Pet Hates of The Music Industry | Méadhbh Crowley

We’ve all got things that bug us about music today. For some of us it may be annoying teenage pop stars, or crooning indie bands, but for me it’s a never-ending list of thing that, if given the time, I could personally write a whole book about. But fortunately for you this is a much shorter rant.The first thing that really bothers me is lip-syncing . This was brought to my attention a few weeks ago when Beyoncé lip-synced the American national anthem at Obama’s inauguration. Having persistently denied that she did indeed mime, Beyoncé finally admitted to doing so, stating that it was “about the president and the inauguration and I wanted to make him and my country proud, so I decided to sing along with my pre-recorded track, which is very common in the music industry, and I am very proud of my performance."Cheryl Cole has also revealed that she sang along with a pre-recorded track during her performance at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Sure, we all would have slagged them off for a few weeks if they had messed up a few notes, but isn’t it slightly worse to be told that they didn’t even sing at all? If you were told that the €30 you spent on a ticket was wasted watching one of your favourite acts because they weren’t playing live and the drummer, guitarists and lead singer were all just miming you probably wouldn’t be pleased. So why is it OK?The next thing that really gets on my nerve is excessive auto tuning. Like miming, this takes away from the authenticity of a performance. I’m not naïve, believe me, and I know auto-tune can be used for good. For example, the greatest singers like Amy Winehouse or Bruno Mars have had pitch problems in recording and were helped with auto tune, but what I’m talking about is the excessive use of auto tune where you can actually hear the robotic sound in the background. The journalist Greg Milner describes my feelings perfectly; “While working with Cher on the song "Believe" in 1998, producers Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling discovered that if they set Auto Tune on its most aggressive setting, so that it corrected the pitch at the exact moment it received the signal, the result was an unsettlingly robotic tone.”My final pet peeve is sampling. I personally don’t understand why sampling is so popular, maybe it’s because people are lazy and it’s easier to write just take a melody written by someone else and stick some new lyrics to it. It’s just not the likes of The Black Eyed Peas and Flo Rida who are huge culprits of taking sampling to the extreme it’s other respected artists like Gotye and Avicci too.Gotye’s Grammy winning single Somebody that I Used To Know is carefully taken from the 1978 Latin hit Seville, hard as it is to believe. Avicci’s Levels too, which itself was used on Flo Rida’s track Good Feeling features some obvious sampling which the track. Something’s got A Hold On Me by Etta James. It seems to be unoriginal and boring to me to use this technique and it’s certainly something I hope we see the end of soon.