Turn on, auto-tune in, drop out
I’m probably wildly late on this one as, contrary to popular opinion, I don’t spend that much time trawling the internet for crap unless I’m hungover. And thus it was that the morning after Steve Sane’s birthday party found me idly browsing what my mum, in conflation of the various advances in communications technology that now blight our modern lives, refers to as ‘YouFace’. Anyway this popped up by mistake after I was hoodwinked by what appeared to be a video of a naked lady but was in fact an appalling rundown of the latest viral meta-memes, i.e. videos of cats dancing. Amidst the gurgling babies and skateboarding canaries, one video caught my eye and seemed worthy of further investigation to ease my troubled head.
Basically it’s a bunch of dudes who put American news clips through the auto-tune treatment (as popularised by Kanye West, leading exponent of ludicrously self-aggrandising arrogance and dressing like a space clown). Unfortunately they themselves then jump into the resulting videos, but if you can get past the occasional facetious bit there are some gems in there. I particularly like the “very thin ice” theme, and I dig the way it frequently sounds like a soup of regurgitated parts of R Kelly’s ‘Trapped in the Closet’ but with added cries of “shortayyyy” over dribbling sentimental teenage sex beats - in short, exactly like an Usher song. The other great thing is how weird the US news is, auto-tune or no auto-tune: appalling jokes, senators debating the merits of turtle fences, Michael Jackson “waking up dead” etc. T-Pain is in one of them, Gordon Brown sings in another and all the US newsreaders are hot cougars. Sorry about all this, I’m mildly hungover today too.
