13 March

Pick a Day

13 MARCH

In Music History

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2024 At his concert in Los Angeles, Justin Timberlake brings out his group 'N Sync, who perform together for the first time since the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards. Along with a medley of their hits, they debut a new song, "Paradise."

2015 Daevid Allen, Australian jazz-rock guitarist (of Gong, Soft Machine), dies of cancer at age 77.

2013 Ken Casey of Dropkick Murphys takes out a skinhead fan after seeing him raise a Nazi salute. A crowd had gathered onstage for the encore and, seeing the fan across the stage, Casey hits him to the floor and lays into him. Calmly returning to his bass, Casey proclaims: "Nazis are not welcome at a Dropkick Murphys show."

2008 South By Southwest features a rare performance from R.E.M. and scorching set from My Morning Jacket.

2004 Luciano Pavarotti makes his 379th and last performance at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, playing the painter Mario Cavaradossi in Giacomo Puccini's Tosca. He receives a 12-minute standing ovation.

2002 Danny Bonaduce of The Partridge Family wins his bout against Barry Williams (Greg from The Brady Bunch) on the Fox TV special Celebrity Boxing. In another bout, Todd Bridges from Diff'rent Strokes whoops up on Vanilla Ice.

1998 Reggae and ska musician Judge Dread (real name: Alexander Minto Hughes) dies of a heart attack at age 52 shortly after giving a performance in Canterbury, England.

1998 Jack Harlow is born in Louisville, Kentucky, which he proudly reps after hitting it big with his debut single, "Whats Poppin," in 2020.

1993 "Informer," a reggae-rap song with inscrutable verses by the Canadian artist Snow (named for his whiteness), hits #1 in America and stays on top for seven weeks. Snow enjoys it all from a prison cell in Toronto, where he's serving an eight-month sentence for assault.

1992 Bad Religion release their sixth full-length studio album, Generator. This is the band's debut album with drummer Bobby Schayer, who remains in the band until 2000's The New America.

1987 Bob Seger receives a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He's from Michigan, but did some recording in Los Angeles, which inspired his song "Hollywood Nights."

1977 David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Blondie begin a North American tour.

1976 #1 Billboard Album: Eagles' Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975)

1973 Ed Sloan (frontman for Crossfade) is born in South Carolina.

1972 Rapper Common is born Lonnie Rashid Lynn Jr. in Chicago, Illinois.

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Cher Auto-Tunes To #1 With "Believe"

1999

Using the pitch correction software Auto-Tune to distort her vocals, Cher goes to #1 in America with "Believe," opening the floodgates for many more Auto-Tuned hits.

Auto-Tune went on the market in 1997 and quickly became an invaluable tool for producers because it could correct vocal pitch in real time, flattening notes that were too sharp and sharpening the flat ones with minimal effort. But if the software is set to an extreme setting, it creates an interesting distortion effect that preserves some of the singer's voice while radiating it into a computerized trill. It's more natural than the vocoder effect heard on songs like "Let's Groove" by Earth, Wind & Fire and "Mr. Blue Sky" by the Electric Light Orchestra. Cher's producers use it on "Believe," a song painstakingly crafted by several writers and producers for the purpose of giving the 52-year-old singer a comeback hit, which it does, going to #1 in both the UK and US, making her the oldest female solo artist ever to top those tallies. The song brings Auto-Tune into the open. Listeners have long known that a certain studio magic takes place to enhance vocals, but it's now clear that most popular singers are getting pitch correction, which can make the difference between a live vocal and studio recording quite striking. And many more producers emulate the "Believe" sound to distort vocals, notably Kanye West, who makes it commonplace in hip-hop. By 2009, the effect is so ubiquitous it becomes cliché; Jay-Z metaphorically murders it that year on his track "D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)." Cher was not the first to use Auto-Tune as a distortion effect: Kid Rock beat her to it on his country ballad "Only God Knows Why," released a few months earlier.

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Susan from Illinois Cher has a long career with many different songs. I thought the autotune distortion effect was brilliant and interesting!

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