Category: Music

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AI Art Aspires to the Condition of Muzak

Most food you can get is mass-produced in factories, or constructed on assembly lines. But people will still pay more to cook from scratch with good ingredients, or pay someone to do so for them.

Most furniture these days is factory-made or flat-pack. But if you pay enough, you can get something of lasting quality, made by a craftsman either now or centuries past.

Most clothes are fast fashion, made in Asian sweatshops, and fall apart or fade after a few washes. But for enough money, you can get tailored clothes which will last decades.

And if it doesn’t murder us all or melt the planet, this is possibly where AI is taking us. To a future where most words, most images, most music, most entertainment will be algorithm-generated.

But if you’re prepared to pay, humans will still be around to make you a quality product.

Walter Pater famously said that all art aspires to the condition of music. In his Jerry Cornelius series of novels, Michael Moorcock subverted this to the mass media age, suggesting that all art aspires instead to the condition of muzak.

We now know of course that it is not ALL art which thus aspires. But certainly all algorithmically-generated content does, by definition.

Capitalism is using algorithms to enforce industrialisation upon creativity, that having been resisted by humanity until now, despite the concerns of generations before us, from the Luddites to William Morris.

But at the fringes, where the poor and the hyperrich almost meet in a kind of horseshoe of behavioural patterns, human-created art, without any AI involvement, will be the art of choice for those who cannot afford the mass-produced option, as well as those who can afford to pay extra for its status symbolism, quality and the longevity.

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He did it AI way

What you notice on first listen is of course how the AI has mimicked the diphthong pronunctions of Thom Yorke in the chorus, rendering the fake Sinatra version self-evidently fake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkrisNqui9c

But if you persevere, you notice something more significant about the AI rendering. It’s superficially impressive, apart from those pronunciation errors. What I mean is that it’s more persuasively Sinatra than almost all cover artists could aspire to be.

However, unlike almost any human singer, it’s soulless. There’s no attempt to convey or interpret the emotion of the original, because the emotion is the one singular component that the AI cannot aggregate or understand.

It makes a better fist of the Doors, perhaps because of much closer musical, chronological and cultural proximity. But generally, as more and more of these AI covers make their way into the cultural arena online, it’s becoming clear that, as Simon Pegg recently explained, AI is a mediocrity machine.

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How Utopia may grow from Coal Black Suburbia

The best band of the Britpop era was not Blur or Oasis, nor even Pulp, but Suede.

(Shout outs to Ash, Echobelly, Sleeper and Gene too.)

So it’s been interesting reading Brett Anderson’s brief memoir, Coal Black Mornings, of the period up to the point where he became famous and his story devolves into, as he put it, “the usual ‘coke and gold discs’ memoir”.

Coal Black Mornings (English Edition) eBook : Anderson, Brett: Amazon.it: Kindle Store

Comparing it to David Mitchell’s novel Utopia Avenue, which features a fictional band from the Sixties, it’s interesting to see the many overlaps. The early sections of Utopia Avenue are easily the most interesting.

Both are tales of three-bar fires, poky terrace houses, distant parents, and the edgy tedium of suburbia, all opening up into a London which is equated to liberty, albeit a grimy, pot-infused, impoverished kind of freedom.

The conclusion of Mitchell’s novel, bar one not-especially-shocking twist, devolves to the same hotel rooms, drugs and hangers-on narrative one can find in any rock or pop memoir. One suspects Mitchell had nowhere else to go.

One also wonders whence he derived where the novel came from. Anderson’s origins are far from unique (mine shares many of the same attributes, albeit with the added frisson of a low-level civil war going on at the edge of the stage). But I wonder whether Mitchell read Anderson’s book before completing his own?

More memoirists should consider Anderson’s approach rather than speeding through their childhoods to get to the fame bits. Fame is boring and monotonous, and judging by the opinions of the occasional famous person I’ve met, somewhat of a trap and a burden. We are made by our youth and it is there where we may be found.

Thanks to the success of this first volume, Anderson wrote a follow-up about his fame years. It gets pretty good reviews, but as with the latter portion of Mitchell’s novel, I suspect it might disappoint, so I intend to leave his story hanging, perpetually suspended on the brink of success.

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Messels about the Molodoy

While researching my forthcoming book on Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, I came across mention of Molodoy, a shortlived Sheffield punk band of quasi-fascist tendencies whose schtick was that they appeared in full droog regalia on stage.

Molodoy is the Nadsat term for young, though it is barely used in the novel. Burgess did however use it extensively in one of his many revisits to the world of Alex, when he conducted an interview with his own creation entitled “A Malenky Govoreet about the Molodoy” in 1987, which can be found in the 2012 Corrected Edition of the novel as edited by Professor Andrew Biswell, or online here for now.

Judging by the information in this article on Dangerous Minds, the band Molodoy sound like they were right charmers. Some members later went on to form the disturbingly named Dachau Choir. Anyhow, their cover of ‘Tomorrow Belongs To Me’ does strike one as a note of sour and deranged genius.

Molodoy were far from the only band to derive inspiration from Burgess’s novel. In fact a large host of musical artists have either named themselves after aspects of the novel, or else written songs inspired by it.

But for Burgess, we might never have had Moloko, Moloko Knives, The Devotchkas, The Droogs, Campag Vellocet or Korova (which refers to both a band and a record label). And of the ten fictional bands mentioned within the work, at least five have had their names appropriated by real-life groups: Heaven 17, Johnny Zhivago, The Humpers, The Sparks and The Legend.

Molodoy may have been mentioned at the Kingston University conference on A Clockwork Orange a couple of years back, I seem to remember. Perhaps they’ll also feature in the forthcoming essay collection being edited by Matt Melia.