PITCH CORRECTION IS THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET of pop music. Now R.S. Field, one of my favorite record producers (he produces Webb Wilder, John Mayall, and has worked with Steve Earle), is blowing things wide open with a sticker on the latest album he’s produced:

Pitch correction is actually one of many computer-based tools that producers use to make singers sound better. Using increasingly common studio software such as Pro Tools, flat notes can be fixed, off-key vocals can be spruced up and entire performances can be cut and pasted together from several different takes.

According to industry insiders, many successful mainstream artists in most genres of music — perhaps a majority of artists — are using pitch correction. Now some in the music industry think the focus on perfection has gone too far.

“Vocal tuning is contributing to the Milli Vanilli-fication of modern music,” says R.S. Field, who produced Moorer’s record. Putting the sticker on the record, he says, “was sort of our little freak flag.”

The software is, I have to say, very cool. You can program in the scale and it’ll force someone’s voice to it, or you can put it in automatic mode and it will just move the voice to the nearest “real” interval. I don’t use it (don’t believe me? Just listen to any record I ever produced!) but I’ve been tempted from time to time.

The problem is that — like quantization, which does the same thing, essentially, for beats — while a little bit of it may save an otherwise great take, more than a little tends to make everything sound the same: perfect, but lifeless. And the temptation is to overdo it. There’s a lot of that out there.

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus is waiting for the blog application!

CHRIS REGAN HAS BEEN LOOKING AT DATES on the Iraqi documents that have been discovered. It makes him think less of Barbara Bodine.

MATT WELCH ACCUSES COLIN POWELL of being too close to Saudi Prince Bandar. His source: Colin Powell.

MORE FRENCH COLLUSION WITH IRAQ:

France colluded with the Iraqi secret service to undermine a Paris conference held by the prominent human rights group Indict, according to documents found in the foreign ministry in Baghdad.

Various documents state that the Iraqis believed the French were doing their utmost to prevent the meeting from going ahead.

Ann Clwyd, the Labour MP who chairs Indict, said last night that she would be demanding an apology from the French government for its behaviour, which she described as “atrocious”. . . .

Saddam supporters staged a protest outside before it started, she said, and at one point a bomb scare led to the hall having to be evacuated.

Victims of Saddam’s regime gave evidence at the conference and filming was strictly forbidden because they feared being identified.

But someone smuggled in a camera and started filming, Miss Clwyd said.

“The police were called. But they could not take the film from the man because he was an Iraqi accredited to the Moroccan embassy.”

The French foreign ministry denied collusion.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: And here’s more on George Galloway:

The appeal set up by George Galloway to treat a sick Iraqi child spent more than £800,000 on political campaigns and expenses, including a direct salary payment to his wife, the MP admitted yesterday.

Dr Amineh Abu Zayyad, Mr Galloway’s Palestinian wife, was paid around £18,000 by the appeal fund to “look after” Mariam Hamza, the girl who received treatment for leukaemia in Britain and America.

It’s always the money with these tribunes of the people. As Tim Blair notes:

The charity spent £860,000 on anti-sanctions campaigns, expenses and administration, and only £100,000 on the kid. She was effectively used as a front for a propaganda operation.

He thinks things are looking bad for George.

BILL WHITTLE hopes the Iraqis kick our ass. No, really, he does.

THE CONSPIRACY IS UNRAVELLING. Whatever shall I do?

MICHAEL MOORE CRITIC DAVID HARDY is scheduled to appear on FoxNews’s Fox & Friends tomorrow morning around 8:45 a.m. It’ll probably be a boost for the Revoke the Oscar campaign.

JEFF JARVIS has observations on democracy in Iraq, Iran,and China. Just keep scrolling.

HOWARD OWENS WRITES that we shouldn’t worry about charges of imperialism:

It’s a charge leveled by people who want the power for themselves and their kind. In Athens, it was the oligarchy, displaced by the democrats who trumped up the imperialism charge, then conspired with Sparta to war against Athens. Today, it’s a wide swath of liberals and a few conservatives (mostly paleos like Pat Buchanan) who blame western liberalism for all the evils of the world. Such people are uncomfortable with the uncertainty an open society engenders, and either consciously or unconsciously they seek more order and centralized control.

The charge of imperialism has nothing to do with any actual fault of the United States, and more to do with a fear that America’s model, the open society, will take hold in more regions of the world.

Interesting.

UPDATE: Don Williams sent me a lengthy comment on Howard Owens’ history, which he says is wrong, but it was too long to post here. He’s posted it with Howard’s essay — it’s comment #21, just scroll down.

JESSE WALKER NICELY CORRECTS an error from his USA Today piece on Iran. That’s one of the nice things about a blog: fast’n’easy error corrections. God knows when, if ever, he’ll be able to get USA Today to run the correction. And it’s another good reason to have your Big Media pieces link to your blog!

I didn’t even catch the error when I read the piece, because — seeing what I expected instead of what was there — I read it as saying that Iran isn’t as oppressive as Saddam was, which is true, rather than as saying what it actually said. So for me, at least, it was harmless error.

