The music had been bad, all afternoon. I didn’t feel like listening to anything that my own device was serving up, since it’s in that mood where it thinks I only want chamber music, like it’s Sunday morning at home and I’m buttering a croissant and the music is dialed down low to indicate that we are cultured people who appreciate the finer things, even if they’re an indistinct stream of rote Baroque cliches turned out by the yard by some bewigged guy who was probably dosing his syphillis with mercury. But this meant listening to the execrable pop krep on the gym speakers. And here I thought: this is it, the sign that my brain has gone over, something’s wrong, a wire snapped, a lobe died.
It was Wild Thing by Tone Loc. But it was different. I don’t know how to describe it. The guitar part was . . . wrong somehow, and the fill that followed was correct but thicker. The vocals were meaner. The whole thing was darker and abrasive, like the original, except after five years in jail. When I looked it up I saw that it was indeed Wild Thing, but a re-recorded version.
Whew. If someone had said “say, you have a look of sudden relief,” I would have said “I just realized that Tone Loc’s producer had intentionally fuzzed up the guitar, and that this was not a sign of a stroke.”
We are at a cultural dead-end when people are re-doing those old songs, just playing with the knobs.
Right now I’m in the gazebo in the evening, listening to my “station” on Apple Music, which is drawn from songs I’ve indicated I like, and I am listening to something I recall hearing while I was on a plane, descending. That adds drama and elation to anything, particularly if you’re going to a familiar location and the usual airport uncertainties do not await. Stripped of that context it’s quite banal. There is no indication that a human being is behind it. Nothing on the socials or YouTube channel or the 'gram, just gauzy profile pix, no bio, no composer notes - and no interaction from anyone on any video. I don’t know how it swam out of the primordial sea to get into a playlist. I just had the sudden conviction it's AI.
I think we’re going to hit a point where some people refuse to listen to anything made after 2023. Because you don’t know.
But what if it’s good?
I don’t care.
I don't want to discover a new song by a favorite old artist and discover that this absolute banger is completely fake. Perfect in every way, a natural inhabitation of their style and quirks and idiosyncrasies. But fake! Does it really matter? It’s the band’s music you like, and isn’t this more of it?
I was on a thread today about Mahler over at R, and the author of the post had been to a multi-day all-Mahler event. He mentioned the 10th, which is unfinished. (Or the 11th if you want to be a stickler, but if Gus didn’t count Das Lied I’m not countermanding his decision.) Only one movement was finished, and it has that great horrible dissonant chord, the cry of anguish over wife and life. Also the moment where he opens the door and glimpses the Bosch-like nightmare of the post-tonal hellscape. (The chord is, I think three notes short of a 12-tone row, and every time I say that I think I’ve come up with a new description for an idiot. Well, he’s 3 notes short of a 12-tone row. ) AI could finish the symphony. I’m sure it already has, somewhere. Does it matter that the program doesn’t know what it’s like to compose while your wife is off having a fling with a modernist architect and you’re pouring you grief on a page with black scribbles on a stave? Does it matter when AI can remix the authentic expressions of those emotions, AND - this is key - produce something that is genuinely beautiful?
Yes of course no one’s asked these questions before I am a smart fellow wondering about serious issues
The other day I clicked a few times on a video about a sheepdog whose quiet and unquestioned authority shut down a messy free-for-all fight in a kennel somewhere. I sent it to someone, too. The next day my feed had a video thread that had ten examples of the dog working his kingly influence. I am 99% sure they’re real. A year from now I will just assume there’s a 50-50 shot the dog exists. (At which point you learn that the first dog was always fake.) Why wouldn’t there be a bot that skitters through Twitter making up things you like?
What’s the harm? Share and like.
AND JUST LIKE THAT we’re not only in a post-truth era but a time where truth itself is forgotten as a concept, because truth isn’t as much fun. Truth is, like, parental. Untruth is liberating because it produces more possibilities and more novelties to light up some synapses and neurons for 57 seconds.
I’m listening to something now that’s full of samples, and while they’re repurposed snippets, there was a human hand behind that guitar lick, once. It’s something you know,instinctively, and it grounds the whole piece. It’s the single string that anchors the whole artistic endeavor of humanity. It's thinner than we could have possible thought. We'll never know when it snaps or unravels, but everyone will have a moment when they tug on the string expecting it to be connected to something, and it'll be loose in their hands.
Maybe not everyone. Maybe not most, alas. The majority of people who just CONSUME the CONTENT and VIBE won’t care.
Now, you can make the point that no one ever really cared that much, because they always just vibed to the groove, and I suppose that’s true. Synthpop paved the way for acceptance of artificiality, right, and I loved that, so who am I to complain about the rise of the machines?
Fair enough. But a sound made by machines under human control is not the same as AI.
But you use AI art on this site! Colossal hypocrisy! Fair enough. But I use it mockingly with its flaws exposed and limitations plain. I’m not passing it off as the equal of actual art (and with the exception of the main site banner, which is altered daily by AI for reasons I’ll explain some day) I’m moving all AI art out of the Bleat except for its pathetic attempt to reproduce dream imagery, just because I want clean hands.
All fair. So get back to the point about no one caring that much about how the music got made - few people bopping along to the radio wondered how the guitar was tuned or whether the Fender Rhodes was fed through a particular pedal. It just sounded cool. So why worry now? Because you can’t drill down on the thing itself and study it, note the slight imperfections that reveal the human element, consider the bio of the musician who stepped into the studio one day and summoned up something better than he’d ever done before, then spent the rest of his life chasing it, and so on. There’s just a blank wall behind every song. In Oz terms, Pay no attention to the spot behind the curtain where the man used to stand.
Okay, enough. The playlist just tossed up “Go” by that weedy geeky nut job Moby, proof that militant veganism gives you the strength and charisma of a damp stalk of celery, but he's done a lot of stuff I like. I don’t ever remember anyone at the time calling him out for completely and utterly ripping off the Twin Peaks soundtrack, but he did, and it’s not even a remix. Same synth, same tempo, same mood - but he made something new out of it, in the end. AI makes thievery more moral than antiseptic and inhuman virtue. At least it’s a choice, and someone has to choose.
nope
Very simple dream, and a happy one. I was getting my hair cut while the Jackie Gleason Orchestra played, and I waited for the moment when Bobby Hackett entered the piece and I spread out my arms. The barber wasn't impressed with my happiness or sense of drama.
It was difficult to get the AI to understand any of this, which doesn't surprise me.
LANCE CHINSLAB era - and I think this one hasn't been used, either. I've gone back to the original sources.
This year we're going back a (gulp) half century. Remember, just because they were low-charting in the top 250 doesn't mean they didn't rise up the next year. For my rankings I use the Whitburn collection, and I'm sure there are other charts that dispute these particular ranks. Who cares! It's just for fun.
Eight levels of hell for Christmastime:
I track one of the producers to a job at BMG - "Rick Bleiweiss, senior VP of marketing and branch operation." It was all a Pickwick cheapy.
Anyway, that's it for now! Thank you for your visits, and I'll see you Monday.
