Jace Clayton, the writer and musician who releases geographically dauntless mixes asDJ /Rupture, recently published his first full book,Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture. Out via Farrar Straus & Giroux, the 288-page paperback explores the interconnectedness of music culture in a globalized, digitized world. It’s a subject on which Clayton—in writings for his ownNegrophonic blog and other publications (including Pitchfork), as well as on releases like the 2008 set also titledUproot—has already shown himself to be both a trusted expert and a patient guide.
In the book’s second chapter, “Auto-Tune Gives You a Better Me,” Clayton argues that “the most importance piece of musical equipment of the last 20 years” is the computer software developed in 1997 to correct the pitch of off-key notes. Cher’s 1998 single “Believe” showed how this simple tool could become a robotic sound effect, a trick that T-Pain made his trademark in the mid-2000s, and the rest of the world followed. Clayton looks at how Berber musicians from the Maghreb region of northwest Africa were among the first people to go all-in on Auto-Tune.
What follows is an excerpt from the book, where Clayton finds uncanny links between Maghrebi music and, remarkably enough, the gloriously Auto-Tune-free vocals on Whitney Houston’s classic “I Will Always Love You.”—Marc Hogan
WHITNEY
Forgive a detour—I think a careful listen to Whitney Houston may bring us closer to understanding what’s going on in Maghrebi listening habits.
“I Will Always Love You,” one of the world’s most popular singles, was written by Dolly Parton in 1973. Even Elvis Presley wanted to record a cover version. His legal team demanded that Parton give him half the songwriting credit. This was their standard strong-arm offer (most artists happily ceded 50 percent of songwriting profits to Elvis since he guaranteed sales), and wisely, Parton refused. “I Will Always Love You” was a bona fide moneymaker well before Houston’s 1992 rendition for The Bodyguard sound track skyrocketed to become the all-time bestselling single by a female artist.
Houston begins unaccompanied, as if the string section and other instruments have, like me, been stunned into silence by the quality of movement inside the filigreed pathways of her voice. Houston doesn’t stretch each word out so much as give it wings to fly around in. I and you—these brief words can last for seconds here, long enough to make sure we all know just how large they really are. The vulnerability of her naked voice ups the bravura. It’s a tightrope walk without a safety net (Auto-Tune hadn’t been invented yet). As with Cher’s Auto-Tune innovation, the record company executives were dead set against the now-famous a cappella opening. It took protests from Houston and Bodyguard costar Kevin Costner to keep it intact. (Tone deafness or outright hostility toward music as an art form may not be required to land a job as a major-label exec, but all indications suggest that they sure won’t hurt your chances.)
From the outset, Parton’s lyrics and melody become secondary to Houston’s modulations on them. Whitney inserts pauses, extends syllables, redraws the melody to fit the moment. Her arabesque vocalizations become something in their own right, codependent and contingent yet emotionally, viscerally, musically real. The ornament swells to become the heart.
These effects flow from her masterful use of a technique called melisma. Technically speaking, melisma occurs when vocalists use melodic embellishment to extend a single syllable. Emotionally, it’s something else entirely, a mode of expression that bucks against the very limits of language. Indeed, the crushing power of “I Will Always Love You,” its meaning in sound, results from how Houston’s melisma activates a mysterious, even mystical relationship between overflowing emotion, life’s vicissitudes, and ultra precise self-control. Rather than simply sing about the bittersweet conflicts involved in saying goodbye to a lover, Houston deploys melisma to enact in sound a heart-felt struggle between holding on and letting go. Like life as it unfurls, each moment is un-anticipatable until it happens, whereupon we can’t possibly imagine it any other way.
Such is the power of melisma. The technique breathes life-flow into fixed text. Melisma is vocal embellishment’s purest form, almost always improvised and therefore rarely written down. Melisma locates meaning in the instant. It reveals to us the risk and control of a singer at her most unpredictably alive.
That the richness Whitney Houston brings to “I Will Always Love You” cannot be written down, owned, or repeated does virtually nothing to prevent “X Factor,” “American Idol,” and related- franchise contestants from doggedly attempting to re-create her solo by rote. Houston’s many imitators value the technical virtuosity required to reenact her singular performance—slavishly tracing her melismatic curves turns that freedom into a rule book, against which one can be judged and found wanting. Houston sang it differently each time. Her improvisations focus our attention on the part that is unscripted and unforeseeable.
“I Will Always Love You” was great from the start. Whitney Houston made it a classic. By activating broad words and simple song structure with what sounds like spontaneous, deeply personal utterances, Houston’s melisma collapses the space separating intimate and universal. Only the finest pop can lead us to such a place.
