Links & Bits for 3/18/11

In Bed with Beth Ditto (The Guardian)

"I feel like I've made a difference for certain people and that's what matters. Growing up with riot grrrl, I feel like I owe it to the me of tomorrow – without sounding too ridiculous – to do this. The people who listened to Gossip when they were 14, they're 20 now and it's no longer cool, but when they're 30 they can look back and think, 'I listened to the Gossip and it was really helpful', and that will be how Bikini Kill or Nirvana were for me."

Pitch imperfect (Dorothy Surrenders)

Auto-Tune is the Photoshop of music. Just as the perennial picture perfector is ruining our perceptions of beauty, reality and basic human anatomy, Auto-Tune is dismantling our expectations of music. It’s turning the human voice an unrecognizable mishmash of synthesized wails and moans. The voice isn’t a uniform instrument with perfect pitch. It doesn’t modulate mid note. In fact, it’s those very breaks and imperfections that Auto-Tune covers up that can make music so memorable.

Right By Her Roots is Right On (Tiny Cat Pants)

As for Hight’s book, she’s looking at eight artists–Lucinda Williams, Julie Miller, Victoria Williams, Michelle Shocked, Mary Gauthier, Ruthie Foster, Elizabeth Cook, and Abigail Washburn–and their catalogs. And through interviewing them and really carefully listening to their lyrical and musical approaches to their subject matter, trying to really grapple with and understand the aesthetic values at the center of their work.