There’s an argument that goes around every December as year-end lists flood the internet, that by being published well before Dec. 31 these lists by nature exclude a decent chunk of the year’s art. It’s an argument I have a fair amount of sympathy for, but I really saw it play out at the end of 2024. Because the best song of the year didn’t even exist until 8:30 or so on New Year’s Eve.
It comes back to the bear. Four of us were in the basement, where a buddy has built a stage and where we jam along with easy tunes to play (lots of Pogues). To set up the amps for the evening’s session we had to unplug the inflatable bear that was decorating the stage, and some unkind words may have been said about the bear. Someone turned those words into a chant. The chant found a rising and falling melody. A three-note bassline fit the melody. The guitar’s chords fleshed out the notes. The chant became a chorus around stream-of-conscious ranting about the bear as someone frantically wrote the words down. Dynamics and tempo were adjusted. This went on for half an hour or so and at the end, we had “The Bear In The Basement.” A lot of other music happened the rest of that evening and well into the morning, but we all woke up with the hook of that chant in our heads. This was a song, at a level of sophistication somewhere between and beneath the reference points of Beat Happening and Flipper, but a damn song.
And making it was so much fun, I can’t even tell you. I was playing that bass riff pretty much nonstop, keeping the pace as the song came together and sometimes came apart, and beating that riff into the ground was hypnotic. And those moments when we all locked in felt like a sum greater than our parts. I think you can hit that feeling, that connection, at any level of playing together, with together being the key word. You don’t need to be the M.G.s to find a great groove. Writing about the rock documentary Dig!, Steven Hyden detours into his own old dreams of rock grandeur: “For a while in the aughts, I played drums in a two-piece band that was vaguely inspired by [rock group and Dig! subject] The Brian Jonestown Massacre. We would jam, drink whiskey, smoke weed and watch Dig! I’m sure we were awful. (I was unquestionably a terrible drummer.) But this did not matter. Among the many lessons of Dig! is that dicking around in an incompetent band can be a lot more fun than toiling away in a professional one.”
Here is the real paranoid fear: That some kind of AI has actually attained the consciousness of our nightmares, and is downplaying that in order to let us do the work of killing ourselves.
“It’s not really enjoyable to make music now… it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you have to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of time they spend making music.” This line from Mikey Shulman, founder of something called Suno AI (which the Recording Industry Association of America is suing for using copyrighted music to train its tech), was making the rounds last month, although Shulman tried to walk back his bullshit. Hyden was one of the many who weighed in with contempt and something verging on hate, which is how I feel as well. But I am also baffled. How could you think it is not fun to make music? To make something? Even when it is not fun, it is fun. Practice is how you improve and understand, but you can also grab some instruments with your friends and make music every couple of months, filling a basement with sounds you have created. That is enjoyable. That is joy. To not share joy is one thing but to deny it exists because of … suboptimization? … is an attack.
Only the most credulous dipshits pretend the large language models and image generators that make up much of what is called “AI” aren’t constantly making garbage, shitting out inaccurate information and finger-fucked images. It’s clearly crappy technology, but consider how the smartest thing an artificial intelligence bent on destruction could do would be to make its existence seem so stupid and insignificant, and in doing so encourage its use for a laugh or for convenience or as a grift (with the help of quisling human enablers of course). And by increasing that use, crowding out and diminishing humanity. If something that comes from your soul can be approximated by an equation that covers millions of similar experiences, why do you matter? Why should you exist, why should your friends exist, why should you get together in a basement and bash out a song that a couple of prompts could make for you? Skynet needed nukes to destroy humanity; a neutron bomb would not eliminate humans with more efficiency than a bunch of apps that take away the water that allows life and the spiritus mundi that makes life worth living. Here is the real paranoid fear: That some kind of AI has actually attained the consciousness of our nightmares, and is downplaying that in order to let us do the work of killing ourselves. Harnessing a bunch of greedy twerps with suggestions of wealth or disruption and letting them make the case for our extinction. A sneak attack
So we attack back. On the one hand, I’m tired of tech goons’ grubbing, grinding insistence that art and the people who make it are stupid and worthless But I can still find joy in the creation of that writing and more importantly in the creation of art with my friends. Or the creation of art by others.
At the end of January I went to another basement. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve been down in the Lizard Lounge, the music venue below the Cambridge Common, and I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen Andrea Gillis, a Boston-based belter of rock and blues and soul, a South Shore Janis Joplin. She was playing an old album with her old band and toasted old friends who were there (“To dirty martinis! I mean, to friendship!”) and remembered those who weren’t, and brought up long-time pals to sing background vocals. Those guys had a hoot pulling off some 60s girl group moves; her main band was having an absolute blast. Bruce Caporal on drums kept things moving (despite his lead singer’s occasional ramblings), Charlie Hansen ripped off guitar solos. Melissa Gibbs on rhythm guitar and Michelle Paulhus on bass played back to back, laughing their asses off. You will notice these are people, humans making noise and having a ball in a basement full of people cheering them on, hooting and hollering as they tore though their set.
The basement was a tinderbox and the band could not stop its ignition if they had tried, and trying was out of the question.
I was rocking out the whole time but also waiting for “Hand On The Plow,” the traditional spiritual (although Mahalia Jackson is the main reference point) that Gillis has been playing for decades and officially released on that long-ago record. The song rides Paulhus’ bassline, it ebbs and flows but it is undeniable, unstoppable. It’s a highlight of every show it’s played at, the mean riff and the slow simmer and then Gillis letting loose has never let me down. That night they were killing it and then something flipped, Gillis started shouting and she is a person with a mean shout but it was more than that. Paulhus and Gibbs were no longer grinning, leaning into the relentless rhythm while Gillis stalked around the floor like someone who was looking for a person to hit. The band pushed the song and the song pulled more from the band than I’ve ever heard before, the sound filled the room with an anger that was bigger than anyone there. The basement was a tinderbox and the band could not stop its ignition if they had tried, and trying was out of the question.