Melisma straddles genres and singers and nation-states. I knew it first in black American music such as R&B and gospel. It’s positively huge across the Maghreb. Bawdy folk singers, throats burned by a lifetime of whiskey. Honey-voiced Koranic reciters who “sing” the Koran magnificently yet consider all music to be sinful. It doesn’t matter who you are or what scene you’re in, you’re gonna have a tough time if your voice can’t flutter around those notes with the grace of a bird and the hairpin turns of a butterfly. Maghreb audiences of all stripes are keyed in, listening to precisely those moments when the voice glides through notes.
Melismatic vocals have formed an integral part of the sonic landscape across huge swaths of Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East for centuries—public recitation of the Koran and the five-times-daily call to prayer rely heavily on the technique. If melismatic styles weren’t already widespread, they ended up that way when Islam swept in 600 years after the birth of Christ. Several musicologists assume that it’s what ushered melisma into black American church music and eventually into the bloodstream of an eleven-year-old junior gospel choir soloist named Whitney in the first place.
gif by Seacrestcheadle
What does the computer think of this weightless technique of vocal gymnastics whose touch of the divine spans religions? Auto-Tune hates it. For all its algorithmic fineries, Auto-Tune cannot distinguish between world-class melismatic pitch control and off-key drunken shouting. To fix the problem of “out-of-tune vocals,” [Auto-Tune inventor] Dr. [Andy] Hildebrand had to encode into the software his beliefs about what constituted appropriate singing. Auto-Tune hears the opening section of “I Will Always Love You” as one long error in need of digital correction. And it’s not just her.
Melisma’s swoops and dives are exactly the type of melodic movement that provokes Auto-Tune into extreme corrective mode, thereby producing its most unusual sounds. This, I believe, explains the software’s mind-boggling success in North Africa. The region embraced Auto-Tune so early and so heartily because for more than a millennium audiences have been listening to—and for—those gorgeous, subtly rising and falling pitches. And they sound especially startling when processed through Auto-Tune. The familiar pitch slide gets activated by bizarre effects. A weird electronic warble embeds itself in rich, throaty glissandi. The struggle of human nuance versus digital correction is made audible, dramatized in a zone of heightened attention. Listening habits from the dawn of Islam helped Auto-Tune mean so much here.
AMAZIGH IDOL
While melisma helped to explain Auto-Tune’s popularity in the Maghreb, I still wondered why the technique hit the Berber areas of Morocco the hardest. The best way to find out was to visit its heart.
Agadir, crown jewel of the Amazighs, lies on the country’s southwest coast. Berber culture enjoys majority status here. In 1960 an earthquake destroyed much of the then-small city. Roughly a quarter of its inhabitants died. Agadir’s reconstruction drew on French urbanism to create a cleanly modernist, wide-avenued city prized by Moroccan Berbers as their unofficial capital. Budget flights and newly constructed highways have dramatically increased Agadir’s accessibility in recent years. Tourism money radiates outward from its miles-long beach, where sun-stunned Europeans wash up year-round.
The Abattoir neighborhood hunkers down near enough to the beach to host flocks of kids dressed to swim or surf, yet far enough away to offer no relief from the heat, with the result that this busy working-class quarter feels more like a desert way station than a seaside vacation town. Banged-up Mercedes cars of indeterminate age crowd the taxi plaza at its heart, ringed by sawdust-floored eateries filled with men and haunted by cats.
Al-Maarif Studio lies behind a nondescript door on the plaza’s edge. I am here to get grounded. Some studios transmit the clinical time-is-money tang of a doctor’s office; others try to make you feel at ease. Al-Maarif is one of the good ones. An assistant ushers us into the front salon. The openness of Moroccan interior space makes it a joy to wait in. Firm long, low rectangular cushions line the walls. These possibility-rich slabs of furniture can easily seat a dozen people or serve as beds for a handful. A television fastened to the wall plays old Japanese anime. Cartoon people bounce and ripple lysergically, their bodies as flexible and indestructible as folk songs.
The assistant returns with what must be our fourth or fifth sweet mint tea of the day. The welcoming offer of tea means more than the drink itself, particularly for newcomers such as me. I abstractedly cradle my cup, wondering how this country does not suffer from diabetes given the glacier-size chunks of sugar that everybody stirs into their drinks. In lax pastry shops, bees or wasps swarm glazed postcolonial croissants, as addicted to sweeteners as we are. I take another sip. If, like cats, we humans couldn’t taste sugar, then eating cookies would be punishment and, lacking reasons for New World sugarcane plantations, the whole history of slavery would have come out differently, at least a nudge less bitter. I drain my cup.