When I was a kid in the 1990s, Mariah Carey released one of the most popular songs from her catalog, “Hero.” As a tiny aspiring “Star Search” contestant, I brought it into my first day of voice lessons, hoping to learn to sing it. Carey’s vocal performance was something from another plane, an impossibly impassioned, subtle, powerful and skilled rendering of impeccably arced melody, with perfectly melodramatic and inspiring lyrics.
This week, Lara Trump, Republican National Committee co-chair and daughter-in-law to former President Donald Trump, released a song also called “Hero.” Suffice it to say, the song was received quite differently than Carey’s masterpiece. Criticism swirled instantly, including, notably, of Trump’s technical skill (or lack thereof, to hear critics tell it) and apparent heavy reliance on Auto-Tune.
What people are bristling at in Trump’s effort, I think, is that it exposes both Auto-Tune and her larger political project as a gimmick.
Carey’s hit, released in 1993, came out during the twilight of analog recording. By the turn of the millennium, most things in the popular music world would be recorded “in the box,” using digital environments as a home for mixing, editing and generating a wide range of sonic effects. One of the most revolutionary additions to vocal production was the software Auto-Tune, which was released by the company Antares Audio Technologies in 1997, and quickly became an industry standard tool and a household name.
Critiques of Lara Trump’s song have foregrounded Auto-Tune because it has become shorthand for suggesting a person cannot sing. To be sure, Auto-Tune does some very heavy lifting in Trump’s vocals. But Auto-Tune is also an easy target, and I think the wrong one here. The software has enabled plenty of unfortunate and silly (and delightful) performances in the zeitgeist — but it has also enabled exciting musical experimentation. In short, Auto-Tune cannot be summarized as one thing.
What people are bristling at in Trump’s effort, I think, is that it exposes both Auto-Tune and her larger political project as a gimmick, or what cultural theorist Sianne Ngai describes in her book “Theory of the Gimmick” as “overrated devices that strike us as working too little (labor saving tricks) but also as working too hard (strained efforts to get our attention).”
Yet every single one of your favorite singers recorded in the present millennium, be they pillars of vocal skill or not, uses Auto-Tune, which is now a stand-in term for any number of tools (Melodyne, Waves) that perform what is called pitch correction. Pitch correction is a standard and ubiquitous part of musical post production during which vocals are “tuned up” or locked into place in a desired musical scale. This step of the process happens equally in genres that tend to be more finicky about authenticity, like country or rock. If that strikes you as a bummer, it is in some ways. There are all kinds of micro-deviations and expressive pitch gestures that simply do not make it through today’s production process. But you might be heartened to know that singing, or any kind of expressive vocal performance, far exceeds pitch alone.
On Trump’s “Hero” you’ll notice that Madeline Jaymes, who carries the first verse and the chorus, sounds pretty good. Perhaps unremarkable, but basically in line with a contemporary accepted standard of vocal skill and sound. She, too, is Auto-Tuned (or, more likely, Melodyned). What we hear when Lara Trump enters on the second verse is, yes, pitch correction, but even more, we hear a pile of acoustic accouterments — reverb, compression, delay — that are caked on to obscure the fact that Trump might be able to make sound, but she doesn’t command professional-level vocals. The things the performance lacks include: expressive timing, dynamic range, vowel shaping, thoughtful breath placement, to name a few. Even heavily Auto-Tuned pro singers have a sense of all these things. Trump’s performance is literal, where singing, no matter the genre, always requires a bit of poetry.
One of the most consistent and enduring critiques Antares has fielded from the listening public is that it’s not fair that Auto-Tune can make anyone a singer. What Trump’s “Hero” proves is that it can’t. It can put anyone in tune, sure, but singing is not reducible to pitch. It is a much more complex bundle of expression and skill that no one really has a precise handle on.
It can be beautiful and exciting when people try their hands at things they’re not the best at. I also really like vocalists who sing out of tune. People don’t need to foreground technical training in order to render compelling performances. Think Tom Waits, or Missy Elliot, or Nick Cave, or Adrienne Lenker, or Shakira. What these examples articulate is that interesting things happen when singers (and listeners) stop narrowing themselves on the technical and open up to the poetry.
But Trump is not that thing. She articulates Auto-Tune at its most offensive and grating, because it reminds people of the luxury that people like her have — of avoiding all the labor it takes for her (and her family) to maintain their power and take the spotlight.
In a way, Trump’s singing career is a comparatively harmless synecdoche of her father-in-law’s much larger hoax of policy acumen and care for the working class, of which he possesses neither. But the gimmick suits him, and, in its own predatory way, it has been very effective. So there are certainly a number of things to criticize in the odd choices that led to the release of Trump’s “Hero” — ranging from technical to ideological. But don’t blame Auto-Tune as the culprit here.