'auto-tune the news' is news to me

i remember reading, a while back in college, a short, yet dense french postmodern book called 'noise' by jacques attali.  ah, how i used to search in vain for clues to living in these types of impenetrable gobbledygook books---but i do remember one phrase which, at the time, struck me as being as important as it was cryptic: that the musical instrument of the future [written in 1985] would be the video camera. being a musician who was studying video, i filed away the comment...

cut to a few days ago when my friend james sent me a series of links to peruse, one being to the auto-tune the news channel on you tube. instantly, after watching and listening, i was struck, not only by attali's prescience, but by the brilliance and total 'now-ness' of the art of the gregory brothers
---the creators of the channel. the 'now-ness' or cultural relevance to what it means to be human at this time, is so rare in most creations [which mostly look to other people, at other times, or, heaven forbid, look nowhere at all] and constitutes real art in my humble, aging book!

in other words, here are three young brothers and one wife who are offering a playful, engaging, artistic, thought-provoking and musical answer to our culture of constant media bombardment. they're not whining about it! they're making yet more media, yes....but media that's on our side.

below is the famous-for-the-moment 'bed intruder' song---as i type, this video has had over 42 million hits and has, i imagine, turned the gregory brothers art into a full-time career!! the creation is based on a news story of an intruder breaking and entering an apartment in the projects and getting in bed with a sleeping resident. here i think of the long-running folk and blues tradition of turning current events into songs...

first, here's the original news story source material for the song:




now, the song [response]:




no, the gregory brothers aren't the first to play video musically, however. even back in those heady, postmodern theory-soaked days of the early early 90's, i remember being exposed to the emergency broadcast network's [ebn] then-hot-off-the-press video loop music and performance. see an example below:





compare, contrast...talk amongst yourselves about digital patchwork quilts...