Paris Chiong

Cher Didn’t Need Auto-Tune to Prove What “Believe” Had Already Changed “Believe” has a funny history. In 1998, Cher walked into the future almost by accident. The strange, robotic vocal effect on the record was so unfamiliar that it became part of the song’s identity. It wasn't just a production trick. It became the sound of a new era of pop. Twenty-six years later, at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Dua Lipa stood onstage and sang the song again. Without that trick. That is what caught my attention. Dua takes the opening herself. The song sounds cleaner, warmer, more like a straight vocal performance than the record people grew up with. Then Cher appears for the bridge, and suddenly the performance stops being a young singer covering an older star. It becomes something else. You can hear the distance between them, but you don't hear a fight for ownership. Dua doesn't try to impersonate Cher. That's important. Her voice sits differently — lower, smoother, more contemporary — so the first part almost feels like someone opening a door into a song she knows belongs to another generation. Then Cher walks through it. And now the same lyric has a different history behind it. “Believe” was already a song about surviving the end of a relationship. In 1998, its futuristic production made that survival sound almost defiant: I'm hurt, but I'm moving forward. In 2024, Cher is singing those words after a career that has survived fashion changes, musical fashions, film careers, television, reinvention and decades in which plenty of artists who were enormous for five years simply disappeared. So when she sings the chorus now, I don't hear the question in quite the same way. I hear evidence. She really did survive. There is also something beautifully backwards about the whole thing. Dua Lipa belongs to the generation that inherited the pop world Cher helped reshape. Cher is standing beside her, singing a song whose production once sounded impossibly modern. And the younger artist isn't introducing Cher to the future. She's introducing the future to Cher. That's why the performance works better than a conventional tribute would have. A tribute can turn an artist into a museum piece. This doesn't. Cher is not being presented as someone whose best work happened a long time ago. She is being placed inside the song again, next to an artist who grew up in a musical world that Cher helped make possible. Even the missing Auto-Tune feels appropriate. The original record needed technology to make people hear something new. Cher doesn't need it anymore. The song has already done its job. The machine became ordinary. The woman who used it became the landmark. And perhaps that is the most satisfying part of watching Cher sing “Believe” in 2024. Dua Lipa can sing the song beautifully. But when Cher arrives, you suddenly remember something that has nothing to do with vocal technique. **Some artists don't need to sound like the future. They become part of the reason the future sounds the way it does.**