Lunching with my friend, author, music journalist, and podcaster, Rob Sheffield this past November, he casually mentioned that for the first time a song topped the Billboard charts that was entirely human-free. An AI-generated artist named Solomon Ray, created by Christopher Townsend, achieved this feat with a chain-gang thumper featuring allusions to faith called “Find Your Rest.” As Rob rightly pointed out, this “digital stream” hitting #1 on a Gospel chart and not the Billboard Hot 100 was less intrusive to the greater public, but nonetheless there it was: a song made by a computer atop the Gospel charts. The most spiritual of musical genres dominated by a robot. A ghost in the machine” kind of thing.
There are many aspects of this event to discuss here. I will start with the obvious – controversial backlash. Of course, those in the religious community questioned the worth of a song reflecting God derived from something purportedly not created by humans, who were purportedly created by God. And, of course, this underlines the argument that man created a Godhead to fill a void in the human spirit, and in many ways, the advent of AI is yet another human creation filling voids, whatever they may be. But irrespective of technology, faith, science or philosophy, there is something rather funny if not strange that the first AI creation (it was bound to happen eventually) rose to the top triggered by the faithful.
You make the existential pun here, I’ll let it lie. I have bigger hurdles to traverse.
Next, there is the obvious dispute on whether artificial intelligence is art, or strike that, a creative endeavor. My dear friend, Peter Blasevick, one of our honored subscribers, is vehemently against even considering this. He sees it, and I concur on several levels, as non-music-talents sitting in their basement with a computer feeding “ideas” into some form of AI (ChatGTP, etc) and coming up with “song.” These things are everywhere now, but mostly in social media or YouTube and not “official” releases. One can assume that people who bought/streamed “Find Your Rest” and the entire Solomon Ray album, Faithful Soul presumed this was a person, as all songs for more than a century of recorded music has surely been. Does this matter?
Ray, sold as a Black Gospel singer in the mode of an Al Green with a heavy influence of blues/soul – I hear “Find Your Rest” as a track not unlike early Ray Charles, Sam Cooke or Aretha Franklin (all humans) that could slip easily into a secular construct. In fact, the name Solomon Ray, one could assume, is a clever mash-up of the godfathers of rhythm and blues, Solomon Burke (a human) and Ray Charles (also, again, human). So, there is some marketing acumen here that could be considered (beyond the whole computer-generated singer and song) a hoax, a con, or at the very least an attempt to mislead consumers.
An important side-note to keep me from being eviscerated: all the stellar artists referenced above, of course, are far superior to the robot and its robot song, but taste/critique is hardly the point here.
If there was no official announcement that Ray didn’t exist, then that is the most egregious part of this. Jesus, Milli Vanilli, a couple of model/dancers who were marketed as having sung songs two other guys sang in the late 1980s, were first vilified and then ostracized, despite all parties involved being human. And who is to say that you couldn’t have someone “front” a song sung by others? Phil Spector did this shit all the time in the early 1960s. Ask Darlene Love. There were 50 versions of the Drifters. What exactly is Steely Dan? But that’s for another column. So, you know, caveat emptor.
But just in case anyone thought Solomon Ray was a one-off phenomenon, the very week after my discussion with Sheffield, “Walk My Walk,” a white guy chain-gang blues by a faux band called Breaking Rust, reached the apex of the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales chart, hitting three-million streams on Spotify. Ironically, the music streaming platform released a statement this past autumn pledging “stronger impersonation protection for artists” that “features an improved music spam filter and intensified scrutiny” of what they deem is “deceptive content.” But these policies still allow publicly anonymous creators to post AI-generated artist profiles and music, which is, at best, a paradox.
So, is this art? Is this good? Or is this garbage creation by non-musicians and non-singer-songwriters and it is very bad?
Now, I’m old, so I will land on “I’d like my artists to be human and their songs to be created by humans,” but I am also not a head-in-the-sand afraid of technology cranky white-guy grievance dipshit either. I realize there is some “creation” here, and since I have always blathered on about “art being a two-way street,” if people are reacting to these songs one way or the other, then it is art. But I am also no longer a singer-songwriter, as my friend Peter is, as so many friends of mine are, not the least of which is my niece, the 22-year-old, Sydney Leigh, who’s been a pro for a year now and has new music coming out soon that she endeavored to keep clean of autotune and other digital “fixers’ that make the untalented sound less horrible. So, I could see how those who make song, as I make words and columns and books – another craft being invaded by the robots – might be threatened and aggrieved by these faux songs.
And this brings me to the modernization of music in the twenty-first century, where a fair if not major portion of our popular music is in many ways “enhanced” and “manipulated’ by computers. Not to the extent that it is entirely fabricated, but let’s face it, has been a gateway for this ingenuity. No way this Solomon Ray character could have comfortably infiltrated the music biz before synthesizers, drum machines, autotune, digital studios, algorithms, and other aspects of technology that have taken some of the “real” and “life” from our music, those little mistakes and foibles that make recording an organic artform.
In my new book, Revolution – Prince the Band, the Era, many members of the Revolution discuss Prince’s ability to effortlessly combine modern musical instruments with a human touch, antithetical to the bands of the period that relied on synths and drum machines to dehumanize music, Kraftwerk, Gary Numan, Human League, etc. Prince, perhaps better than anyone in the 1980s into the 90s, balanced the human element with technology, so much so that he had entire albums dedicated to this marriage, starting in 1982 with 1999 all the way through The Gold Experience in 1995 and his use of disseminating new music entirely through the Internet, the first popular artist to do so.
So, with the advent of two robots and their robot songs topping the Gospel and Country charts, what could be next? It won’t be stopping, that much is certain. Consumers of music have always “liked what they liked,” and invention and technology has always threatened the music business and musicians – from sheet music to radio, and then recordings, MTV, Napster, and on and on and on. The threats from the evolution of humans and machine are real, sure, but is it “pure evil” or “a necessary evil” of that evolution? The humans will decide.
One thing I noted to Rob in our discussion, as I have to many inside the industry, and especially Sydney Leigh, is that I can foresee a backlash to this from the younger generation. I already hear from Gen Z that they want real songs with real expressions, featuring those “mistakes and foibles” and they will seek those out, as youth once found be-bop during the big band era and rock and roll and rhythm & blues when “(How Much is That) Doggie in the Window” ruled the charts, and when punk revolted against the pretensions of prog rock, or hip hop was an antidote to the blandness of 80s soul, or grunge’s challenge to the pretentiousness of AOR pop, and, you get the point.
Where AI and robot songs and robot artists fit into the inevitable, “Cut this shit out!” I don’t know. Disco had its run. And then it didn’t. But it’s no longer coming, folks. It’s here.
Recent Comments
Categories