"From Ke$ha to Indie singer Bon Iver to reality sensations like Rebecca Black and Real Housewife Kim Zolciak," notes WNBC reporter Katie Tur, "artists across the board are using Auto-Tune -- that handy audio tool that makes even the most dreadful voices sound musical -- and other devices to either stylize or subtly smooth out tracks." This was an actual segment on last night's newscast--which aired right after NBC's much-hyped debut of The Voice--and its main point seemed to hinge on the fact that Tur can't really sing, but she can sound like a pop star with a little bit of computer assistance. Hey, maybe her warbly cover of "American Girl" will go as viral as Rebecca Black did! That should help out NBC, right?

Jay-Z and his arch-nemesis T-Pain, together at Summer Jam last night

Released late Friday, Jay-Z's new single, "D.O.A (Death of Auto-Tune)," from the now thoroughly-announced The Blueprint 3, is less a Martin Luther-like cry for hip-hop reformation than an awkward slab of concept rap. The concept: That a new Jay-Z song about rap's current "lack of aggression" and tight jeans, over a jagged No I.D. beat of choked clarinet and wailing guitar, simply by existing, represents the death of auto-tune.

That's the idea anyway. Really, the song is just a new way to say "this is that real street shit"--e.g., this is that death of auto-tune shit. It's a gimmicky song that sets out to destroy Rap & B's latest gimmick. The stunt is reminiscent of Hip-Hop Is Dead, the rap-killing album by Jay-Z's good buddy Nas, and Jay's own American Gangster, which found businessman Jay-Z painted into a corner in which the only way to return to reliable gun-talk was to wrap it around a movie tie-in conceit.

If Auto-Tune hit its peak as a joke delivery device last week amidst the spectacle of a weirdly robotic Katie Couric involuntarily singing an "O Superman"-reminiscent lament for melting polar ice caps, it also hit its nadir at about the same time, when a tape surfaced of an Auto-Tuned Martin Luther King "singing" his epochal "I Have a Dream" speech. If there is a god, the internet's random desecration of one of the all-time great oratorical moments of the 20th century should finally put Auto-Tune-as-a-joke in the internet meme grave, hopefully never to rise again. As far as the larfs went, the technology had a good run.

The phenomenon started simply: Former Exxon seismic data explorer Andy Hildebrand manipulated a technology that had previously been used to detect oil under the Earth and applied it to music, debuting his Auto-Tune software in 1997. The program was immediately popular, used to detect pitch, correct vocals and resurrect the careers of Oscar-winning future Christopher Guest parody subjects. Humor ensued. And thus we begin.