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"It's our responsibility as musicians to keep pushing each other. We will be the new Beatles, the new Hendrix. I want to be Elvis", trumpeted Kanye West boldly like a pop astronaut at an award ceremony earlier this year. The hip-hop monolith's self-proclaimed genius knows no bounds, as we know. He really does think he is The Man. This year in an attempt to highlight this epic talent, Kanye has even ripped off the rap straightjacket and sought to become a ‘proper singer', just like The King.

New album, the really quite good, soul-scraping electro-doom fest of "808s & Heartbreak" finds him, essentially, singing throughout, via AutoTune. The tool was most famously used by Cher for the 1998 globe super-smash "Believe" and digitises the voice to create a rich, robotic, psychedelic stream of digital sound, ironing out all the creases. Akon has, it seems, built an entire career around it.

But what happens when the device malfunctions? Well, the true horror of Kanye's real vocals were comically exposed on "SNL" this weekend in the clip below. Props etc to West for actually posting the clip on his official website, rather than attempting to have YouTube exterminated or the internet shutdown. But even a long dead Elvis could surely put in a better performance than this busted android karaoke.