I began this piece last summer while in Ireland with the intent of exploring the potential impact of Artificial Intelligence on popular music but I felt something was missing in the narrative and put it aside. A few months later, my review of Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps triggered a reader discussion around the question, “Are we condemned to listen to shitty, formulaic pop music for the rest of our lives?” As the current state of pop music bears some resemblance to the situation facing the Beatles in 1963, I decided to expand the theme to include a study of Beatlemania in the hope of finding possible solutions that might lift us out of the pop music doldrums. The delay proved to be something of a blessing because recent developments have given us a clearer picture of how AI will impact the music scene.
*****
Old Protestors Never Die
I was about to put fingers to keyboard and write the intro for a future review when my brain reminded me of a loose thread in my research. For a few minutes, I watched the battle between the side of me that wanted to get the fuck on with it and the side that told me to “do it right or not at all.” While searching for a compromise between my bipolar manifestations, it occurred to me that the answer was close at hand.
“I’ll just pop over and see Dad. He’ll know.”
Our cottage is just a hop, skip and a jump from the main house, but the stones were wet from another round of Cork rain, forcing me to tread carefully on the slippery steps. Though the door is always unlocked, I like to knock because I never know when my parents might be banging away. Dad yelled, “Come on in, Sunshine,” so I opened the door, gave him a quick hug and heard John Lennon singing “Too Much Monkey Business.”
“I didn’t know this was National Nostalgia Day.”
“And I didn’t know there was one.”
“Okay, so why are you listening to Live at the BBC?”
“Well, you can’t keep an old protestor down, so this is my way of protesting.”
I shot him a curious look and asked, “What on earth could you be protesting?”
He shot me a curious look and said, “Artificial Intelligence.”
“Ah, the new song. But McCartney said they just used AI to clean up an old cassette tape. It’s no different than how the Stones touched up Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out, just different technology.”
“Tip of the iceberg, Sunshine. You watch—in a few years we’ll be swimming in artificial Beatles albums, Cream albums, Kinks albums—you name it. Fake shit for people who don’t give a crap about real music and the effort that goes into making real music.” As my lesbian cousin in Nice had recently emailed me several examples of AI-generated porn, I empathized with his concerns.
“So that’s the why behind Live at the BBC.”
“Yeah. I wanted to remember a time when four regular guys changed the world with real guitars, real drums and real vocals. Just listen and you’ll see what I mean.”
I didn’t pay much attention to Live at the BBC back in 1994 when Dad brought it home, figuring it was just another attempt to keep the dream alive by scraping up whatever was left in the attic. Though I secretly thought I had better things to do than listen to what I thought would be a no-frills mono recording a couple of steps up from a decent bootleg, I spent the next couple of hours sitting with him and listening to all sixty-nine tracks.
And I spent most of that time smiling.
The Beatles Bible tells us that the Beatles “gave 52 known musical performances on a variety of BBC radio shows” in the timespan between 1962 and 1965, from pre-Beatlemania to its peak. The recordings from 1962 were either lost or of poor quality, so Live at the BBC only covers the period between 1963 and 1965. I was particularly impressed by the 1963 performances because they gave me a better understanding of how the Beatles overcame innumerable obstacles to reach the “toppermost of the poppermost,” eventually transforming themselves into an artistic entity that changed the trajectory of popular music while simultaneously triggering cultural change all over the world.
It was time for me to take a deeper dive into Beatlemania.
The Dam Bursts on Theatre Seats
As Beatlemania was long gone by the time I was born, I had some difficulty understanding the phenomenon. Their music was a constant presence in our house, and I learned most of their songs on the piano and acoustic guitar by the time I was sixteen, playing and singing Beatle tunes along with my Irish-side relatives at our frequent get-togethers. But while they thrilled me with their melodies, harmonies, imaginative chording, energy and willingness to keep pushing the boundaries (up to and including Magical Mystery Tour anyway), I never considered them particularly sexy.
