Ghostwriters in the Sky

This is just going to move faster and faster and faster until anything anyone writes or says about AI is going to be outdated by the time they finish the sentence and take their next breath, isn’t it?

When I last wrote about the spreading wildfire of artificially intelligent music production, five days ago, there was only one “this is the final straw” fake DRAKE song going around. Now there are two. Everything has doubled, people! And when I wrote in this space 13 days ago, vis-à-vis vocal fakes, that “all we have to do is add verified checkmarks to authentic songs going forward and then we’ll be all good, right?,” I was KIDDING. Now it’s being floated as an actual solution for the music industry by one of the blue-checkiest media/tech influencers out there. Help.

“The solution isn’t to try to eliminate [fake] content, but rather to find ways to verify that which is still authentic,” Stratechery’s BEN THOMPSON writes, and he suggests that will be one of the central components of music streaming companies' business models in the coming computer age and one of the most important services they'll offer to the music business. I share his essay not because I agree with all of it—Thompson’s ideas on what constitutes the “value” of music are weird and frightening, and the current trend in social media, for anyone who hasn’t been paying attention, is away from verification and authentication. I share it because I think Thompson has a good handle on where media and tech are, or at least want to be, headed, and because people in those businesses, and this one, read him. And because I can, in fact, imagine, “a future where Drake licenses his voice, and gets royalties or the rights to songs from anyone who uses it.” But I'm not looking forward to that future, and I’m all for resisting it. I want a future where artists freely use AI (as much or as little as they choose), not a future where AI freely uses artists.

Or to put it another way: Wired: The Future (Artists' Version). Tired: The Future (Artificialists' Version).

Desert Storm

Pitchfork had my favorite roundups on all that was good (or not) about COACHELLA weekend one. ALLISON HUSSEY on BLACKPINK: “Watching Jennie, Jisso, Lisa, and Rosé power through hits like ‘Whistle,’ ‘Lovesick Girls,’ ‘Kill This Love,’ and ‘Boombayah,’ as well as an interlude of solo tracks, I couldn’t help but think about infrastructure rather than music.” ANNA GACA on Phoebe, Julien and Lucy: “BOYGENIUS walked out to ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ and finished with surely one of very few guitar solos ever to take place in a cuddle puddle on stage.” Here’s the site’s complete Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3 lookbacks.

And here’s the LA Times’ 13 best things we saw... Vulture’s Highs, Lows, and Woahs... The New York Times on two of the weekend’s most hyped and mysterious sets... Coachella’s local newspaper, the Desert Sun, on the rock counterprogramming inside the “venue within a festival” that was the Sonora Tent... And sound engineer DAVE RAT on the sound system design that makes Coachella and other modern festivals possible.

Etc Etc Etc

The most heartwarming story about delivering a violin across the country you’ll ever read... SOUNDGARDEN and VICKY CORNELL settle out of court, and a new Soundgarden album will follow... HALSEY and CAPITOL break up, and a fake viral moment on TIKTOK will not follow... Layoffs at UTOPIA MUSIC... PHANTOM OF THE OPERA closes after 35 years on Broadway... SPOTIFY is shutting down HEARDLE... Why do birds (actually) sing?... Programming note: MusicREDEF is taking a day off. We’ll be back in your inbox Thursday morning.

Rest in Peace

The modernist piano giant AHMAD JAMAL released his first recordings in the early 1950s and his last in the late 2010s, and spent the better part of the decades in between searching for ever more inventive, thrilling and moving ways not to play. “Ahmad Jamal sat down at the piano, and just floated over the beat,” critic Ted Gioia wrote in one of the most affecting remembrances of the influential jazz master who died Sunday, at 92. “Sometimes he played almost nothing. Jazz fans had never heard this way of improvising before.” Jamal was one of jazz’s great virtuosos of space—"as eloquent with dramatic silences and suspended phrases,” Richard Brody wrote in the New Yorker, “as in torrential outpourings of sound.” He was popular—unusually so for an improvisational jazz musician—widely misunderstood by many of his contemporaries, and deeply influential on the more open-minded among them, none more so than Miles Davis, who famously said, “All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal.” More than a few rappers fell under fell under his sway, too... RIP also: MARK SHEEHAN, guitarist for Irish rock band the Script.