
Many is the pop star who harbors a dark secret beneath his wholesome façade. Michael Bublé’s is that he is an evil death robot from the future, sent back in time to annihilate mankind.

I’ll admit that I lack ironclad proof of Bublé’s status as a remorseless genocidal automaton, but there is circumstantial evidence aplenty encoded into his — its — latest release, Crazy Love. Careful listening can leave no doubt: This so-called “Bublé” is in fact a B.U.B.L.É. — a Binary-logic Undercover Bio-Life Eliminator, With The Accent On “Eliminator,” an emissary from some dystopian robocratic hell, and if he is not stopped he will bring humanity to extinction by ensuring that no one ever gets laid again.
Perhaps the most frightening aspect of this is the sheer arrogance of the plan. The mechanical entity they’re passing off as a big-band singer isn’t even a particularly convincing AI; performance clips and interviews suggest that the Bublé-creature would not pass the Turing test, let alone the more rigorous Voight-Kampff inventory. And this weakness extends also to the musical component of Bublé’s cover story. Without reading the filenames, compare and contrast these two performances of well-known pop songs. Can you tell which one is being performed by a computer? (more…)

The new crop of pop stars could learn a lot from Frank Sinatra. No, they probably won’t match his voice or his depth of feeling. No, they probably will still rely on the celebrity dating and nipple-slips to draw attention when their respective albums fail to. As far as the qualitative end of things, I can’t name one single modern artist who could replace Lanky Frank (this means you, Michael Buble and Josh Groban.) What Sinatra does have in common with Pop ‘09 is that he was an interpreter of other people’s music and songs. Even his classic conceptual Capitol albums, including Only the Lonely and Where Are You?, were the work of other minds yet when he set his voice to them, the songs became his. When you think of “High Hopes” it’s his voice singing them. The same holds true for “All of Me” and even if “Love and Marriage” makes you picture Kelly Bundy, you’ll never mistake who was singing it.
Usually, anytime a musical artist performs on a talk show, that marks the end of the program:
I heard 