The Illiterate

Over the weekend I went to see Star Trek, which I’ll avoid talking about right now because Jaq hasn’t seen it yet. But there were a couple of moments unassociated with the movie that got me wondering about the state of the audience and its expectations.

One was the series of trailers for the special effects spectaculars that will fill theaters throughout the summer: Transformers, Land of the Lost, GI Joe, the latest Harry Potter installment. None of them looked worth seeing, but the scale was impressive. They reminded me of the graphic designer joke about customers constantly urging them to “Make the logo bigger”. That seems to be the only operating principle behind these movies: make the effects bigger. Thanks to CGI, of course, they can make the effects as big as they want–the unreality and unbelievability of it all becomes the main selling point.

Which brings me to the second moment of realization: tucked in with all the commercials and previews was an anti-drug PSA, a simply made, single-shot film in which a dancer posed in front of painted backdrops. Each backdrop had a silhouette of the dancer cut out of it, and as the backdrops moved forward, the dancer positioned himself in the shape of the cut-out, letting it flow around him and drop away to be replaced by another. It’s not a new idea, but it had a coolness factor to it that was appealing—until that is, I heard someone in the audience say: “It’s CGI.” It wasn’t, of course, but CGI is what the audience has come to expect. Anything magical or fantastic that appears on screen must be created with computers: it’s so cheap and easy, what would be the point of doing it any other way?

There’s something cynical about this attitude, this willful suspension of belief, which applies not only to movies, but to pop music, as well. Survey the comments section of just about any pop music site and you’ll consistently come across the attitude that almost all modern pop music is the creation of technology rather than human beings. Whether its autotune or ProTools or sampling, the assumption is that actual human investment in most pop music is insignificant at best, so much so as to be essentially non-existent. That people are often wrong about this doesn’t seem to phase them. One of the most frequent types of search strings on my site comes from people looking for the sources of samples, often for records that, as far as I can tell, contain no samples at all. As for autotuning, the growing assumption seems to be that no one, except perhaps for reality show finalists, knows how to sing on key.

Which may explain why, aside from their soap opera elements, reality shows like American Idol are so popular. The fallibility of the contestants, the knowledge that they are singing live, with no technological assistance (though there are tons of effects that can be added to vocals, even in a live setting), provides a welcome relief from the machine tooled perfection of most pop music. No matter how bad the material may be, or the singers often are, the appeal of hearing a real voice, singing live, without assistance in terms of pitch, is almost like that of a magic act. When a singer successfully brings off a song, it seems like a miracle—a real one. It’s not much to believe in, but it’s something.