Life to Auto-Tune!

"In excess (on the chaffest of the chaff hip-hop singles) it can make a weird kind of sense, preferable to its detractors' mealy-mouthed bleatings about authenticity and integrity. We should be mindful of anything that seeks to make musicians pay dues, that imposes a hierarchy on inclusion in pop based on vocal 'talent'; indeed any orthodoxy that makes us forget what a confection pop is. But the recording angel surely has to sound like an angel, has to have a sense of battle with the humans within it — too often we find, listening to modern pop and R&B/hip-hop in particular, autotune inflexibly sitting on weedy-assed beats, shining like a fake Rolex in a suitcase, blinding the eye whist dropping a glistened turd in your ear. You can't polish it, no matter how reverse-double-bluff-with-salko be your hipster manoeuvres"

This article does a nice job of articulating the problems of the auto-tune moment, which is not so much a matter of software as it is of deployment. Auto-tune could sound great if it found the right context, or was pushed beyond its standard parameters. I can't speak to the dancehall tunes mentioned in the article, but will definitely check out some of them.