I don’t hate pop music. I’d rather listen to an album side than top 40, but there have been good pop songs over the years. Ones that are not only earworms, but also interesting. Most pop is terrible. But some of it has at least captured the zeitgeist, and been a part of the soundtrack. I wouldn’t intentionally put on Leo Sayer’s “You Make Me Feel Like Dancin’”, but I can’t deny it’s a quality track. Good hook, good beat, great studio musicians. And it helps define its time. Hearing it will take you back to the disco era.

But what little pop had to offer is now gone. They’ve finally figured out how to remove the last trace of humanity from popular music. Not content with manufactured boy bands and focus-grouped lyrics, the music industry has now perfected the art of eliminating the one thing that made singers actual singers: the beautiful, imperfect, gloriously flawed human voice.

Autotune. That’s the name of the assassin that killed music’s soul. It sounds harmless enough, almost helpful—like a feature on your car that keeps you from drifting into traffic. But what it really is, is a digital lobotomy performed on every note, every breath, every moment where a singer might accidentally reveal something real about themselves.

And I’m not against technology in music. But the real artists find a way to make it interesting and new, instead of just a cheap replacement for the real thing. Peter Gabriel knows how to program a drum machine. Tangerine Dream makes synthesizers artistic. Hendrix made the electric guitar a wholly different instrument than the acoustic.

Sure, there’s always been manufactured garbage. The music industry has been cranking out syrupy, focus-grouped pablum since the dawn of recorded sound. There have always been singers who couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag without a compass and a GPS system. But at least when they were terrible, they were authentically terrible. At least their awfulness had personality.

The Genius of Imperfection

Listen to Otis Redding sing “Try a Little Tenderness.” Notice how his voice cracks just slightly on the high notes, how it gets rough around the edges when he’s pushing it, how you can hear the sweat and the struggle and the pure human need to communicate something that words alone can’t express. That crack, that roughness, that struggle—that’s not a mistake to be fixed. That’s the whole damn point.

Joe Cocker sounded like he was gargling gravel and channeling the ghost of every blues singer who ever lived. His voice shouldn’t have worked—it was too raw, too uncontrolled, too absolutely human. You believed every word he sang because you could hear his heart breaking and healing in real time.

Aretha Franklin didn’t just sing notes—she inhabited them, lived in them, made them into something bigger than the sum of their parts. Her voice carried the weight of gospel churches and jazz clubs and every hard lesson life had taught her.

Janis Joplin sounded like she was ripping her soul out through her vocal cords and serving it to you on a platter. Beautiful? Not always. Perfect pitch? Hardly. But when she sang “Piece of My Heart,” you understood that music wasn’t about technical perfection—it was about truth, raw and unfiltered and absolutely necessary.

The Sanitized Generation

Now we’ve got singers who sound like they were assembled in a laboratory by committee. Every note mathematically perfect, every breath digitally optimized, every trace of personality scrubbed clean like a hospital floor. They hit their marks with the precision of a GPS system and all the soul of a tax return.

The technology that was supposed to liberate artists—to open up new possibilities, to push the boundaries of what music could be—has instead become a prison. Instead of using these tools to explore uncharted territory, the industry uses them to make everything sound the same. Safe. Predictable. Marketable.

It’s not just that Autotune makes bad singers sound passable—though it certainly does that. It’s that it makes good singers sound like machines. It takes the very thing that makes one voice different from another and smooths it out, files it down, makes it conform to some algorithmic standard of what a voice should sound like.

The Death of Dangerous Voices

Could Lou Reed happen today? That flat, conversational delivery that turned everyday observations into profound statements about the human condition?

What about Serge Gainsbourg, with his cigarette-scarred whisper and his ability to make French sound like the most dangerous language in the world? They’d have him singing through seventeen different filters, his growl transformed into something more “radio-friendly.”

Tom Petty’s nasal whine? Forget Dylan. What would they do with Howlin’ Wolf or Captain Beefheart?

And Iggy Pop? The raw, animalistic howl that made “Lust for Life” and “The Passenger” into anthems of beautiful destruction? That voice would be so processed and polished it would lose everything that made it dangerous.

What would a track like Lennon’s “Mother” sound like if autotuned? How would it capture the pain of abandonment in his screams? Could Punk even be a thing?

The Algorithm of Mediocrity

The real tragedy isn’t just what we’ve lost—it’s what we’ll never have. Somewhere out there is the next Johnny Thunders, the next Tom Waits, the next voice that could change everything. But they’ll never get the chance because the first thing that happens when they walk into a studio is that some producer will start “fixing” everything that makes them unique.

The kids growing up today think this is what music is supposed to sound like. They’re being trained to expect perfection, to be uncomfortable with the beautiful imperfections that made music matter in the first place. They don’t know what they’re missing because they’ve never heard what a real human voice sounds like when it’s pushed to its limits.

We’ve created a generation of singers who sound like they were designed by committee and manufactured in China. Technically proficient, certainly. Pleasant enough, sure. But about as dangerous as a greeting card and about as memorable as last week’s grocery list.

The Robots Are Singing

The irony is that in our quest to make singers sound perfect, we’ve made them sound exactly like what they are: products. Manufactured goods designed to move units and test well with focus groups. We’ve taken the most human of all art forms—the voice, the one instrument we’re all born with—and made it inhuman.

You want to know why music doesn’t matter the way it used to? This is why. When every voice sounds the same, when every note is mathematically perfect, when every trace of personality has been digitally removed, what’s left to care about?

The great voices of the past weren’t great because they were perfect. They were great because they were imperfect in exactly the right ways. They had character, personality, flaws that made them human. They took risks, pushed boundaries, revealed truths about themselves that no amount of technology could manufacture.

Now we’ve got voices that sound like they were created in a spreadsheet, and we wonder why nobody writes songs about them, why they don’t inspire devotion, why they’re forgotten as soon as the next digitally perfect product comes along.

The human voice—that miraculous instrument capable of conveying joy and pain and everything in between—has been turned into just another piece of software to be optimized. And in our rush to eliminate every flaw, we’ve eliminated everything that made music worth listening to in the first place.

The robots aren’t coming for our jobs. They’re already here, and they’re singing our songs.