Bright pop: Hoàng Thuỳ Linh

January 30, 2024 3:50 PM

Especially for my fellow northern Northern Hemisphere denizens, struggling through the gloomy season: a pair of brilliantly colorful pop music videos. Kẻ Cắp Gặp Bà Già (Diamond Cut Diamond) and Gieo Quẻ (Casting Coins).
posted by clew (16 comments total)

Auto-tune has made popular music utterly repulsive to older listeners, much as the electric guitar was utterly repulsive to older popular music listeners in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Discuss?
posted by Scarf Joint at 4:53 PM on January 30

These don't sound auto-tuned to me? Vietnamese is a tonal language and the tones of the words wind up as part of the melody, so it sounds a little exotic. Chinese is another interesting case: in Cantonese songs, the semantic tones are mandatory, while in Mandarin, the tones are just ignored when singing.
posted by jabah at 4:59 PM on January 30 [2 favorites]

Sure, Vietnamese is a tonal language, and so are other Southeast Asian languages, and I'm personally a great fan of Thai and especially Cambodian music from the 1970s and 1980s that riffs amazingly with these languages and the amazing chances to improvise in a tonal language unlike mine.

But here we're hearing computer music, auto-tuned to Western octaves.

Am I as deluded as Perry Como fans who hated The Beatles, or is there a difference between fingers and voices innovation in popular music versus beats and auto-tunes innovations in popular music today? I don't need to win this question; I'd just like to hear opinions about whether this stuff is as sublime as earlier abrupt popular music shifts were, or whether this is the most unimaginatively robot-scripted (and depressingly non-regional) music trend in popular music in decades?
posted by Scarf Joint at 5:14 PM on January 30 [2 favorites]

> Scarf Joint: "But here we're hearing computer music, auto-tuned to Western octaves."

Wait, I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying that the original music is keyed to a non-Western scale and it's being auto-tuned to Western octaves? Personally, I don't hear this auto-tune at all. It sounds processed but not obviously pitch-corrected to me, but I'm definitely no expert in this.
posted by mhum at 5:41 PM on January 30

Well, neither am I, but it sounds just like Taylor Swift's octaves to me.

Ugh, I'm at work and can't search YouTube, but if you look around for Thai and Cambodian popular music on keyphrase "Vietnam War," it's obviously informed by western pop of the time but also riffing on musical scales and tonal differences in language that are strikingly and beautifully different from it.

Which doesn't mean anything. Maybe we now have the best pop music of all time, finally converging on a common musical language that increasingly sounds the same because it's so digitally sublime (while breaking the ears of old people who remember when different bands from different lands sounded different). I don't know.
posted by Scarf Joint at 6:08 PM on January 30

Sinn Sisamouth fan myself. I was going to do a post on Khmer Rock. But I defer, I'd like to see a cool post. For those who might want a start ' Cambodia Rocks' is not bad, some good playlists and documentaries.
posted by clavdivs at 6:18 PM on January 30 [1 favorite]

If there's any discussion energy here, I'll sit back and listen from now. Love to hear your opinions.
posted by Scarf Joint at 6:34 PM on January 30

Since my favorite color is "every color, in neon, and make it shiny, too" I enjoyed this quite a bit.
posted by phunniemee at 6:44 PM on January 30 [5 favorites]

> Scarf Joint: "Well, neither am I, but it sounds just like Taylor Swift's octaves to me. [...] if you look around for Thai and Cambodian popular music on keyphrase "Vietnam War," it's obviously informed by western pop of the time but also riffing on musical scales and tonal differences in language that are strikingly and beautifully different from it. [...] Maybe we now have the best pop music of all time, finally converging on a common musical language that increasingly sounds the same because it's so digitally sublime"

So, it seems to me that there's at least two things you could be complaining about. One is the apparent lack of non-Western scales in globally popular (or perhaps merely globally perceptible) music from regions that historically used non-Western scales, at least in the two Vietnamese songs presented in this post. The other is the introduction and widespread availability of digital audio processing techniques like auto-tune (which may or may not even be used in these two songs and is certainly not necessary to produce music in "Taylor Swift's octaves"). The initial mention of auto-tune (as well as the references to Perry Como vs. the Beatles and "digitally sublime") suggested the latter but this follow-up seems to suggest the former. I would suggest that these are largely separate things to complain about.
posted by mhum at 6:47 PM on January 30 [1 favorite]

one aspect to Cambodian Rock or music is Khmer is a non tonal language. if you first listen to some cuts from various artists, to the Western ear it might sound like dissonance and overall sound quality of the recording. many of these singers adopted western style Harmony with an upbeat scale. one aspect to the Southeast Asian '60s and '70s onward Rock and Western Rock is there both involved that one important thing, dancing. to make a small point I don't think you can really dance to Beethoven's 5th and let's face it not very fast if you're listening to Perry Como or my mother's favorite Pat Boone.
this is why we invented Chet Atkins.
posted by clavdivs at 7:42 PM on January 30

I rather loosely related, earlier today I was listening to Dengue Fever, they're more retro than authentic, but the style is more my taste.
posted by ovvl at 8:45 PM on January 30

I don't really get the hate for auto tune. It's just another sound. Is it the idea that 'they can't really sing.' Personally if that's the case, I don't care. Authenticity is music is overrated.

If it's the sound itself I have to ask if vocoders back in the day bothered folk who now hate auto tune? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by treblekicker at 5:30 AM on January 31 [1 favorite]

Would auto tune (pitch correction) even work with a tonal language? You would need some sort of algorithm which can distinguish between the semantic tones on the one hand (which involve mostly a quick glissando), and inaccurate pitch on the other hand—ignoring the former and correcting or removing the later. Maybe the same aspect that allows vibrato with pitch control also allows tones? I tried to research this but came up empty handed.

I really like the super wide aspect ratio of the second linked video. The first time I ever saw that used in a music video was Don't Need Nothing by Aly and AJ and it took my breath away.
posted by jabah at 6:16 AM on January 31

For me the innovation in the songs is in the visuals, which I love. Melody-wise I don't find the music interesting, all the progressions and rythms end up somewhere totaly predictable. It's flat.

About autotune, sometimes it is used as an extra effect by people who can really sing, in for instance some Nigerian popular music. I love it then.
posted by glasseyes at 6:28 AM on January 31

Maybe the same aspect that allows vibrato with pitch control also allows tones?

How quickly and how tightly things get repitched are parameters on the software. That’s how you get “autotune-as-effect,” by setting it beyond the “tasteful and unobtrusive” range. Plus songs in tonal languages already bend words a bit to fit into the melody, right? That’s usually how music works.

This isn’t especially “autotune-as-effect” though (which is a trend that peaked like a decade ago really although like distorted guitars it doesn’t go away in the appropriate genres). It’s just slick pop vocals. If anything I find the trap drums more symptomatic of boring globalized production trends, but sometimes it’s fun to see how different cultures do, well, American style pop music anyway.
posted by atoxyl at 8:44 PM on January 31

> atoxyl: "If anything I find the trap drums more symptomatic of boring globalized production trends, but sometimes it’s fun to see how different cultures do, well, American style pop music anyway."

Even more than trap drums, how about rap breaks? I would love to read a deep-dive/oral history of how rap breaks were introduced to and became established in various genres of East Asian pop music.
posted by mhum at 1:44 PM on February 1