Guest Post By Gary Mullinax, AKA ‘The Minister Of Culture’
Stu Cook of the classic rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival knows that 19 CCR songs sit on a themed Spotify playlist next to roughly similar music by Velvet Sundown, the new Artificial Intelligence “band” that’s racking up views on streaming sites. So Velvet Sundown makes music he can appreciate, right?
Nah, he hates it.
“I just can’t get past how boring it is,” he told the Washington Post. “There’s just nothing inspiring about any of it.”
The style of the music is not the issue. Like so many others, he just can’t get behind music that exists only in the mind of a computer. It sounds like music played on instruments and sung by people, and at first that’s how listeners took it. But no humans struggled, worried or imagined anything at all to bring these songs into the world. Just let the computer survey its electronic brain and spit out what you asked for. No artist gets paid because there aren’t any artists.
In other words, it’s the idea of the thing that rankles. It does get you thinking, though. Anytime we listen even to “real” recorded music we can be sure only about the sound coming out of the speaker. We have to imagine all the rest. There’s no songwriter wracking his brain in your living room, no guitar player running through chords in the corner, though we do know these things happened somewhere sometime.
And there’s this: A lot of theoretically real pop bands today seem almost as purely manufactured as Velvet Sundown. Is there really a Sabrina Carpenter?
Sabrina Carpenter won’t appear on any playlists with Creedence Clearwater Revival. Those lists evoke album rock from the late ‘60s and 1970s. You can hear a bit of mild psychedelic rock in Velvet Sundown, some country-rock, some folk-rock, some yacht rock and, yes, some CCR. The music is not terrible, but it’s not a great example of the style. The band name itself is calculated to evoke that era. The fake bio includes AI photos of the kind of people who would make the music. Classic rock persists, even when hippies have given way to algorhythms.
Can this be loftily construed as some kind of art project designed to call attention to the slippery nature of realty? The “band” is giving that a try. According to a recent statement, Velvet Sundown it is “an ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge boundaries of authorship, identity and the future of music itself in the age of AI.” Sure.
When all is said and done, maybe we should just call it that old familiar thing: A cash grab.
Music simulation is also playing a part at the venerable World Cafe Live music club in Philadelphia. A (Trump-inspired?) new owner has riled staff — many have been fired or quit — and promised (threatened?) a new approach that would in part replace bands with some kind of virtual reality.
The guy has a tech bro background (so, Musk-like too?) and apparently can’t understand why everybody’s not eager to live in his wonderful world. He’d probably think a virtual band is a good idea, but he doesn’t seem to have a lot of company.
I certainly can’t imagine a World Cafe audience that has been weaned on XPN, which is right there, going for music without musicians.
If the new owner wanted to get WCL to fold, he couldn’t pursue a more effective strategy.
So… this made me want to hear it. And I guess I was not surprised to find it it just as boring as any similar classic rock band. (Not my bag, man)
That said, the idea that it is derivative (as a critique in the linked video) is strange to consider. Isn’t all popular music derivative? For that matter isn’t all music going back to australopithecus derivative? It all comes from somewhere, but the interesting part is what a band does with the raw materials. Where do they add a mandolin where there was no mandolin? I guess that’s the problem with this generation of AI. No life experiences to add to the long train of derivation. Maybe next week when the next version of AI comes out?
https://tinyurl.com/2ru329fj
Memo to self:
Look up ‘australopithecus’.
Is that the scientific name for a black hole?
https://medium.com/the-nib/how-the-ape-brain-assesses-risk-9322c4423123
“Every pop musician is a thief and a magpie”. (Declan McManus)
As a lifelong fan of classical music I find it challenging to not hear classical influences in most of the modern music I have heard over the 7 decades of my life. I’m not a linguist but derivative seems like an accurate description of this phenomenon.
I dunno. The word ‘derivative’ suggests an absence of original artistry or thought. While that applies to some artists’ work and certainly applies to AI, which, by definition, can’t be anything BUT derivative, making music that, while influenced by other artists, reflects an artist’s unique vision is not derivative.