So when I launched my exploration of Beatlemania and read that the post-concert clean-up crews not only had to sweep the floors but disinfect the seats due to excitement pees, orgasmic fluids and soaked underwear left behind by young ladies, I found myself completely baffled. I understood why teenage guys put guitars on their birthday and Christmas lists once they saw how the girls went gaga over the Beatles because teenage guys are always hunting for paths to the pussy. Still, the “girl reaction” seemed excessive.
Then it hit me: it was 1963. The Sexual Revolution hadn’t happened yet. While I grew up in an era when the moral dilemma was whether to fuck or not to fuck on the first date, the moral dilemma for a teenage girl in 1963 was whether or not to fuck before marriage—and most abstained out of fear that they would ruin their lives.
At this point, my knowledge of baseball history came into play. I remembered that 1963 was the year Joe Pepitone lost track of a ball thrown by Clete Boyer in the glare of the white shirts worn by the largely male spectators at Dodger Stadium, an unhappy accident that contributed to the Yankees losing the World Series. Men of that era were expected to wear white shirts and ties for special occasions, and the uniform would not have been complete without closely cropped haircuts.
My bafflement about the orgasmic reaction to the Beatles was a classic case of failing to include the social milieu in my calculations. Western societies of the era were conformist and sexually repressed. Sex was not discussed in polite company. Lucy and Ricky and Rob and Laura slept in separate beds. Parents and teachers naïvely believed that if the old rules worked for them, it would work for the young ‘uns. With millions of Baby Boomers entering puberty in the late 50s and early 60s the old ways didn’t stand a chance.
Western culture was like a forest in the middle of a drought. All it needed was a spark to ignite the fire.
The Outsiders Conquer the Homeland
In the years immediately preceding the rise of the Beatles, rock ‘n’ roll had gone soft. The top-tier rockers who dominated the mid-50s all vanished from the scene. Little Richard took up preaching, Elvis went into the army, Buddy Holly died in a plane crash, Chuck Berry had legal troubles and Gene Vincent fled to England to avoid the IRS. When I reviewed the Billboard Hot 100 charts for the years 1960-1963, it seemed that rock ‘n’ roll had gone the way of the Edsel and only a very few of the meager number of charting rock songs made use of the guitar. Upon closer examination, however, there were a few signs that guitar-based rock was not completely comatose in the land of its birth. The Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ USA” was the best-selling single of 1963 and the proto-garage-rock stylings of the Kingsmen’s nasty version of “Louie, Louie” came out of nowhere to land in the top 10 later in the year.
While America slept, Beatlemania swept the U.K. in ’63. It is impossible to understate the importance of one fundamental truth about Beatlemania: It was a grass-roots movement sparked by young music fans in defiance of the so-called experts in the music business.
The obstacles the Beatles faced in their homeland are well-documented examples of paradigm paralysis. “Guitar groups are on the way out, Mr. Epstein,” said the geniuses at Decca. “A band from Liverpool? You’ve got to be kidding.” Fortunately, George Martin of Parlophone took an interest in the band and helped them shape their first #1 hit, “Please Please Me.”
The success of that record earned them a spot on Helen Shapiro’s UK tour . . . at the very bottom of the bill, in sixth place. Journalist Gordon Sampson followed the tour and noted a highly unusual development: “Great reception went to the colourfully dressed Beatles, who almost stole the show, for the audience repeatedly called for them while other artists were performing!” A month later, while supporting popular American acts Tommy Roe and Chris Montez on another UK tour, “the crowds repeatedly screamed for the Beatles, and the American stars were less popular than a homegrown act for the first time.” After “From Me to You” was released and shot straight to the top in May, the Beatles hit the road in support of Roy Orbison where “the crowd’s loud and constant clamoring for the Beatles led the promoters to change gears and make the Beatles the headliners.” Meanwhile, anticipation for the next single rose to a fever pitch, with thousands of fans placing orders before they knew the song’s title and before the song was even recorded. “She Loves You” wound up selling three-quarters of a million copies in four weeks and Beatlemania entered the English lexicon.
