Given that Kanye's Love Lockdown has been getting primetime radio play and thus improving the otherwise dour experience of visiting franchise convenience stores, I thought I'd dedicate this month's Bassfiles to the auto-tune phenomenon.

This is an interesting off-shoot of a pop music industry determined to push the right-looking act regardless of their talent. Technological innovation was necessary. Enter a device that automatically renders anyone's singing 'in tune'. Of course, this was not without side effects, producing when not properly calibrated a sort of distorted, tinny, delayed effect. Hey, why not play around with this and come up with the new vocoder. And so it was. (See: Sensual seduction by Snoop Dogg, and just about anything Lil' Wayne has put his name to in the last two years.) It's so prevalent in hip-hop now that you could be forgiven for thinking that rappers just sang that way naturally. This is T-Pain featuring Lil' Wayne, in what I think is quite a Christmassy sounding number. Missing from the video is the little skit at the end of the single version, where one of them declares 'auto-tune is dead'.

Check it out [here] (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT_fnAjZNDY)

Look no further than these two for the murders of auto-tune. It's now officially a hip-hop joke. This blog has cooked up auto-tune versions of some rap classics, the laughs they generate don't make up for the pain of hearing what they sound like: here

Of course, we all know better than to measure the life and death of any urban music technique by hip-hop's fashion barometer. British-Jamaican genres like jungle and garage have a proud tradition of vocal-distortion, best represented by all those old-skool time delays. Who could forget Oxide & Neutrino's stretched entreaty for everyone to “please stop getting shot”? I never expected Grime artists to jump on the auto-tune bandwagon, but no prizes for guessing who is leading the charge. Check Wiley's new video which features Kano and more surprisingly the more underground'Ghetto:

On the other hand, auto-tune has been so central to how certain Jamaican Dancehall artists sound that it's almost strange to hear them without it. Exhibit A: Demarco. This fairly raw but effective video showcases one of Demarco's bigger tunes from late last year – notice they don't seem to have opened the bottle of champagne at all – now that's street! (Munga is another man not afraid to put his voice through the auld cheat-box.)

This tune itself has now been sampled by Grime artist Jammer for a track on his Are you Dumb? Vol. 4 mixtape. Check a sneak preview here via a radio-rip of Logan Sama's KISS FM show:

So hip-hop, maybe you're wrong, maybe auto-tune isn't dead, maybe it's just the way you've been overdoing do it so unimaginatively. The jury is out till we digest how Kanye's new album 808s & Heartbreak is received. It features auto-tune on nearly every track.

Written by Johnny Ilan