Cher — "Believe"

"Believe" arrived on October 19, 1998, as the lead single from Cher's twenty-second studio album of the same name. Six writers share the credit — among them Brian Higgins and Paul Barry — with production by Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling; Cher herself reworked lyrics without taking an official writing credit. It was a sleek dance-pop record about surviving a breakup, sung by a woman who had been famous for more than three decades. Nobody expected it to change how pop music sounds.

Then there's THAT voice. Taylor processed Cher's vocals through Auto-Tune — pitch-correction software meant to be inaudible — with the settings cranked so the corrections snapped instantly instead of gliding. The result was a shimmering, robotic stutter on "I can't break through" that listeners had never heard before. The trick became so identified with this one record that the manual for a later version of Auto-Tune literally calls it the "Cher effect." What was designed as invisible studio repair became, overnight, an instrument.

The song didn't just chart; it colonized. Number one in 23 countries. In the US it crawled from a #99 debut to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 on March 13, 1999 — making Cher, at 52, the oldest solo female artist ever to top the chart, breaking Tina Turner's record — and Billboard ranked it the #1 song of 1999 on the year-end Hot 100. It won the Grammy for Best Dance Recording at the 42nd Awards, sold over 11 million copies worldwide, and in the UK it remains the best-selling single by a solo female artist; there Cher stood as the oldest woman ever atop the chart until Kate Bush took the record in 2022.

And about that lyric: the hook is "life after love," but the processed vocal blurred it just enough that a generation confidently misheard "life after life" and assumed Cher had gone metaphysical. Either way, the answer was yes — for Cher, whose imperial phase got a whole second act, and for the warble itself, which went from novelty to the default texture of twenty-first-century pop.