Don't You Ever Miss Me.

I tried reading a book recently where in the preface the author confessed they’d written the whole novel during a three-day writing contest. Having churned out some real stinky doo doo in my NaNoWriMo days, I was impressed—until the book actually started. The author had published widely in nonfiction, but this was their first foray into fiction. I’m grateful for that honest preface, because I would’ve been very confused otherwise. I set the book down after twenty pages and returned it to the used bookstore.

Compression can be fire for forging excellent expression. Under pressure, the extraneous reveals itself immediately. There’s no time for sculpting—even your scaffolding has to pass muster. So many recording artists describe their earliest studio sessions as “first idea best idea” because they had limited time and funds. Recording music is, of course, different than writing it.

Freestyle is such respected skill in hip-hop and rap because it’s approximately eight hundred times harder than it looks. We’ve all borne witness to some chucklehead on Facebook Live or The Bachelor crash and burn over the limpest little beat, risking an aneurysm trying to rhyme something, anything with their name. Sorry Brent, get bent. Done well, freestyle is mellifluous, and exciting, and the kind of virtuoso posturing that makes an artist’s reputation.

You want to freestyle on guitar? Well you’ve got scales you can fall back on. Six strings, 12-18 notes per. Your range has some helpful bounds, the way a sonnet does. On drums? Long as you stay on beat you’ve only got so many surfaces to strike. But with words? You have the entirety of all language at your hands which is a liberating and completely paralyzing prospect. You have a lot more ways to embarrass yourself.

For her song “Wake Up” Chastity Brown didn’t write any lyrics. The story goes, her collaborator Robert Mulrennan presented her the song and the microphone, and what she felt is what she sang.

At first blush, the lyrics might not appear to share much in common with something as punchy as a freestyle—they’re decidedly vague, dreamlike, and sometimes unintelligible. No one can agree on the second verse. What impresses me most is the range of emotion Brown conveys with such simple syllables.

She begins with the question “Don’t you ever miss me, when you’re gone off to the silence?” Just before the chorus comes in, she says, “Don’t you ever miss me when your dark skies turn to gold.” or maybe it’s blue—the internet can’t agree. But I don’t hear this as a question—there’s a tiny tonal shift that turns this into an instruction. Don’t you ever miss me. There is fear, tenderness, resignation, and relief all within the first minute.

Brown’s catalog displays an expansive knowledge of music from the varied traditions of folk, country, bluegrass, and rock. But being perfectly dialed into those conventions isn’t enough to produce great music. Her ability to express nuances of feelings through the slightest changes and tremors in pitch animates everything around it. Her emotional knowledge is a vast as her musical education.

In the second verse I can’t tell if she’s singing “Curled up at night” or “cut like a knife”. She repeats the phrase, even more indistinct the second time. All we have to lean on is her delivery. Either way, she sounds wary. Even if it is “curled up at night” it’s not safety, but a reiteration of isolation. There’s a badlands sketched in the verse’s twilight. The chorus invites a contrasting comfort. “Wake up, Honey. Love come on soon.” Yet there’s still an uncertainty, a tinge of worry in her voice that sells the song for me. The flickering nightmare isn’t so easily dispelled by a lover’s assurance. It’s not a victory shout, but a promise of perseverance. The song has so many emotional facets, they aren’t all available to you on the first listen, or the second or third. To be enjoyed fully it should be heard at your every emotional pitch.

That tight control over delivery, that emotional resonance on the first take, is the testament to Brown’s skill. If the lyrics were a carefully architected ballad with an impressive rhyme scheme, it might be more recognizable as a freestyle, but I think the heart of both lies in spontaneity, that attempt to capture an instant entirely. For most of human history music was only heard in the moment of its live performance. Many have derided the supposed sterilizing effect of studio recording, and others have resisted by alleging live music listeners are delusional sentimentalists—“it’ll never sound as good as it did in the studio.” These people are both equally boring to me.

Not to make this about AI, but all the numbskulls crowing over how AI will replace art everywhere are losers with bad taste who have never made a single interesting thing. They want to quantify the human experience, eviscerate and devalue art and artists, and make money so they can colonize Mars. They are as unoriginal and uninteresting as the cartoon villains they sound like. No neolib triumphalism, but AI is pretty fundamentally incapable of creation. It can “generate” “art” in the barest of terms, but they all admit to pure imitation and plagiarism. Even if they are fed the billion pattern repetitions that make up popular music, familiarity and convention is only one-side of the coin. The monkeys and their typewriters may someday make Shakespeare, but if they have no understanding of the context and craft and soul of the thing, well then it won’t sound like anything we recognize as art. AI’s mimicry might become quite good, and the ravenous impulse of popular music to appeal to the lowest common denominator may gobble up a share of listeners, but it will not innovate. Any of the uncanny variances that seems to indicate a creative pulse are anomalies of pure coincidence. Even those become boring after the third one.

Musical movements react to their predecessors, often in extreme opposition. Punk, art-pop, nu-metal, all owe a great deal to their forbears, but also make important innovations to sound and content—specifically to the discord and distaste of masses. If AI “art” continues to try and appeal to everyone in its ouroboros cash-grab, it will make the most boring pablum imaginable.

My favorite episode of television is from Joe Pera Talks With You, where the titular character, a public school choir teacher in his 30s, hears “Baba O’Riley” for the first time. He goes nuts, calling every radio station around requesting they play it again, insisting even the pizza delivery guy come in and hear this song. He’s absolutely giddy with the excitement of discovery, despite the song being 50 years old. The other characters are quizzical, sometimes derisive. How could you not know this song? They’re already sick of it.

For that song’s iconic intro, Pete Townshend wanted to algorithmically generate music by literally injecting spiritual leader Meher Baba’s vital signs and personality into a synthesizer. Big surprise: that didn’t work out, so Townshend fucked around with an electric organ’s looping function instead. Maybe he could get closer to his original intent with the technology of today, but do you think he would make a better song? At best AI will become an instrument in the artist’s toolkit, but it won’t become the artist.

To innovate, to freestyle, to perform spontaneity one must begin with a deep well of knowledge and experience. But knowledge is not ability. Supplied every known recording of Americana, no robot could make “Wake Up”. They cannot contend with the ambiguity of true lyricism, or understand the nuance of weaving so much emotional variance in such a tight space. They can serve up only what is already known, and what we already know is already out of date.

Anyway, whatever, this is the only thing AI is good for: