While watching YouTube videos - my substitute for television news these days - I came across an ad for Suno, an AI program that enables one not just to write a song but to create a recording by vocalizing melodies and rhythms and translating them into instruments and arrangements.
The Beatles. the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix, I prefer to believe, never would have allowed AI to be used in a commercial recording. But had they had access to it in the sixties, they would have used it to introduce new songs for the band to learn their parts on. And they wouldn't have necessarily followed the AI demos to the letter, either; they would have made changes to the arrangement with a new take if, during the recording process, they heard in the playback process something wrong that didn't fit. Because AI, like any other computer program, makes mistakes.
You know that old sentimental cliché that a knight in shining armor didn't need a shiny car? Please. Just as Sir Galahad would have bought a Lexus had he been able to, the rock and roll musicians whose records we celebrate today as "classic rock" would have used AI if it had been available to them. And, in fact, they have. Paul McCartney couldn't have used AI to figure out how to arrange songs he wrote for Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road - and it's too bad he couldn't make an AI demo of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," he might have gotten the song finished in the recording studio much sooner and spared George Harrison and and Ringo Starr all that wincing (John didn't take part in that recording) - but he did use AI to complete the Beatles tune "Now and Then," an unfinished Lennon demo meant for Anthology 3 but set aside because George didn't like how it was working out. (Had Lennon had AI available on a computer or laptop at home in the late seventies, he would have made his demos with that and so they wouldn't have been the tinny cassettes that the surviving Beatles and Jeff Lynne had to work with.) The Rolling Stones used AI on their latest album, Foreign Tongues. And given all of the unfinished, unreleased tapes from Electric Lady Studios in New York, a new Hendrix album mastered with AI may be inevitable.
But the Stones and McCartney, veterans that they are, know how dangerous AI can be and so use it responsibly. Today's kids don't have the restraint to use AI with care. They'll go overboard with it, just as the Beatles went overboard with eight-track tape once it came in to replace four-track in 1968. But with AI as opposed to recording tape with double the tracks, the chances of overreaching are exponentially greater. Artificial intelligence has much more power to reduce music to ugly excess than any multi-track tape machine ever could.
And what about those kids? If they listen to rap, they've likely never seen a musical instrument, much less heard one, and if they like pop stars like Harry Styles or Taylor Swift, they might want to put themselves as the same level as those singers with just Suno, a laptop, and a dream. They'll create a tune and bring it to life by scatting it into the microphone and letting AI turn it into a generic radio-friendly sound, and they'll add words, and then they'll make percussive noises to create the drums, and . . . that will be it. They'll have a professionally made record. Or so they'll think. But then there's no incentive for them to make a finished product from it when the they think it is a finished product.
The dumbing of popular music has in fact been going on for a long time. For the past forty years or so, record labels have heavily skewed to dance music because it is easier and cheaper to produce. They didn't need AI to figure that out. Rap was a boon because it was easier still to create. It was rappers who "pioneered" the practice of vocalizing percussion; the first rap act to do so was the Disco 3 (well, their sound wasn't disco, but there were three of them), whose percussive vocalist became known as the Human Beat Box. We should be glad they didn't record a collaboration with sound-effects master Michael Winslow. Again, this was the 1980s, so no AI was involved.
For whatever reason, the increasingly rap-friendly pop press found this clownish amateurism in eighties pop endearing, as did the A&R men who spurred it on. (I'll say this much for Harry Styles and Taylor Swift; they are not clownish, and they are not amateurs.) These amateurish trends continued. Now AI is here, and not only is it being used as part of a recording, not only is it being used to create entire recordings from whole cloth, it is being used to create artists. AI programs are successfully creating fictional groups (at least the Archies were voiced by real studio singers!) Even as lightweight pop divas and rap poseurs continue to make records without any musical talent or skill, AI is writing its own songs and creating people to put into fictional bands to play them.
If you need any proof that artist and repertoire (A&R) men are so clueless as to fail to realize what their shortcuts and indulgence for laziness in the 1980s, consider Michael Rosenblatt. He started out as a messenger at Sire Records, Warner Brothers' New Wave label, and rose through the ranks, eventually helping to bring Madonna to the world's attention.
You know where this is going. In a recent interview with a Lincoln Square Media podcast, Rosenblatt recalled how, when Sire boss Seymour Stein signed Madonna to the label, he (Rosenblatt) worked to cultivate her and gave her direction based on what she wanted to achieve as a singer. It was the same thing she told Dick Clark on "American Bandstand" in 1984, soon to bite the dust as more homes were getting MTV - she wanted to rule the world.
She missed her calling. She could have been a comedian.
As you might gather, Rosenblatt laments in this podcast that AI has taken over and hais governed how popular music is presented and even made, making more of it itself, and - shocking but true - misses the climate in the record business that allowed Madonna to emerge and prosper.
So, Rosenblatt is saying there was more respect for musical craft and ability when his label signed . . . Madonna???
The dumbing of popular music and the rise of rap, divas, "boy bands" (so called because it's an alliterative phrase, even though none of these groups play their own instruments) was already at an Olympian summit before AI crept in. There were times when pop could have taken a turn away from this dumbing - Tracy Chapman's debut in 1988, the grunge revolt in 1992 - but once those trends toward musical integrity proved to be insufficient as cash cows, it was back to business as usual. Promotional budgets went to videos for airplay on MTV instead of tours that are vital to building up young rock bands. Record labels scaled back signing rock bands because solo performers gave synth-pop and rap even bigger profit mentions than they already had - why waste studio on a band when you only have to deal with deal with one performer at a time? And the "music" got more and more robotic and formulaic. And Rosenblatt is shocked that AI has taken over? As the man who helped Madonna get started, he has a lot of damn gall to curse AI and pine for a time when music was about quality and integrity.
Look, I tried to learn how to play guitar when I was a teenager, but I never could master it. Chicago's "Colour My World" is the only song I can play on the piano. I can sing along to a vocal on a record, but I'm not good enough to perform on stage. I can write lyrics, and I have written lyrics, although I thought they were poems - I'm a Bernie Taupin without an Elton John, as I can't think of original melodies. So I have respect for anyone who can sing, play and write music. Even . . . Journey. I have no respect for Madonna, as she is a talentless hack, and so I disrespect rappers that I call them by their given names, because I think it's stupid to humor them by calling them A$AP Rocky (Rakim Athelaston Mayers) or MC Lyte (Lana Michele Moorer) - yeah, yeah, I know, rappers from different eras of rap, why not? And so you'll excuse me for my disrespect for Michael Rosenblatt, because he lost his right to demand respect because he was a part of the reduction of popular music to the sort of annoying background noise that made it ripe for AI in its rudimentary period to take over.
And what do I think of artificially created voices and instrumental sounds being hits on the radio? Hey, despite my personal opposition to commercial recordings made entirely with AI, as far as I'm concerned, whoever makes these records should get a whole lot of credit for them. Maybe fake AI songs should be hits. After all, they can't be any worse that the authentic garbage pop singers and rappers are currently "creating."
It all comes down to this for popular music today: Artificial intelligence, real stupidity.
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