To Err Is More Than Human, It Is a Refusal
In praise of the wobble, the breath, the noise, and the bits the plugins keep trying to bleach
Here’s the quiet catastrophe of modern music—the secret everyone senses but few dare phrase aloud: we built tools that elevate those who can’t, and tools that flatten those who can. That’s the backbone of the era, the paradox humming beneath the surface. Technology that once promised liberation has, in trying to democratize greatness, ended up democratizing smoothness instead. The bell curve lifted at the low end but sank at the top, raising the floor for the unskilled while lowering the ceiling for the truly gifted. Tools meant to help now sand down fingerprints. Tools meant to empower now homogenize the extraordinary. We didn’t democratize excellence—we democratized sameness. And then we mistook that sameness for truth. Which is precisely why, in 2025, to err is more than human—it is a refusal. A refusal to be laminated, to be algorithmically “corrected,” to swallow the cilantro-coded tang of forced perfection.
The Great Flattening (or, Why Everything Tastes Like a Lemon-Scented Countertop)
We’ve been bathing in lemon-fresh “improvement” for years. Pitch correction snaps notes into a mechanized grid, forcing melodies into obedient little lockstep marches. Quantization irons out the swing—those micro-shoves and little hesitations that give rhythm its pulse. Spectral de-noise hushes honest air, vacuuming away the room’s own breath. Multiband compression kneads everything into toothpaste, squeezing the soundscape into a suspiciously uniform smear. It’s all one giant aural Sephora counter, selling poreless vocals with a finish so flawless it squeaks.
For some listeners, that gloss tastes like lime—sharp, crystalline, deliberate. For the rest of us, it’s cilantro’s evil twin: a bright soapy betrayal that overruns the palate with chemical fizz. The deeper cruelty is this: these tools don’t make mediocre singers great; they make them interchangeable. And they don’t help great singers blossom; they make them ordinary. The floor rises. The ceiling drops. Everything collapses into an inoffensive middle beige—a factory-standard sonic neutrality where individuality dissolves like sugar in hot tea.
The Rise of the Authenticity Performers (Bless Their Spectral Little Hearts)
Enter a new species: the earnest terriers of truth on YouTube. Slightly disheveled British men (and a few rogue Americans) hunched over ring-lit spectral analyzers, barking earnest revelations into their webcams. “I WILL NOW EXPOSE THE LIP-SYNC!” they announce as they zoom in on a telltale alignment. “HERE IS THE AUTO-TUNE INFLECTION!” as their cursor circles the robotic stair-step. “THIS VIBRATO IS NATURAL—AND THIS, MY FRIENDS, IS FROM HELL!” complete with side-by-side graphs that look like lie-detector printouts for ghosts.
They aren’t restoring authenticity—they’re validating the suspicion that authenticity has been quietly hijacked. Their real thesis is simple: your ears aren’t broken. The culture is. People flock to them not for scandal but solidarity, a communal exhale: Ah, so it wasn’t just me. In the era of glossy illusions, these spectral sleuths carve tiny openings back to the real.
Breath as Rebellion (Tori Amos Understood the Assignment)
In the temple of immaculate vocals, breath was the first heresy. Engineers clipped it, software scrubbed it, and producers treated it like lint on a black dress. But breath is the original signature—the pulse of the performer made audible. Tori Amos breathes like the intake itself is lyric. Her inhales act as commas, confessions, and invocations. They are part of the emotional grammar of the song, tiny tectonic shifts that make the performance human.
The industry whispers, “No one wants to hear you breathe,” as if air were an apology. Tori answers, implicitly and unapologetically: Then why are you listening to me at all? Breath is the audible evidence of presence. Remove it and you erase the body. If perfection demands we stop breathing, then blessed are the flawed—alive, inhaling, insisting on their own humanity with every gasp.
The Monkees Weaponizing Plosives (Saints of the Sacred Pop Filter)
Deep in Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. lies a brilliant little act of rebellion: “Peter Percival Patterson’s Pet Pig Porky.” It’s a plosive carnival. P’s popping like bubble wrap in a fire. The microphone practically flinching. Any self-respecting pop filter in 1967 would have staged a walkout. The Monkees didn’t hide the flaw—they weaponized it, turning the engineer’s nightmare into comedy.
It’s a reminder that the human mouth is percussion, whether or not the gear approves. Long before our authenticity anxieties, the Monkees waltzed into the studio and declared: “We know this is wrong. That’s why it’s delightful.” A plosive as punchline. A flaw embraced so thoroughly it becomes flair.
