I feel bad for Generation X and The Millennial's

@oregon The TV dinners sucked but JoAnn Castle brought the house down every time.  I implore anyone who who hasn't heard her give a listen!

I have to weigh in on this.

What seems to be lacking in modern pop music is the flesh-and-bones humanity of the old school recording process (ugly warts and all). I’d rather hear John Lennon screw up the bass line in "The Long and Winding Road" than some technically perfect digitally generated bass line. I’d rather hear Dylan sing off key than hear "Ye" sounding pitch-perfect using autotune. The visceral experience of hearing a live orchestra cannot be matched by a synthesizer playing state-of-the-art pitch and rhythm perfect renditions of the same score.

To be fair, there are many modern artists who eschew digital manipulation and prefer to stay true to the old analog processes (digital recording is fine as long as manipulation is kept to a minimum, or, even better, entirely eliminated). I do respect that many modern artists use synthesized music and autotune as part of their expression (T-Pain is a good example), but certain genres simply do not hold up (for me at least) when overly processed and produced.

George Gershwin was a prodigeous piano player and composer who has left us with an amazing repertoire. All evidence suggests that hearing him play live was enthralling. Gershwin is also famously known for creating piano rolls (to be played on the then popular player pianos – the digital music of the times). No doubt this made him a lot of money, and has left us with some priceless historical artifacts, "But a sense of voiceless perfection, a lack of microcosmic nuance, and an overall mechanicalness of the recordings ultimately shatter the “live” illusion and return our attention toward their inorganic nature. It’s even more difficult to coax out the personality of Gershwin as the performer of this music. Though scholarly analysis can provide clues about Gershwin’s style and arrangement, the combination of post-performance editing and analog reproduction obscures what traits of a “live” Gershwin performance might linger in the facsimile."*

* quote from "The Ghost in the Machine: Decoding Gershwin in his Piano Rolls" by Sarah Sisk, 2021.