"Gonna let it rock/Let it roll/Let the Bible belt come and save my sou-oh-ohhll/Hang on to sixteen as long as you can/Changes comin' 'round real soon make us women and men."
"Jack and Diane" by John Cougar Mellencamp is just one of many examples of the "80's drum sound". Like most other great ideas, the 80's drum sound originated spontaneously. A British recording engineer named Hugh Padgham was goofing around in the studio with Phil Collins in 1980. In order to have communication between the control room and live room, Hugh had placed one microphone in the center of the room and compressed the dickens out of it so he could hear quiet conversation. When Phil started playing the drums, however, inspiration struck. Thus, the "gated" drum sound was born.
The effect soon spread like hotcakes. For most of the 1970's, the trend in pop had been to record drums as dryly as possible, "choking" the sound and emphasizing the beat.
However, as soon as "In the Air Tonight" blew up worldwide, other mix engineers began copying the gigantic drum reverb effect. For the first time, digital reverb technology became widely available cheaply. Soon, drums were living in giant digital cathedrals. In 1986, Paul Simon took this effect into entirely new territory with "Graceland", an album the paired a heavily processed drum sound with traditional African chants and South African guitar playing.
It wasn't until the advent of the Nirvana grunge sound in the early 90's that the polished, "slick" drum sound of the 80's went out of vogue. Pop music was free from any one particular production trope until 1998, when two more British blokes named Matt Taylor and Brian Rawling unleashed Cher's "Believe"on the world.
To achieve the song's signature sound, they had simply overused (or abused) Auto-Tune, a program originally designed to fix vocal takes that were slightly out of tune and save engineers, vocalists, and producers LOTS of time. Their manipulation of Cher's vocal performance created a distinctive "robotic" vocal sound that appeared here and there sporadically until T-Pain started writing symphonies with it and rappers began exploiting it en masse.
However, the backlash against ubiquitous use of Auto-Tune was swift. Artists including Death Cab For Cutie began speaking out about its use and it became an object of ridicule through parodies such as Auto-Tune The News. Jay-Z even went so far as to more or less condemn the assimilation of Hip-hop into pop by releasing a song called "The Death of Auto-Tune". Despite its hotly contested stature as enabler of modern sounds in pop music, it continues to be used widely by almost every performer in the music industry, in recording studios as well as live situations.
I have found that it is easy to date a recording based on whether or not it contains the infamous "80's drum sound". Most songs containing it are seen as "corny". It is natural that the recording industry moves from one "trend" or "sound" to another, but Auto-Tune seems to have lasted longer than any fad preceding it. Is it possible that Auto-Tune will "date" recordings the same way the 80's drum sound does in the coming years? Will perfectly-pitched vocals go out of style like spandex, big hair and keytars? What would modern pop sound like if vocalists still had to nail the notes in order to make a hit recording? Would performers like Fergie, T-Pain, and Ke$ha have careers?
It remains to be seen, as soon as "I Gotta Feelin'" hits oldies radio...
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