The Beatles were the perfect antidote for a culture stuck in reverse. Their haircuts defined them as non-conformist. They were blessed with a keen sense of absurdist humor thanks to the influence of The Goon Show. They came from the middle and lower classes and had no connection whatsoever to the Establishment. The people who guided them to success were stunningly unqualified: Brian Epstein had no experience managing artists until he signed the Beatles; George Martin worked in a subsidiary of EMI known primarily for comedy, novelty and classical records. Those apparent negatives were positives in disguise. Paradigm shifts always originate with outsiders who have no loyalty to established norms and conventions.
How to Kickstart a Worldwide Revolution Without Internet Access
Meanwhile, the movers and shakers in the lost colony wanted nothing to do with the Beatles. Capitol refused to release their maiden album and any of their singles based on the “common wisdom” that British artists couldn’t make it in the USA.
The person who launched the effort to yank the suits at Capitol out of their obliviousness was a 15-year-old girl living in suburban Washington D.C. by the name of Marsha Albert. Marsha had seen a piece about the Beatles on the December 10, 1963 edition of the CBS Evening News and was knocked out by their music and their energy. “They had a scene where they played a clip of ‘She Loves You’ and I thought that was a great song.” She wrote a letter to local DJ Carroll James of station WWDC and asked him to play the record. James didn’t have it but he had also seen the CBS piece and was suitably impressed. He immediately made arrangements with a flight attendant who worked the DC-London route to grab a copy of “She Loves You” on her next flight but for reasons unknown, she brought back their latest release instead. In an admirable display of gratitude and graciousness, James brought Marsha into the studio to introduce the record to the listening audience: “Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time on the air in the United States, here are the Beatles singing ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.'”
And the WWDC switchboard lit up like a hundred Christmases.
James sent tapes of the song to DJs in Chicago and St. Louis and their switchboards lit up, too. As the word spread, people all over the country started calling record stores demanding a single they didn’t have in stock. By this time, Capitol was starting to wake up and had agreed to release the single in connection with the upcoming appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show but pressure from fans and DJs forced them to move up the release date by five weeks. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” quickly climbed the ladder to #1.
Capitol wasn’t alone in the clueless department. The Beatles’ first exposure on American television occurred on November 18, 1963, via the Huntley-Brinkley Report. Here’s the audio recording featuring Edwin Newman, but if you don’t have time to listen to the whole report, this quote from Newman sums up the cynical attitude towards this new beat group: “One reason for the Beatles’ popularity may be that it’s almost impossible to hear them.”
The adults didn’t get it, but the Baby Boomers sure did. The Ed Sullivan Show performances became known as a “watershed cultural event” and Beatlemania became a reality in the USA, quickly spreading to all corners of the world.
Why Live at the BBC Is an Artifact of Significant Value for Today’s World
Live at the BBC consists of 56 songs and 13 spoken word tracks of Beatles-chatter; about two-thirds of the songs are covers. Since the Lennon-McCartney (or McCartney-Lennon) songwriting partnership was just beginning to ramp up in 1963, only three of the twenty-six tracks from that year are original compositions. Though I dismissed Rolling Stone’s rating of Please Please Me as one of the greatest albums of all time due to the overdependence on cover songs, I was shocked—shocked!—that I found the 1963 covers on Live at the BBC unusually exciting and thoroughly enjoyable listening experiences.
Because many of their early gigs involved residences in Hamburg and the Cavern Club, the Beatles had to keep coming up with new material to keep their fanbase interested. As Lennon and McCartney still had a long way to go to become prolific songwriters, covers were their only option. When I went through the list of all the cover songs from 1963 I was struck by the sheer diversity of the material. Though most of the songs fall into the categories of rock ‘n’ roll and R&B, there are ballads, show tunes, novelty songs, proto-soul songs and country hits written by a diverse group of accomplished songwriters: Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Arthur Crudup, Burt Bacharach/Mack David, Leiber-Stoller, Goffin-King, Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, Smokey Robinson, Ray Charles and Mikis Theodorakis. In addition to adding material to their shows, learning those covers served as a solid education in pop songwriting—and the effort it took to figure out chords and guitar solos without access to chord charts and tabs helped to enrich their intuitive approach to music without having to bother with the dreary details of music theory.