MORE SUPPORT for Mickey Kaus’s theory on why Cuba is so popular with politicians and celebrities: “It’s the ‘ho’s!”

HOORAY FOR JEFF BEZOS:

Now he has a $1.7 billion fortune to try to convert that dream into reality. NEWSWEEK has learned that Bezos created Blue Origin, also known as Blue Operations LLC, to pursue his fervent dream of establishing an enduring human presence in space. He has surreptitiously recruited a stable of rocketeers: physicists, ex-NASA scientists, veterans of failed space start-ups and even sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson (“Snow Crash” and “Cryptonomicon”), who has a lifelong interest in rocketry. People familiar with the firm say Bezos spends part of a day each week at Blue, and is in frequent touch through e-mail, pinging his staff with technical questions. These sources say Blue Origin is actually building a spacecraft whose mission will be closely related to some of the first voyages that brought astronauts to the very edge of space. Confident that people want to travel beyond the Earth’s atmosphere—even after a second shuttle disaster—Bezos and his engineers are in the process of working on rocket designs. They’re adding staff and aiming toward launching a reusable space vehicle into suborbital space, with seven tourists onboard, in the next few years.

I wonder if he’s a Star Trek fan?

UPDATE: Reader Demian McLean emails that Bezos is indeed a Star Trek Fan:

I worked at Amazon for four years. Bezos named his dog “Kamala,” after a minor character on The Next Generation. Kamala was the metamorph in the episode titled “The Perfect Mate.”

I knew it!

I WONDER IF THIS MADE AL JAZEERA?

(04-27) 10:40 PDT CAMP BUCCA, Iraq (AP) —

Chanting “Saddam no, Bush yes,” some 200 Iraqi prisoners of war were let go Sunday at the coalition’s main internment camp in the desert near the southern port of Umm Qasr.

The men, many of them barefooted, shook hands with the American soldiers guarding the camp before boarding buses and trucks to be driven to nearby Basra, southern Iraq’s largest city. . . .

“I gave orders to my five men not to fight and we surrendered,” he said, his eyes red from the sand. “Americans were coming for our own good. … What has Saddam done for us? I’m 30 and I haven’t enjoyed life — no justice, no piece of land, no car.” . . .

The men gave thumbs-up signs and peppered journalists with questions: “No more Saddam statues?” “No more military service?” “No more executions?”

Hussam Abbas, from Basra, said all he had known in his 25 years were prisons and military service. “I gave myself in so that I would have a chance to be evacuated and not to come back to Iraq,” he said. “But now, I am happy. We got rid of Saddam who oppressed us.”

Hanging out a bus window, Mussalam Hassan, 22, shouted happily: “We did not fire a single shot!” He said he was taken prisoner in Rumeila on March 21, the second day of the war.

I sure hope so.

ACCORDING TO THIS ARTICLE, Saddam was bribing a lot of journalists and politicians.

Is it ethical not to expose these people, if we find out who they are?

UPDATE: Meanwhile, these thoughts on George Galloway:

Leaving aside unproved accusations of personal gain, there are other explanations that might cover George’s sudden blindness on the road to Baghdad. And the most obvious is that sin of the committed, the belief that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Or, in the context of the modern world, any anti-American will do. When Iraq stopped being a friend of the West it became a friend of George’s.

This is linked to a characteristic of much of the Left, which is a strangely cavalier attitude towards freedom and democracy. What, for example, should we make of this question from Tam Dalyell, asked in Parliament in 1998: ‘Is an alternative to Saddam Hussein,’ queried the man who has condemned Tony Blair as a war criminal, ‘really preferable? How can we be sure that post-Saddam Iraq will not descend into civil war along religious and tribal lines – like the north of Iraq?’

True, the same people will often shield themselves with one half sentence about Saddam’s ‘appaling human rights record’. But this is a phrase invoked as a defence against the reality of that record.

Indeed.

JIM LINDGREN WRITES IN THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE ABOUT IRAQ AND EXPECTATIONS:

A few days ago Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld referred to the continuing confusion and death in Iraq as “untidiness”–a euphemism for something far more serious. Yet community upheavals can be deadly–even in the absence of war, cruise missiles, and attack helicopters.

Just last year, more than 200 people died in riots in Nigeria over newspaper comments about the Miss World contest. In the three days of burning and looting in the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, 52 people died and 1,200 businesses were destroyed. Looting was also a big part of the 1990 Detroit Pistons riots, which killed 7 people. In the 1993 Chicago Bulls riots, our fellow Chicagoans killed 3, shot 20 more people, looted 197 businesses, and damaged more police cars than the chase scenes in “The Blues Brothers” movie–139 cruisers in all.

These numbers, of course, are mere shadows of what can happen when a people are freed from colonial rule and millions are forced to relocate, as happened in 1947 with the partition of India and Pakistan. In a recent issue of the scholarly journal Asian Ethnicity, professor Ishtiag Ahmed offers estimates that 2 million people were killed and 750,000 women raped in the violence accompanying the partition. . . .

