Mr. West, please, no more auto-tune today

Hip-hop has always been defined by fads.

Seven or eight years ago, it was the influx of the remix.

Five years ago, it was "baby voices" used in the chorus of popular songs like Cam'ron's "Oh Boy" or Twista's "Slow Jamz."

Today, it's the auto-tune - or the voice synthesizer, equalizer, vocoder or flanger effect. Call it what you want, but we can all agree on one thing: It's not good.

The auto-tune originally hit the hip-hop scene on Sept. 30, 1985 - the day Faheem Rasheed Najm was born. Throughout his youth, Rasheed desperately wanted to be a performer. He had an undeniable passion for the art of melody. He was enamored with the infinite possibilities it provided, with the bright lights of the big stage. Rasheed had a problem, however: he sucked at singing.

So he brilliantly decided to grow dreadlocks, edit his voice with a machine and change his name to T-Pain. The rest is history.

Ever since T-Pain made it big, other performers have tried to implement the auto-tune into their repertoires. The results have been mixed.

On one side of the spectrum, there's Lil Wayne, whose voice is so unique that the synthesizer doesn't even change it noticeably. On the total opposite side, there's Birdman, who claimed "I'm the Martin Luther King of this new machine" in his only experiment with the voice synthesizer, which failed so miserably that Lil Wayne threatened to stop providing him with a roof to live under and an Escalade to drive.

Then, of course, there's Kanye West. West's use of the auto-tune was worse for hip-hop than Birdman's - and that's because he was actually good at it. That's right, West - the hero of the average nerdy white kid who feels too uncomfortable to listen to the Ying Yang Twins - sounds great with the auto-tune. Scratch that, he sounds amazing. But perhaps he sounds a little too amazing for his own good.

And now, as cool as he sounds in "Lollipop remix" or "Love Lockdown," West has taken the use of technology a little too far. His next album, "808's and Heartbreak," which is set to hit stores on Nov. 25, uses the auto-tune in every single track. Many people-especially those on the UConn campus-feel that may be a bit extreme.

In a recent survey among 60 UConn students, 86.6 percent said they prefer the original West to the new auto-tune.

"I love Kanye and since he has switched to the new auto-tone, I've had trouble listening to him," said Anthony Recupero, a fifth-semester business management major. "It's not his style and he needs to go back to regular Kanye."

Perhaps seventh-semester accounting major Mike DiSciacca put it best when he said: "Kanye needs to spit that hot fire via no auto-tune."

Exactly.

In West's first two albums, the hot fire he spit was much different than anything the music industry had ever heard. West didn't rap about the rims on his SUV or how many guns he has or how much cocaine he's done/sold. He rapped about his near-death car crash, about his mother, about his girlfriend and about religion. His style was 100 percent unique.

Now, he's just like everyone else. West's new lyrics lack the depth and creativity that his old ones were filled with. Part of that has to do with the beats of his new songs and the other rappers that are featured on them, but nonetheless, West is overly concerned with obtaining the generic hip-hop image than he used to provide an alternative for.

There's just something weird about Kanye West saying "I feel like there's still bitches who owe me sex" in a robotic voice just seconds before he covers his face with a bandana.

In his "College Dropout" days, that seemed absurd, but that is indeed the scene in Young Jeezy's video for "Put on," one of the first songs that West "put on" his new voice.

We can only hope that Jeezy's next single is called "Turn off," because if West wants to remain an innovator and icon in hip-hop, that's exactly what he needs to do.