Though the recording quality of those songs is best described as “salvageable,” the unbridled energy of the Beatles comes through loud and clear. You can hear it in John’s give-it-everything-you’ve-got vocals, in the punch and tightness of Ringo’s drums, in George’s extended solo on “Too Much Monkey Business” when he abandons the classic Chuck Berry riffs for an attack filled with close-to-blue-note dissonance—and yes, you can hear it in McCartney’s vocals on both the hot stuff (“Long Tall Sally”) and sweet stuff (“The Honeymoon Song”). On the earliest performances, they make extensive use of stop-time to amp up the excitement and never miss a beat. I love the playfulness they display in many of the cover songs, particularly in their remake of the Coasters’ “Young Blood” where George delivers an appropriately sassy vocal while the others play the role of the Three Stooges. At one point during the 1963 performances, I looked at my dad and said, “GodDAMN! It sounds like they’re having the time of their lives!” The sheer joy expressed in their music was the perfect remedy for a society stricken with a bad case of dull conformity and would become a key factor in their conquest of the USA, where people were still recovering from the shock of the JFK assassination.
After reflecting on the experience, I concluded that the Beatles were essentially engaged in making a dream come true. No, I’m not talking about reaching the “toppermost of the poppermost” (though they certainly realized that vision), but the dream expressed in the D.H. Lawrence poem “A Sane Revolution.”
They were making “a revolution for fun.”
And baby, we could use a revolution for fun right fucking now.
A Different Form of Mania
We are now in the midst of a new phase of pop star mania: Swiftmania. You may have read comparisons of the two phenomena on the internet, most of which involve the old farts claiming that no one will ever come close to creating the excitement of Beatlemania and Swifties vehemently defending their heroine’s accomplishments.
Trying to compare Beatlemania and Swiftmania is the ultimate in silliness. The only thing the two have in common is their grass-roots origins. The manias emerged in completely different contexts involving different generations who lived through completely different times. The one quality shared by the Beatles and Taylor Swift is an exceptionally strong determination to make it to the top and stay there.
The key difference between the two is this: Taylor Swift is not a threat to anyone except Donald Trump, the MAGA crowd and perhaps Ye. The title of her Netflix documentary says it all: “Miss Americana.” Her quarrels with the Establishment involved business-related issues regarding ownership of her master recordings (which led her to re-record four of her albums) and the questionable practices employed by the big music streaming services that screw artists out of their due. Despite her genre creep from country to pop, she isn’t particularly innovative in the musical sense; her songs consist mainly of standard pop chords with singalong-friendly melodies. Taylor Swift earned a devoted following by creating a strong connection with her fans through well-crafted, emotionally intelligent lyrics about real-world experiences that most people can relate to. Despite her extraordinary success, she remains grounded in family values and comes across as an accessible, authentic human being. Most Swifties don’t think of her as a megastar; they think of her as a close friend. Swiftmania is as much a grass-roots phenomenon as was Beatlemania; the difference is that Swiftmania poses no discernible threat to the social or musical status quo.
By contrast, the Beatles were perceived as a threat to the Establishment from the get-go because of their long hair and impact on teenage girls. Though they eventually won over most of those who hoped they were a fad that would eventually go the way of the Twist, they tired of the Fab Four act and expanded their musical horizons while cementing their anti-Establishment orientation through controversy (“More popular than Jesus”), recreational drug use, non-Christian explorations of spirituality and aligning themselves with “hippie values” in fashion and politics. Their philosophy regarding music was the polar opposite of Taylor Swift’s give-the-people-what-they-want orientation, as explained by McCartney in a May 1967 interview with Hit Parader:
We could have stopped thinking up new things and brought out ‘Son Of Please Please Me’ or ‘The Son Of Love Me Do,’ but that was not on. We work on one song, and record it, and then get tired of it. So we think up something very different. The strength of any act is doing something that you wouldn’t associate with them.”
