Dylan vs. Autotune

 I watched two Bob Dylan documentaries done by Scorsese. I'm not a Dylan super-fan, so in a way that made it more enjoyable, because I don't have anything invested in liking or disliking anything associated with him. Both movies are long and have delightful footage. The genuineness of the singers who inspired Dylan in the beginning, and his contemporaries, like Joan Baez, is wonderful to see. Allen Ginsberg appears in both films.  (I also watched a Leonard Cohen documentary that was not quite as good.) 

I watched the Grammys and the Super Bowl half time show. The excessive spectacle, the lack of emphasis on the music itself, the autotune and lip syncing, the sheer narcissism, the mutual admiration among mediocrities, etc... was very off-putting. It was nice to have Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder, and some of the historic rappers, but the best part of the Grammys was, in, fact, the more nostalgic part.  (Showing my generational bias here.) 

Rick Beato has a good video on autotune. We can compare it to the AI program infecting writing. Beato says that when AI writes all the songs, we won't even notice, since we are already so used to mechanized music production. My objection to autotune is not that it makes people more in tune than they otherwise would be (so that anyone can be a pop star without even singing in tune), but that it flattens out the music, robs it of vibrancy.