"People who wouldn't know me here in the United States would know Wayne was on another song, so let's check that song out," Jay Sean, who is British, told the Wall Street Journal in 2012, explaining the power of Wayne's presence. Moreover, it had the biggest rapper in the world on it, a guaranteed formula for a hit. Jay Sean's "Down" was the pinnacle of this movement, the ultra-glossy endpoint of ultra-glossy R&B. Jay Z had proclaimed the "Death of Auto-Tune," Kanye West had recorded an entire album devoted to it in 808s and Heartbreak, and Lil Wayne was cruising along using it without comment because he recognized that it was both fun as hell and good as hell.
Central to this sound was Auto-Tune, which had been around long enough to be recognizable and was wildly divisive, especially in the hip-hop world. Artists like Taio Cruz, Jason Derulo, and Akon had pushed R&B into supremely glossy, processed territory in what felt-in retrospect even more so-like an attempt to stave off feat over the growing economic recession with a fantasia of bottle service and robot voices. "Down" came out in 2009, and it captured the pop music zeitgeist at the time in all the ways that infuriated people.
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