Here’s the thing: both manias addressed the needs of their respective eras. In the early 60s, the Beatles rescued the populace from wearisome conformity and moribund thinking and along with Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Ray Davies and others, elevated pop music to an art form. In our unstable era, where political polarization and misinformation intensify our sense of isolation, Taylor Swift fulfills our yearning for authenticity and emotional connection. Taylor’s work may be classified as mainstream pop and “Establishment Approved,” but encouraging people to get in touch with their emotions and try to live authentic lives might eventually be recognized as revelatory and revolutionary. On the flip side, it’s unlikely that Taylor Swift will change the trajectory of popular music like the Beatles did.
I chose not to review any Taylor Swift albums for the same reason I haven’t reviewed Beyoncé: their journeys are incomplete. For the record, I think very highly of Taylor’s two “pandemic albums” Folklore and Evermore and Beyoncé’s Renaissance.
Who Needs Artificial Intelligence When You Have a Geoff Emerick?
As for my father’s protest . . .
It’s well-documented that the Beatles used all kinds of studio tricks to pull off Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour. What’s notable about those tricks is that they involved good old-fashioned human ingenuity. Here’s just one example from a Forbes article entitled “Sgt. Pepper’s Was a Perfect Storm of Musical and Recording Creativity”:
Ringo’s drums on “A Day in the Life” were called the best drum sounds ever recorded when Sgt. Pepper’s was released. This must have pleased the Beatles because Lennon and McCartney wanted the drums to be a prominent feature of the song. To get this new sound, Geoff Emerick recorded the drums in ways that had not been tried before. He had Ringo tune his toms very low by loosening the skins on the drum heads. Emerick then removed the skins from the bottom of the toms, wrapped a mic in a tea cloth, put it in a glass jug, and placed it on the floor under the drums. The result was the huge, tympani-like drum sounds you hear on the verses in “A Day in the Life”.
Could AI have pulled off the same thing without all the hassle? Perhaps . . . but the experience would not have been as satisfying as a victory earned through human ingenuity. If the guys on Apollo 13 had been rescued by AI, the public would have yawned and turned the channel to Marcus Welby M.D. Gene Kranz would be remembered as the guy in the white vest who ordered some flunky to push a button. Tom Hanks never would have agreed to star in such a boring flick.
My experience with puberty coincided with the digital revolution, the rise of the internet and the dot.com boom. Initially I thought all this new technology was the coolest thing ever but as the years progressed I became a confirmed techno-skeptic. Part of it involved the corporatization of the internet and its ugly turn towards providing forums for nut jobs; another irritant came in the form of an endless stream of software updates due to bugs that should have been caught before release; and the clincher was the dawning awareness that all this technology could be used for evil purposes, like coordinating terrorist attacks or making war more efficient.
The track record of the human race when it comes to the implementation of new technology is not a pretty picture. Nearly every improvement launched by the human race has created unintended consequences that have negatively impacted lives. The advent of train travel ruined many a countryside and condemned towns excluded from the routes to backwater status. Cars gave people unimaginable mobility; cars also gave us air pollution and global warming. In the early days of space travel, some believed that the exploration of space would bring humankind together; now we have nations and corporations competing for their share of the lunar spoils. The internet gave us instant access to tons of valuable information but forced us to go through security hoops to protect our identities and bank accounts from bad guys.
I’ve heard AI could do wonderful things like finding a cure for cancer, saving the bees, addressing climate change, eliminating world hunger, reducing poverty and providing new tools for the disabled. AI could also lead to massive job losses, a new arms race involving lethal autonomous weapons, more sophisticated versions of global election interference and increased threats to personal privacy. I am also concerned that the widespread implementation of artificial intelligence will make us human beings lazier, more stupid and less innovative than we already are. Why bother to think when AI can do our thinking for us?
