Believe it or not, Cher's dance anthem "Believe" has just turned 20 years old. The song, released on Oct. 22, 1998, kicked off a Cher renaissance, cemented her role as a pop icon and popularized a controversial fixture of pop music today — Auto-Tune.
It could've easily been simply a gimmick; instead, Auto-Tune became a very prominent tool in a lot of pop, R&B and hip-hop production. There's a long history of artists using different vocal modifications, but in the past, producers aimed to keep those alterations disguised. Instead of using effects in hopes that the audience wouldn't notice — just to make a vocal a little cleaner, clearer and more on pitch — "Believe" brings the Auto-Tune front and center.
Auto-Tune sounds like digital stretching or flexing, as you hear a singer kind of slide up and down the register in a way that doesn't sound natural. And though the tactic is used seemingly arbitrarily in today's pop soundscape, the impetus for music's infatuation with Auto-Tune can be traced back to Cher's dance pop song from 20 years ago. The deliberate distortion of her vocals could have been perceived as a gimmick, but, decades later, the success behind "Believe" lives on.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
