T2 feat Jodie - Heartbroken

I haven't been wildly impressed with what I've heard of the northern bassline/speed garage scene. Unlike the smoove London garage, it's got a lot of energy, but so far a lot of the production has been pretty rudimentary, and pretty much repeating the same old warpy basslines. Well, nothing's really changed, but I really like this song.

It's been the number one on the 1xtra garage chart for 12 weeks or something, which makes it the northern Umbrella-ella-ella. Of course, being garage it has probably only sold a 100 copies. Anyway, to the song.

The production itself is relatively uninteresting--it has all the regular warpy/farty bassline noises, and the kinds of string stabs so beloved of garage producers of all types, but it is all about the vocal. One of the great things about ("old skool") garage was the wonky vocals, the "best mate's little sister" feel to vocals made only passable by Auto-tune and judicious cut-ups. Most people would probably consider that a bad thing, but I think it produced a really interesting tone to garage, mostly eschewing the house/diva wailing for a rnb cyberdiva tinnyness. Garage vocals sound, as Simon Reynolds put it somewhere I think, stretched thin, fractured. Needless to say, like most dance music, this was an overwhelmingly female vocalled genre.

"Heartbroken" dusts off the slightly-rubbish garage cyberdiva, and what do you know, it still works. The lyrics, such as they are, about being heartbroken. In the chorus, vocallist Jodie's slightly out-of-tune voice works beautifully. The vocal feels stretched as thin as possible, Auto-tuned to fuck, and time-stretched. It is as if the heartbroken-ness were not so much hers ("the grain of the voice") and all that, but produced in (and only in) the mediation of the technology.

Now, if one thinks about how "love" these days is produced as a cultural object through technology--text messages, emails, msn emoticons, internet dating, pron etc--it suggests that heartbreak itself would be best articulated through a technological mediation, a hyper-real voice. This is heartbreak as simulation.