You can argue that AI is also a product of human ingenuity but you can’t ignore its significant risks. No one on the planet suffered when Geoff Emerick imprisoned a microphone in a tea towel and stuck it in a jug.
There are three problems with AI beyond the hypothesized threats. The first is the same problem we have with classic digital technology: relatively few people understand how it works. Computers, smartphones and software aren’t garden hoses or hammers. We put an awful lot of trust in something we barely understand.
Problem two is that AI is yet another change over which the average person has no control or input. Most change is forced upon us whether we like it or not. That sucks.
This leads us to problem number three. Does anyone on earth truly believe that our business and political leaders will do the right thing and apply wisdom coupled with due restraint when it comes to the implementation of artificial intelligence? I think Jarvis Cocker has already answered that question:
Bluntly put, in the fewest of words
Cunts are still running the world
Cunts are still running the world
As for AI and its application in music, it couldn’t have come at a worse time. The vast majority of the music we hear today is controlled by four large media companies and the major streaming services, so it should come as no surprise that those entities have embraced AI as a surefire way to improve their bottom lines. In the recently published article “What AI in Music Can-and Can’t-Do” on Vox, Adam Clair explained how AI is used as a studio tool and music creator . . . and its predictable impact on the music scene:
Any music AI generator is only as good as the data it’s trained on. These systems require a vast amount of data, and a model trained on a biased data set will reproduce those biases in its output. Whose voices are included in that huge crate of music, and whose are left out? Today’s AI models are liable to exclude vast swaths of music, especially from musical traditions that predate recording technology and come from non-Western origins. As currently designed, they are more likely to produce stereotypical sounds within a genre or style than they are to produce anything peculiar, let alone innovative or interesting. Generative AI systems have a bias toward mediocrity, but transcendent music is found on the margins . . .
While AI may not (and may never) produce music better than a human can, it can currently make acceptable music at far greater speed and scale — and “acceptable” is often the only bar a track has to clear.
Whether you enjoy or even notice it, these types of music have historically been made by people. But automated AI music generation may cost those musicians their jobs — and many of them use that income to support their more creatively fulfilling but less financially viable pursuits. You might never see an AI musician take the stage, but you’re still likely to see fewer human musicians as a result of this technology.
More than 100,000 new tracks are uploaded to streaming services every single day. Digital streaming platforms have a major incentive to diminish the proportion of human-generated royalty tracks their users play. Spotify alone paid out $9 billion in royalties last year, the majority of its $14 billion revenue. In the past, the world’s largest music streaming company has increased the availability and prominence of royalty-free tracks and may still be doing so. AI music generators are an easy way to create royalty-free music that can edge real, royalty-earning artists off popular playlists, redistributing that per-stream income from artists to the platform itself.
“[A future AI-generated hit] is not going to be something that people are going to come back to and study, the way that they continue to do with the great releases of the record era,” musician Jaime Brooks said. Brooks has released records under her own name and with bands Elite Gymnastics and Default Genders, and she blogs about the music industry in her newsletter The Seat of Loss. “But it still generates engagement, and so a world where everything that’s on the top Spotify chart is something that isn’t built to last, that is just sort of meant to entertain you that day and never be thought of, it would be just fine for all these companies. They don’t need it to be art for it to make them money.”
Brooks sees this as a regressive phenomenon, emphasizing to-the-minute topicality over timeless depth, charts topped by audio memes and novelty singles aimed at the lowest-browed listeners, just as shallow songs like “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”—written by two people who had never attended a baseball game—once dominated the airwaves.
“That’s the direction these services are going to push music,” Brooks said.“It’s not going to be about creativity at all. Between the way that these models work and the algorithmic feeds, it’s all just a big repository of the past. It’s not going to push the sound of recordings forward. It is going to accelerate the journey of recordings from the center of American pop culture to the dustbin.”
