a lot of people complain about the musicians using autotune. It reminds me of the late 70s when musicians in France tried to ban the synthesizer. What they didn't see was that you could use those tools in a new way instead of just replacing the instruments that came before. And so I think that's where we are right now. We're a lot. are at the crossroads with so many technologies of, are we going to use this to innovate or

are we going to use this to exploit? And that is the question that we are asking right now about new technologies. And that is a question that innovators like Cher and T-Pain answered with a resounding innovate. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangoati.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoody.com. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a of IHart Radio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer.

Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from IHartRadio, check out the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy,

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