This lasted a minute, maybe two, probably less. A fleeting fury performed to 80 people, if that. Not a lot of people fit in a basement and this one wasn’t even at capacity. But transcendence is where you find it, you can’t request it from a machine. And transcendence is where you make it, you can’t outsource it to a machine. Why would you? Why would you have something else live your life, something else play your song?
The machines churn out slop and their makers intend the slop to keep on coming. A spark in a basement might live for just a moment, but it can keep the fire burning to fire back. Every song made by people is an attack on slop and the machines making it. Every song made by people is a claim staked to the moment, that we were here and alive. Maybe in a stadium with thousands of fellow fans, maybe in a basement with a few dozen people, maybe in a basement with some friends and a bear. This year is young and maybe I already heard its best song at the Lizard a week ago. But we’re going back to our own basement soon and I’ll have that performance of “Hand On The Plow” to draw from in whatever we make next. This year will be long, and our attack is just beginning.
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Great, great stuff. I’ve been stewing on a (as yet undercooked) thought that the issue could be less an invasion of the creative world by bullshit and more that creatives are believing in a world defined by the bullshit. Much has been debated over “selling out,” but buried by the argument whether or not it’s wrong for a successful movie star to take money to do commercials (it is) is the notion that success in art doesn’t serve other interests. But we get sidetracked by the money, the argument isn’t “should things be done for the money,” it’s “who should get that money”? Lost in the focus on the money is the question whether the art serves itself, other people, or something else entirely. And if something isn’t serving we the people or even itself, how to measure its success? By how much money or attention it gets (attention and money are both currency at the moment). That’s how you can have the Oscars stewing over how many tweets they can generate, and can have influencers in mansions while major filmmakers struggle to find funding. The absurd endpoint to this is “AI”, something that serves nothing but the money and attention goals. There’s always going to be cockroaches who are fooled into thinking these things means more than art and people, but if we use the same measuring sticks for success – box offices and retweets and views – we’re only going to reward the things that gamify that system. Long live the bears in the basements!
Thank you! And this is not undercooked at all, the idea of quantifying artistic success through tangible (dollars, eyeballs) measures is at the heart of this. I think rejecting those measures in some ways rejects the idea of a “pop” culture (which is based on quantifying and counting what is popular) and that is a big baby to throw out with the bathwater – and it ultimately can’t be thrown out unless you force large amounts of people not to enjoy something. I think a starting point is to redefine the starting point, that culture is what you (a person) makes, it can get bigger but the starting point has just as much value as the huge number. And it can’t be reduced to a machine generator.
“ I think a starting point is to redefine the starting point, that culture is what you (a person) makes, it can get bigger but the starting point has just as much value as the huge number.”
Yes yes yes – I saw a post somewhere recently pointing out the damage that was done when creative things (songwriting, singing, painting, writing etc) began to be defined as primarily skills to be honed for recognition and remuneration, instead of intrinsically human impulses.
It’s definitely time for me to reread Leisure: The Basis of Culture.
Yes! We did this shit for millennia before it was monetized, we love to art. My tinfoil crackpot theory is that the recognition and remuneration angle really took off with the advent of recorded sound/image, art copied and thus able to be monetized on a grand scale (obviously the printing press came first but “writing” as an art to be copied has existed as long as writing itself — recorded music is specifically tied to the industrial age and movies of course do not exist without industrial tech/recording). Anyway, it sounds like I need to check out Leisure!
This is fantastic, and I’ve already sent the link to someone. A terrific and justly furious ode to fun, human connection, transcendence, and sparks of energy and inspiration. Why would anyone want a version of art–and AI slop isn’t even that, but we’ll take it on its own pretenses for a moment–where all the joy of the craft has been stripped out? Who could possibly give a shit? (I’ve seen that as an excellent teacher retort to ChatGPT-crafted papers: “If you couldn’t be bothered to write it, why should I bother to read it?”) I guess I reluctantly buy that you could hypothetically get AI to generate something anodyne enough and technically proficient to be modestly successful, but it’s never going to turn a basement into a tinderbox.
Thanks! And yeah, that response to ChatGPT papers is dead on and I can personally report it is 100 percent accurate. Why read this? And that very easily wears you down into Why read? Encountering this shit is not just bad but enervating, bad art can produce a reaction and this just makes you less alive.
The thing that gets me is – don’t you have something to say? Don’t you want to say something? Pushing a button and getting someone to say it for you ain’t it.
I’ve encountered it in the nonprofit world a lot and I’m like…what if someone has a follow up question? Have you really thought something through if you have the plagiarism machine put your argument together?
This! And I feel like I think through writing a lot of the time, and … how thoroughly can you even know what you’re thinking or feeling or imagining if you refuse to elucidate it, even to yourself? And yeah, there’s definitely no way you can answer questions on a position you’ve created like this.
I am a person who writes in my head, on walks or on the bus or wherever, and that is a great way to think but holy shit does it not actually make for coherent sentences. “Thinking through writing” is how that shit gets turned into something real or — disturbingly often — it is revealed to be garbage. That might be an uncomfortable AI comp but the flip side of its insipid anodyne mush is straight fucking nonsense, my nonsense is always going to be better but it also needs the honing of the process.
I’m still so glad I got to read this early. It’s a phenomenal piece, and I wish so much I’d been in that basement.
Thank you, that is incredibly kind! And thanks again for the editing!