Autotune This

The Gregory Brothers, masterminds behind the "Autotune the News" phenomenon that has swept the internetz for the past few months, released a new video today in which they use the same gag to contextualize the most recent Christine O'Donnell ad.



Clever? Funny? meh, how about predictable?

These guys have essentially been running off of the same fuel that pop culture has fed them for over a year, a movement which dates back to mid-2009 when everyone unanimously confirmed that autotune actually sucks (you know when Jay-Z titles a single "Death of Autone," that shit is dead). The joke of autotune, which The Lonely Island perfectly encapsulated last year with "I'm On a Boat," is that every song produced like this sounds exactly the same and that it takes virtually no talent to make a song melodized by autotune. This is a joke that the world apparently missed, as the "I'm On a Boat" legitimately features T-Pain (who, in the video, doesn't appear to realize it's meant to be funny) and the song was nominated for a Grammy. Yep, a Grammy - that thing that all musicians strive for. Around this same time, The Gregory Brothers started also making videos parodying autotune pop songs, this time by autotuning news anchors during reports, a typical youtube-esque farce that was sure to garner a couple hundred thousand views. However, they made their big breakthrough when they leeched the meme bandwagon and autotuned the infamous "Double Rainbow" video this summer and then proceeded to do the same thing for Antoine Dodson's "Bed Intruder Rant."

Oddly enough, these remakes of established humor videos have ended up getting more attention and views than the originals themselves (together they have almost amassed 50,000,000 views). The strange part to me is that these 'parodies' add essentially nothing to the existing humor: the relevance of the autotune jokes has already long passed and there is otherwise no insightful commentary to make them worthy parodies. So why are they still getting so much attention?? I guess there's no point in me griping about the quality of youtube - it's a world where the popularity of the absurdly annoying Fred is enough to get him his very own distributor for a full-length movie, and Justin Bieber's music video for "Baby" is the most watched video of all time. Still, these guys are well aware of what they are doing: they rob viral videos for views and attention. It's a cheap and effective strategy that has probably gotten them plenty of online sales (their autotune songs are available on iTunes, and if anything happens on the internet, there is merchandise for you to buy referencing it.) Remember, these guys are just using a technique that they have already established takes virtually no effort to employ and rehashing stolen jokes out with them. For me it's just disappointing to see a group of people who apparently boast great talent demean themselves to such cheap tricks, and watch the undiscerning world of the internet gobble it up. By saying "great talent," I mean that they are all established musicians who have a legitimate EP out, which supposedly embraces their true musical nature. Whether or not it's good will inevitably be irrelevant, though - to the internet they will always be known as the "Autotune the News" guys and nothing else. God damn the power of infectious melodies.