What’s great about the recent (intentional and obvious) Autotuning trend in hip-hop and R&B — as opposed to a straw man argument that can be applied to pop singers you don’t happen to like — is that it gives me a reason to bluntly dismiss Ben Gibbard as a racist [BIG TIME SOBRIETY EDIT: Hey hey hey, read the comments before chiding me for stupidly using the R-word. All potential racial loadedness of the word “soul” I will save for people/institutions/etc. that are not Ben Gibbard personally, though a not-knee-jerk version of this conversation is worth having if we ever get more context for Gibbard’s quote, which I will try to find.] for saying/doing idiotic shit like this:

We just want to raise awareness while we’re here and try to bring back the blue note… The note that’s not so perfectly in pitch and just gives the recording some soul and some kind of real character. It’s how people really sing.

O RLY, Ben, pop radio’s not bringing enough soul for you these days? And you, the lead singer from Death Cab for Motherfucking Cutie, see no irony whatsoever in being the one to make this proclamation?

Anyway, in case y’all never saw the fansite I created with my friend Jamie back in college, here’s Death Cab for Douchebags. What’s great is that by now I can’t remember which comments were real and which were fake!

EDIT: And anyway, by definition a blue note IS an actual pitch. Specifically blue notes are the minor third, raised fourth, and flat seventh of the major scale, IIRC. And Autotuning does not destroy one’s ability to hit, or even pitch bend, a blue note, see THE ENTIRE WORKS OF T-PAIN, who frequently hits blue notes! In fact, T-Pain’s whole aesthetic is pretty much centered around him hitting blue notes through Autotune.

EDIT 2: Example: think of the hook to “Get Money.” He’s hitting the fifth note and fourth notes of a minor scale (“take it out your pocket and show it” goes between the two notes), but he’s bending the pitch around the blue note, a half-step below the fifth (halfway between the two notes he’s landing on). That’s what happens when you use Autotune to go between two adjacent notes; it hits the semitones and half-steps and all the stuff in between those two notes. And if that happens to be a blue note (which in this case it is), you get little palpitations of “blues” almost imperceptibly breaking through. That’s why it doesn’t sound like he’s just repeating the same notes perfectly.