The French were so angry after only four brutal years of Nazi occupation that more than 9,000 collaborators were summarily killed at the end of the war, according to standard academic accounts. And these vigilantes were the oh-so-civilized French.

The evolving process of reform after World War II was slow. Britain’s wartime rationing continued until 1954–and, remember, Britain was bombed but not invaded, and it won that war. Sometimes I wonder whether the English might still be under wartime rationing if they hadn’t kicked out the Labor government for a few years in the 1950s and brought Winston Churchill back in.

Read the whole thing.

YES, I know that NRO has been hacked. I emailed them earlier this morning, just in case nobody had noticed, though I imagine they’ve gotten plenty of emails.

UPDATE: Joshua Claybourn reports that the hacker is French.

MICKEY KAUS is all over Rupert Murdoch and Robert Reich.

SGTSTRYKER.COM and a bunch of other blogs are having problems. This is because CornerHost has problems, which seem to have been precipitated by an outfit called ServerBeach. Got that? Updates are on CornerHost’s offsite status blog here.

HEH:

IRANIAN REGIME WORRIED BY PEOPLE’S PRO-AMERICANISM

By Afsane Bassir Pour

PARIS, 25 Apr. (IPS) As President George W. Bush has also warned the Islamic republic to stop meddling in Iraqi affairs, an influential French daily says Iranian officials are worried by the “obvious pro-Americanism sentiments” of ” the Iranian people”.

Iranian officials are worried. Worried of the American presence next to their doors, on the East as well as to the West, worried of the invasion of Iraq “with so little popular resistance”, worried of the fast fall of the Baghdad regime, worried of the sidelining of the UN, worried of the total disillusion of the Iranian people that, since the beginning of the Iraqi crisis, has resulted in a fierce pro-Americanism of the population… but, especially, worried of the vox populi, that asks for “a change of the regime with the help of the American marines”, the daily “Le Monde” wrote.

This demand is taken enough seriously in the political circles so that the resumption of the relations with America –a 24 years-old taboo – had moved forward on the political agenda in Tehran. These relations had been broken on the eve of the establishment of the Islamic Republic and the hostage taking of 55 American diplomats in 1979.

Did I say “heh?” Oh, yeah, I did.

UPDATE: The reader who sent this says he found it here, where there’s this wonderful comment:

If the wanton exercise of America power were ever to lead to general acceptance of this idea, [that] “the best defense…against the Americans would be to reinforce…democracy in order to deprive them of their arguments”, we’d have won.

Indeed.

DOCUMENTS SHOWING THE SADDAM / BIN LADEN CONNECTION: Found by The Telegraph. (Via LGF).

Meanwhile Drudge says that “In the SUNDAY TIMES reporters allege docs found at the Iraqi foreign ministry show Paris gave regular updates to Baghdad on diplomatic dealings between France and the U.S…. Developing… ” Developing, indeed.

UPDATE: Here’s the link to the Telegraph story. And here’s the story on French intelligence briefings to Saddam:

FRANCE gave Saddam Hussein’s regime regular reports on its dealings with US officials, The Sunday Times reported, quoting files it had found in the wreckage of the Iraqi foreign ministry.

The conservative British weekly said the information kept Saddam abreast of every development in US planning and may have helped him to prepare for war.

Of course, it didn’t help him prepare very well. . . .

TRAFFIC’S MORE OR LESS BACK TO NORMAL. I thought it was the war being over, but apparently it’s because someone’s spreading more filthy lies about me. But I can’t argue with the photograph: I really am going to murder Satan and worship a hobo.

I seem to recall some guy telling me to do that in church once, even, more or less.

UPDATE: Oh, well, at least cool blog chicks think I’m hot. But then, they always go for the bad boys. . . .

TALKLEFT IS DOWN: Some sort of server problem. Jeralyn Merritt says it’ll be back up Sunday or Monday.

IT’S NOT JUST SANTORUM: Josh Chafetz points out that lots of Democrats voted for the “Defense of Marriage Act.” And President Clinton signed it. Not quite the same thing, but those who voted for the bill would be well advised to avoid high horses.

KRUGMANBLOGGING isn’t part of InstaPundit’s regular diet — in fact, this site has been Krugman-free for weeks, if not months. It used to be Kaus and Sullivan who did most of it, but lately Donald Luskin seems to have picked up the ball. I can’t vouch for this post’s veracity, as I haven’t followed the debate. But its ferocity is certainly something to behold.

SO WHAT IF LEGALIZING SODOMY LEADS TO POLYGAMY? There are some very fine polygamists out there, I’ll have you know:

Hatch said, “I wouldn’t throw accusations around unless you know they’re true.

“I’m not here to justify polygamy,” he said. “All I can say is, I know people in Hildale who are polygamists who are very fine people. You come and show me evidence of children being abused there and I’ll get involved. Bring the evidence to me.”

Yeah, it’s not as if polygamy leads to child abuse. You just have to avoid the canards being thrown around by narrow-minded people, and realize that perfectly fine folks can nonetheless live as polygamists.