I started getting nervous about the future of music when auto-tune entered the scene in the late ’90s. Most pop music today involves that form of cheating; according to an article in Frieze, auto-tune “is used on roughly 90 percent of all pop songs.” Bluntly put in the fewest of words, my reaction was “Hey, if you can’t fucking sing, get your ass off the stage.” The technology migrated from the studio to live performances and now “new-and-improved” AI-generated auto-tone is available. Yes, I know that some artists use the tool to create futuristic sounds or add emotional impact, but all that tells me is most of them are unable to create emotional impact through the unfiltered human voice. Even though he’s lucky when he hits half the notes in his vocals, I’ll take Lou Reed over any auto-tuned singer in a heartbeat because I’d rather hear the sound of a flawed human being than a fucking android. I’m not totally opposed to voice manipulation; when employed by musicians and producers who know their stuff (Imogen Heap, Radiohead, John Lennon on “Tomorrow Never Knows”) it can be quite effective. But for most present-day musicians, it’s nothing more than a technological crutch.
The two qualities of music I admire most are craftsmanship and ingenuity. The making of Sgt. Pepper involved several leaps of ingenuity but the Beatles never would have had the opportunity to make that album had they not paid their dues and developed their musical skills by playing sets ranging from four to eight hours night after night in Hamburg. If he hadn’t practiced 11 hours a day, Charlie Parker never would have realized that the twelve semitones of the chromatic scale can link melodically to any key, opening the way to modern jazz. Making great music involves a contrary balance of discipline and imagination, a balance frequently enhanced through collaboration with other human beings. I love those “wow” moments in a song or extended composition when the various parts come together to create a magical experience that sends tingles up and down my spine. I chose to review “the great releases of the record era” because that is where the magic most often resides.
Great music is timeless art. AI is likely to be employed in the creation of low-grade music for consumers who don’t want to be bothered with artistry but want something familiar to get them through their gym routine or provide background music for parties. Some might argue that the reason we haven’t experienced the second coming of the Beatles is that today’s musicians lack the talent and imagination to burst through the muck. As I learned when reviewing contemporary music, there are talented indie musicians out there making great music but they don’t stand a chance of breaking through the wall of label-enforced conformity. As Michael Crossley of the band French Letters observed, “indie” translates into “completely independent of distribution, promotion and attention.”
In the end, I have to agree with my father and Jamie Brooks—the outlook for popular music is pretty grim. The good news is that technology has given us access to an extensive library of recorded music dating back to Thomas Edison, so if you’re not thrilled by contemporary music, there is plenty of music to explore in the past. My six hundred or so reviews covered only a fraction of the great music of yesteryear. Let’s face it: most of today’s music of today is ephemeral and easily forgettable—“new-and-not-improved.” If you want to hear great music, you are more likely to find it by traveling backward in time. Who cares if it’s not hip or trendy? Great music is timeless!
Despite the daunting obstacles, I haven’t given up on the possibility of a paradigm shift that restores craftsmanship and human ingenuity to music. As it was when the Beatles were trying to catch a break, the music establishment of our time has little interest in musicians who refuse to cohere to the template. That orientation will eventually work against them because sooner or later listeners will get bored with the status quo and want something different. The restlessness felt by young people in the late 50s and early 60s as they struggled with conformist norms is mirrored in the restless anxiety and sheer exhaustion we all feel today in response to a constant flood of unreliable information, problems that never seem to go away and leaders who encourage us to hate one another. The environment is ripe for a breakthrough led by talented musicians with the ability to imbue music with meaning and radiate joy.
I don’t know when the seismic shift might occur, where it may originate, or what form it may take, but I do know that the musicians leading the way will not be Beatle clones but will possess the Beatles’ determination to stand up to the nay-sayers and refuse to allow temporary setbacks to get them down. They will achieve the breakthrough by embracing and embodying the beliefs expressed in a popular song recorded over a half-century ago:
There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done
Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung
Nothing you can say, but you can learn how to play the game
It’s easyNothing you can make that can’t be made
No one you can save that can’t be saved
Nothing you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time
It’s easyAll you need is love . . .
I love you all and wish you all the love the world can provide. Thank you for making my journey so immensely enjoyable!
Cheers!