Fiddy gets his vocoder on

Has everybody in hip-hop gone vocoder crazy?

On the new single from G-Unit, "Rider (Part 2)," 50 Cent sings through the voice synthesizer for the chorus:

I told you boy, I’m a soldier boy

I got no choice but to be a rider

I approach you boy, with the toaster boy

From point blank range and then fire

Alas, Fiddy is hardly alone in his use of the instrument – which primitively yet evocatively augments the human voice, first developed in 1970 by electronic music pioneers Wendy Carlos and Robert Moog.

Blame ubiquitous R&B star T-Pain for the vocoder’s sudden vogue. The "rappa turnt sanga" (read: rapper turned singer) began using the voice synth in 2005, making waves with his singles "I’m Sprung" and "I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper)."

And the instrument’s futuristic yet retro sound began to slouch toward a kind of cultural saturation point after he used it on collaborations with a laundry list of pop, rap and R&B luminaries -- Akon, Yung Joc, Mike Jones, Kanye West, Too Short, R. Kelly and Styles P among them.

Fast forward to this year’s slinky Snoop Dogg banger "Sensual Seduction." On the Shawty Redd-produced hit, Snoop’s voice is processed through the computerized talk box a la his 1970s funk hero Roger Troutman and is shown in the video singing into the vocoder’s telltale plastic tube.

And of course no discussion of the current vocoder craze would be complete without mention of Kanye’s Daft Punk collabo "Stronger," which features a sizable sample from the Parisian electronic dance duo’s vocoder-riffic 2001 single "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger."

Robot rock indeed.

--Chris Lee

Photo by Jim Cooper / AP

Comments

[e]

just a quick fyi, the t-pain sound and also the one referenced to snoop are not created by the vocoder but by auto tune (better known as the "cher" effect.)
also you don't sing 'into" vocoders; that plastic tube belongs to the "talk box" as played by peter frampton in the geico ad.
ihth,
e