Hey, everyone. Boomthony Boomtano here, the Internet's busiest music nerd.

Let's talk about autotune.

With modern society regressing in the way that it has over the past 10 years, it's led to a lot of situations where socially, politically, artistically, I feel like we're being forced to have conversations that we had and I thought we resolved years ago.

Because these days, there are a shocking amount of people who will say things like, "hip hop's not even music," or will question whether or not a pop artist should be able to present themselves in a sexy way on their album cover. And now it seems we are once again having to have the dialogue about whether or not autotune is something you should be allowed to use as an artist. One of the most prevalent and popular vocal effects in popular music for the past 20 years.

Hell, there's even fucking indie bands and singer-songwriters that use it now. And these days, it's become such a widely accepted practice that a lot of artists embrace it, not even for its ability to help singers hit the notes they want to hit and keep their voices there. But it's also just become like an aesthetic, something that you just put on your vocals to make them pop or give them a certain presentation.

That presentation, whatever attitude or feeling an artist may be trying to convey by using autotune on their voice, it depends on the track, the person. But I can say, at least in the case of Charli XCX, a lot of her music calls back to the aughties era of Y2K pop, which was not only a time period when autotune was first beginning to come to prominence in the mainstream, but it was also an era in popular music where you had a lot of singers and a lot of producers trying to convey these visions and feelings of futurism.

With a lot of Charli's music calling back to that time period, I feel like her use of autotune makes sense and actually sound good and unique in a way. But it seems that there were a lot of people who disagreed with this after Charli's recent performance at the Glastonbury Music Festival this year, where a lot of stuff did go down, but I'm primarily going to focus on this Charli story here.

Apparently, there were a lot of people taking issue with her use of autotune to the point where Charli began clapping back on social media, pointing out comments that didn't quite make sense, like this one claiming she was lip syncing to a backing track and using autotune.

I do get what the guy was trying to claim in that the backing tracks weren't live and they were actually autotuned as well. But if you've seen Charli XCX live, and I've seen her live a few times, she very clearly does do her vocals live, whether you like the autotune approach or not.

Charli added further comment about all of this on Twitter.

That's another thing with Charli's use of autotune in this context. She's not really trying to hide it. She consciously cranks that shit up so that you have to contend with the autotune. If she were merely using it for pitch correction, there are way, way, way more low-key ways you could go about applying it to your vocals than how Charli goes about it. I'm not sure how many people heading on Charli over this autotune are aware of the fact that some form of pitch correction makes it onto a majority of mainstream albums these days in some way, shape, or form.

I think there's also a bit of a misunderstanding here in terms of what autotune does for a singer. I think there's this presumption that you just get up there and you just go, and the autotune just makes it sound good for you without you even having to try. With the autotune, you still have to be singing in key. You still have to come up with a compelling melody. You still have to sing in a way that is expressive so that your voice is actually recognizable through the autotune, which Charli's very much is.

I listen to and review a lot of records month after month that feature some form of pitch correction or autotune. After covering her music numerous times, I've never not found Charli's voice to be recognizable or to have found other singers to sound like Charli merely because they're both using autotune.

Again, with autotune, you still have to sing in a key, the key that the autotune is set to. You still have to have range. You still have to sing with conviction and passion. You still have to come up with a melody for the damn song. The autotune is not doing it for you.

On top of it, the autotune doesn't save you from sounding like shit if your singing is terrible. Autotune also doesn't necessarily make your voice sound interesting, either. I mean, take, for example, all the boring ass Drake songs that use autotunery sounds asleep at the fucking wheel, where the autotune is clearly not enough to keep the music interesting.

At the end of the day, I'm not saying autotune is across the board, automatically a win or a benefit to all music it is used on. It's all a case-by-case basis. It's all about context. It's all about the outcome, the result and artistic intent. And in the case of Charli, I just personally happen to think that it sounds great and it makes sense.

It's unfortunate that there are still music listeners out there who don't quite get it, despite the fact that autotune is a pretty normalized thing at this point. And I, again, regret to inform these people. There is way more pitch correction in autotune going on in the music you hear than you think. Charli is one of the only mainstream artists who is out here not faking the funk and just rocking it in a very apparent way because it gives her music and it gives her vocals a certain sound.

The last thing Charli said on Twitter about this topic is. "really enjoying these boomer vibe comments on my Glastonbury performance. It's super fascinating to me," which I don't know. I would chalk some of the hate comments up to just people being old and not really understanding or getting it. But simultaneously, I feel like a lot of this is a sign of all of the weird little fragmented niches of culture that we're all holed into via our own personal distinct algorithms.

Even with Charli being as relevant and as popular as she is currently, really at the peak of her career right now, you still have hundreds of thousands, if not millions and millions of Western music listeners who have not been introduced to her sound or her music at all.

And the first time they're catching it on a stage like Glastonbury, which is a very mixed bill. I'm sure there are Neil Young fans watching and listening who are like, "What the fuck? What's going on?" Especially when Charli was licking the floor.

Now, the upside to certain bits of content or music being exposed to us in that fashion is that maybe some of us get turned on to things that we wouldn't have heard about otherwise, which is cool. Simultaneously, the downside of that is that there is no longer any monoculture or any collective softening or understanding toward ideas that we're all uniformly unfamiliar with.

As a result of that, you have things that are as regularly used and as just every day in the music studio as autotune being treated like, "Why would you do this? This is the most offensive thing to my ears ever. Any singer that would use something like this is a complete and utter fraud." To those people, I say what goes on in some of your favorite artist's music studios may shock you. And I will leave it there.

Let me know what you think in the comments about all of this mess. I'm sure you will.

Anthony Fantano, Charli XCX, Autotune, forever.