The Big-Budget Paradox (Major Labels Wear Flaws as Jewelry)
And the twist: big-budget projects have always left the flaws in. They weren’t unable to fix them—they understood that fixing them would drain the blood from the track. Stevie Nicks letting hurricane-force breaths whip across the mic. Janet Jackson whispering close enough you can hear her teeth. Fleetwood Mac’s room bleed blurring the boundaries. Nesmith’s slightly overdriven vocal on “The Door into Summer” wobbling with warmth. Lennon’s throat shredding on “Twist and Shout.” Aretha’s vibrato gleaming with exertion. Cohen’s sighs. Kurt’s cough. Tori’s breaths.
The majors have always known flaws are currency. Meanwhile the middle of the curve is busy cosplaying perfection with latex, Photoshop, and presets—scrubbing away humanity in the pursuit of “professionalism.” They confuse sterility with sophistication. They iron out the very creases the greats used as their signature folds.
Tone Goals vs. Nostalgia Cosplay (Yes, We’re In the River Too)
But let’s not pretend we’re standing on a hill above the river. We’re all wading in it. Take the Universal Audio Ruby perched by the keyboard. A digital Vox AC30, no mic placement, no neighbors calling the cops, no fire hazard. Nancy plugs her ’80s Telecaster into it and—bang—it blooms exactly as it should. That isn’t cosplay. That’s a tool delivering the tone without the ritual.
The Ruby reveals; it doesn’t flatten. But the Tascam 424 preamp emulation pedal? That one triggers an involuntary eye-roll, a perfect symbol of fauxtheticity: manufacturing the flaws we once cursed, selling noise as nostalgia, packaging imperfection like seasonal merch. Yet here we are—in the river, choosing which currents to let carry us. We aren’t rejecting technology; we’re rejecting tools that replace intent with aesthetic.
The SansAmp Parable (Authentic Artificiality > Artificial Authenticity)
Somewhere in a drawer lives the SansAmp bought in 1994—noisy, unruly, and, hilariously, still closer to Kevin Shields’s glide than any boutique “shoegaze” pedal made since. The Keeley Loomer mimics the aesthetic. The SansAmp recreated the behavior—the collapse, the sag, the unpredictable blooming distortion. Shoegaze wasn’t born from clean digital fidelity. It grew out of chaos, accidents, misbehavior. Tools that flatten miss the point. Tools that free? Those are the real time machines.
The Life Pedal Revelation (Tools That Make You More You)
And then there’s the Sunn O))) Life Pedal v3. Stomping it won’t turn you into Stephen O’Malley; it won’t summon fog, robes, or monastic drone cathedrals. But plug a baglama into it and suddenly you’re the Turkish Jimi Hendrix—summoning Anatolian psychedelia fused with doom-laden overtones. It doesn’t give you someone else’s identity. It amplifies your own strangeness.
Tools like the Ruby, the SansAmp, the Life Pedal—they aren’t shortcuts to someone else’s mythology. They’re prisms that refract your intent back at you, louder and weirder and truer. Tools that support identity, not overwrite it.
The Rockman Cometh (The Unapologetic Artificiality Exception)
And floating at the perimeter is the MXR Rockman reissue—the patron saint of unapologetic artificiality. Plastic, fluorescent, gloriously synthetic. The polar opposite of “warmth.” But at least it never lied. It never played dress-up. It never claimed to be vintage. Honest artificiality beats fake authenticity every time.
Why You’ll Never Out-Bowie Bowie, Out-Aretha Aretha, or Out-Freddie Freddie
Here’s the cosmic truth: Bowie was Bowie. Mercury was Mercury. Aretha was Aretha. They inhabited planes inaccessible by imitation. No pitch correction, no AI vibrato, no boutique pedalboard, no “authentic preamp emulation” can lift you into their altitudes. Not because you lack—but because those airspaces are already occupied.
The point was never to out-Mercury Mercury. The point is to out-you you. And here’s the kicker: Bowie couldn’t out-you you, either. You are the only inhabitant of your plane. Your grain, your breath, your wobble, your Tele-through-Ruby shimmer, your baglama-through-doom pedal storm—they are unreplicable. Your signature is the one thing the plugins cannot bleach.
Error as Identity (The Final Refusal)
So yes: to err is more than human. It is a refusal—a refusal to be flattened, polished, preset, pasteurized, or pleasant in the way machines prefer. Error is seasoning. Error is the salt in the sweat, the scratch on the tape, the breath before the line. Error is the timestamp proving a life occurred in the room.
In an era of immaculate fakes and algorithmic crooners, of backstage lip-syncs and sonic Photoshop, the brave little wobble isn’t just human. It’s heroic. It’s the rebel inhale, the signature crack, the unsmoothed edge. It’s the note that refuses to stop breathing, daring the world to taste something real in a landscape terrified of flavor.