Bring back the experts.
As a senior in college, I remember hearing Faheem Rashad Najm on the radio and scrunched my face. His interesting use of "auto-tune" was surely a gimmick I thought. Even though Teddy Riley graced us with a few jams where some lines were altered by a voice box, I had never heard a full song with this pixelated sound before. As Faheem -- better known as T-Pain -- came out with more songs, I thought surely someone will stop this blatant disrespect of what we call singing.
Jay Z clearly heard my request and dropped Death of Autotune (DOA) a few years later. I knew that his expertise in the field would stop all the foolishness masked as vocal talent.
Welp, 7 years after DOA, T Pain continues to bless our ears with the pitch-corrected melodies that confused me way back in undergrad.
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In 2016, Donald Trump secured enough electoral votes to become president-elect. If we closely analyzed T-Pain's trajectory, we would have been able to see this coming. Entertainment could be simplified, and even with heavyweights indicating that this type of trend should stop, it was too late. We were mesmerized.
I will not spend time discussing Trump - I have voiced my opinions and presented data on him before. However, there is a greater problem brewing: the rejection of expertise.
When I trained 6 years for a doctorate (and an additional two for a specialty), I pledged a full-time effort to better understand clinical and community psychology. I remember friends telling me in grad school to blog, and I felt unequipped. What would I be able to contribute after 4 years of undergrad and a masters, I questioned? So I waited.
Then I looked in the comments section. The sordid, trolled, toxic comments section. I began to realize that no matter how much logic, reason, or fact one used to comment on the article or blog, people's emotions were on full display and seemed to matter more than anything else. So I really waited.
And, for the past 1.5 years, we have witnessed an absolute rejection of facts, where anything can be tweeted, stated, or incited - and believed.
I recently spent 26 minutes watching the interview (?) between Trevor Noah and Tomi Lahren, in which Tomi spent a great chunk of time using poor premises and faulty fallacies. Trevor tried to keep it together and argue level-headedly (word? spelling?) against Tomi, but in a post-truth society and administration, does it really matter what type of style, logic, or effort you use to confront myths?
As much as the minority of voters wish to eschew the facts of our society - anywhere from climate change to increasing racist encounters - it is time to bring back the experts. The people who have spent years, decades, careers studying and better understanding these phenomena. I don't care if they're in the swamp, ivory towers, or yo mama's stoop: I will absolutely not stand for a nation that operates in reality TV rather than reality.
We must not back down at a time when we are needed most. When we are called to make clear our knowledge for folks who are desperate for change. Although we may be more divided than at other times in our nation, it is preposterous to believe that what I wanted 8 years ago with Barack is any different than what some of our nation wants in Donald.
To be clear, I will never support the disgusting rhetoric spawned from this election cycle. But if change is the common ground, we, as experts, have to understand how to serve the vast majority of Americans with our knowledge, not continue to write for selective journals or have conversations just with ourselves on panels.
At the end of the day, I truly love T-Pain. Heck, he was even the reason my first boyfriend and I started talking ("Hey, don't you hate I'm in love with a stripper?" "Me too!" Chemistry) But there's a difference between entertainment and artistry, just like there is between r̶u̶n̶n̶i̶n̶g̶ ruining a business and running the government. We need an educated populace to school this farce of a political display happening in DC (Manhattan?). Because if we don't, what type of device is there to help the nation from being off-pitch?