I Hope You Never Listen Alone
Let's talk about the thing that scares me most about AI-generated music.
Every now and again, I recommend other talented people you should be paying attention to in the music space. Sometimes that means an artist. Other times that means a content creator. Today, that means a curator, specifically Chey Watson.
Chey is a self-professed R&B-head who curates music under THE SWEETS. The songs recommended at the end of this week’s newsletter come from her. But before we get to that, let’s talk about the thing that scares me most about AI and music.
There’s Nothing Scarier Than Listening Alone
The other day a friend sent me this a New Yorker article from 1978 about the legendary late-night television host Johnny Carson. Here is how acclaimed film director Billy Wilder described Carson in the article:
By the simple law of survival, Carson is the best … He enchants the invalids and the insomniacs as well as the people who have to get up at dawn. He is the Valium and the Nembutal of a nation. No matter what kind of dead-asses are on the show, he has to make them funny and exciting. He has to be their nurse and their surgeon. He has no conceit. He does his work and he comes prepared. If he’s talking to an author, he has read the book. Even his rehearsed routines sound improvised. He’s the cream of middle-class elegance, yet he’s not a mannequin. He has captivated the American bourgeoisie without ever offending the highbrows, and he has never said anything that wasn’t liberal or progressive. Every night, in front of millions of people, he has to do the salto mortale [circus parlance for an aerial somersault performed on the tightrope] What’s more … he does it without a net. No rewrites. No retakes. The jokes must work tonight.
This praise is effusive. And it’s not unique. If you speak to anybody who watched Carson regularly, you’ll hear them heap the same praises on him, albeit less poetically. Anytime I see a clip of Carson, I too am swayed by his charms. But in the back of my head, a thought always creeps in: Maybe everybody thought Johnny Carson was great because there weren’t many other shows to watch late at night.
Compare the late-night entertainment landscape of yore to what we have today. Between YouTube, TikTok, and Netflix alone there is more content than any human could watch in a lifetime. This puts us in the weird scenario where we arguably have more great art than ever before but less people to enjoy it with.
What scares me about artificial intelligence is that it will likely exacerbate this situation. This AI-generated recording of Freddie Mercury covering the Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” is a good example as to why.
First, I want to note that saying this was generated via AI is a bit of a stretch. According to the video’s description, “The extracted acapella was transformed and finessed with the help of Audacity to match the rhythm, maintain the key, and hit every note as accurately as possible.” In other words, there was lot of human intervention. Nevertheless, here is how this technology could progress.
“Play Me a Song”: This is where things currently stand. A streaming service knows what songs you enjoy and uses some combination of machine learning to find others you’ll feel the same about.
“Combine These Songs for Me”: This is what the various “AI” covers proliferating on the web are trying to be. You pick something, like Kanye West singing “Take Me Home, Country Roads”, and it will start playing.
“I’ll Combine These Songs for You”: Rather than telling the computer what to combine, now the computer knows what you want. This is similar to (1), except rather than having to choose from a set of songs, it can combine things. For example, maybe it knows that you’d love to hear Lana Del Ray perform an acoustic cover of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.
“I’ll Make a Song for You”: Now, the computer isn’t working from component artists and songs that you are familiar with. Now, it is generating a song calibrated to your tastes from scratch. It might have been trained on human-made art, but the output will be distinct from the inputs.
So, why does this worry me? Because you will eventually be listening alone. And I don’t mean blasting your favorite song with ear buds in. I mean that you will be listening to music so finely personalized to your tastes that nobody else will have heard it or will ever hear it. You will be an audience of one.
I’ll admit that I’m being an alarmist. Not only am I assuming that we will surmount all of the technological challenges necessary to arrive at this scenario, but I am also assuming that each person’s tastes are distinct enough where there’d be little to no overlap in AI-creations. The former might not come to pass and the latter might not be true. But the next time you and a friend are both sitting in silence on the couch scrolling through your respective TikTok feeds, you’ll come to realize that pieces of this world already exist.
So, was Johnny Carson really that great? I’m not sure. I write about music, not television. But I don’t think it really matters. What matters is that I’d rather enjoy a decent piece of art with friends than the greatest piece of art by myself.
A New One
"Doctor, My Eyes" by Khamari
2023 - R&B
If you’d first told me this Khamari song was created by an AI Frank Ocean song generator, I would believe you. No fault to Khamari—a fast-rising soul singer from South Boston—Frank’s impact on music over the last decade is so profound that you don’t get to exist in the realm of introspection, existentialism, and R&B without at least drawing a comparison.
“Doctor, My Eyes” is the second track on Khamari’s major label debut A Brief Nirvana. Pulling inspiration from Jackson Browne's 1972 song of the same name, it is a masterclass in modern production with a timeless feel. When Khamari sings “Is there some type of pill I can take?” he is encapsulating the dreadful millennial conviction that time, sleep, and friendship are pulling away from us as we age.
An Old One
"At Your Best (You Are Love)" by Aaliyah
1994 - R&B
When you press play on any Aaliyah record, you’re hit with the sobering reality that what could’ve been will never be. Twenty-two years later, the R&B Princess’ untimely passing still leaves a capacious gap in the genre. Though this is a rendition of a 1975 Isley Brothers’ record, Aaliyah’s voice brings an angelic, almost knowing quality to the song that even the sharpest AI would fail to emulate.
Want more recommendations from Chey? Follow her on Instagram.
Want to hear the music that I make? Check out my latest EP.
Great read as always Chris! Happy to be a part 🍯
Crazy interesting