Major edit: I made a mistake a posted something I wrote earlier. Sorry make a dumb mistake like that. This is what I meant to post this time and I deleted what I posted a little while ago.
The last time I commented on AI music I said the genie was out of the bottle but hoped for respect of artists and not watering down their works by flooding the market with creations of wish lists and the fun of ‘composing’ and mimicking and pretending that John should sing Paul or Ringo should sing Adele or whatever. I decided to shun all the AI Beatles and other artists. I could stay pure and for the first time live up to my ideals. Then I listened to some samples of the stampede to come. You know, for research.
But now I see that I can’t even avoid it or even resist it. I see coming a licensed Beatles channel with everlasting new Beatles material. We never have to move on and keep Beatles collecting a part of who we are, a wonderful hobby. Now on our way to work and home again and beyond we can listen the rest of our lives to our favorite group. We don’t need remixes and multitude of takes anymore. We’ll just have new material by the Beatles whenever we want it. Can we count on the AI to make them progress like the great progression we (those of us that were alive then) from 1963 to 1970? Wow, maybe each year that goes by they will progress like that. Imagine 10 years away. That would be mind blowing. The Beatles still progressing when they’re 110 years old. No need to explore new or a wide variety of artists. Just the Beatles. Or maybe the guys will let EC join them and they can be a fivesome. Why stop there? Elvis can join the group, too. In a way, all that maybe would be OK except for one thing. We’ve stopped exploring, taking in new voices and people with different views of the world.
To tell you the truth, I kind of stopped exploring a long time ago so I’m part of that problem. I have my Beatles and Moody Blues, Neil Yong, Van Morrison and Laurie Anderson and a few others. I couldn’t seem to take in new stuff. I’ve tried, giving some attention to SNL performers, for example. Through the years the acts did seem really good and professional and even if it wasn’t my cup of tea I generally made it through the songs w/o skipping them after a minute and realizing it was just another group or artist changing how they attack a song to sound different and skipping along to Weekend Update. Sure, they usually were competent artists, but it wasn’t like the 60’s and 70’s when groups just didn’t try to sound different, they just were different and creative. If I like a SNL musical guest I find some of their larger body of work to listen to but am generally disappointed, it sounds too derivative or worse. Some of that is on me. But, unless I’m totally wrong, I’m not seeing stellar artists.
Anyway, I’ll make my last point. Since we’re off to the races with the music AI, let’s try to not forget to live some of the time in the present and keep growing as individuals, which in part means opening ourselves to taking in new information and letting our souls enjoy new music from real people, living just part of our lives in the past.