A.I. isn't for us
This info is from September, but it only just reached Celebitchy: A.I.-generated R&B vocalist Xania Monet has charted five times on Billboard, mostly thanks to ‘digital song sales’ (a milestone that can easily be gamed, supposing you have the funds—just sayin’). In an interview with CNN’s Victor Blackwell, Xania’s rep Romel Murphy explains that the human behind Xania, Telisha Nikki Jones, has “been a poet for years” and is singing her lyrics directly into Suno. (Create stunning original music for free in seconds, Suno’s website reads.) Her voice is tuned and augmented—or replaced completely—using plugins.
“Society has a norm for singers,” Murphy goes on to tell CNN. “Your voice has to be a certain type, your look has to be a certain type.”
This made me feel ill. I have empathy for Telisha (supposing she is a real person and not just Romel’s invention, functioning as another layer of security between himself and the rest of the world). I know I gave up acting because of my weight gain; people give up on their dreams all the time because they don't ‘look the part’. Sure! Showing up as yourself is the hardest, most radical thing!
I became friendly acquaintances with Laura Albert in 2006 after writing a lengthy Internet comment (lol) defending JT LeRoy—a defense I’m not sure I’d type out twice—and I also went to bat for Nicki Minaj soon after she was caught shaving two whole years off her age. (Onika Maraj plays the role of Nicki Minaj, I’d argued at the time.) Oh, well. Short-sighted as I may’ve been, this is the central theme behind Jem, Hannah Montana, Batman: we use alter egos, avatars, in order to feel bulletproof. Isn’t that armor necessary when you are commodifying yourself? To shield the authentic, mushy core from being consumed entirely?
Consider even just the proliferation of VTubing: Individuals are acutely aware that if they have a single perceptible flaw, they’ll be mobbed over it, deplatformed over it, especially if they are already femme-presenting in some ephemeral way. It feels like the A.I. apocalypse will be driven by human insecurity—the insecurity over not being the perfect commodity, the perfect product.
This constant striving for perfection feels unhinged. Not too long ago, a music-and-songwriting student—who is already primed to ‘make it’ because he’s awfully well-connected—was telling me he feels anxious and ill-equipped because he doesn't have a ‘good’ singing voice. I laughed. I said that people don’t trust a good singing voice, that a smooth, trained voice sounds corny and inauthentic.
It’s not so different from the inherently cheesy veneer of over-manufactured pop music, I added. It’s got to have a flaw to be trustworthy, credible. Even gen Z hipsters collect music on vinyl because the hisses and pops, crackling between the needle and the groove, impart an organic sense of warmth, like a campfire. We should all be making garage recordings and singing off-key.
I think the creepiest aspect of the Xania Monet story is, this is a media landscape already infected by autotune; T-Pain had to go on NPR’s Tiny Desk, then season one of The Masked Singer, just to prove to audiences he has real pipes. We already can’t tell genuine from fake. If other artists and musicians are already using A.I., there’s no guarantee we’d be able to tell. (“I fell for the bunnies on the trampoline,” I lamented to a Lyft driver recently. He made fun of me. “I think I just wanted them to be real,” I sighed.)
Murphy promises that, in time, Telisha Jones will reveal herself. In other words, “Xania” is effectively Sia Furler’s wig.
Who is this for? People who actually care about music tend to purchase through alternative platforms like Bandcamp, whereas Billboard uses metrics like iTunes and Amazon sales, or radio airtime. (Radio airtime? When practically every station is owned by iHeartMedia? What does airtime prove?) As it is now, a huge number of mainstream recording artists are manufactured by a label and then ‘gamed’ into visibility, leveraging bot activity and algorithms; it’s basically the “dead Internet theory” but for media, including pop music. How is a regular human musician supposed to compete? She isn’t.
The product isn’t intended for human consumption. The product, ultimately, is the metrics: to keep making line graphs for shareholder meetings, to keep moving money around. Uber, for one, has never turned a profit—the company just goes through round after round of V.C. funding, which feels like it should be a form of fraud—and I imagine this is how most ‘ghost industries’ work. Continually reinvesting in a dead-end product maintains the illusion of value. What the difference is between this and regular money laundering, I’m not sure.
I realize any alarmist writing about A.I. is moot; I could just type the phrase “ecological disaster” over and over, and be done. “But this is a different kind of ecological collapse,” I told my best friend, “and it’s the music industry.” (“Good!” she replied.)
We hadn’t been talking about A.I. or pop culture at all. Instead, my friend had been pulling up a photo of the UPS cargo plane that had crashed shortly after takeoff. She held up her phone; it was a photograph of just flames. I squinted and leaned closer. Yep, it sure was a picture of flames.
I asked if she’d heard about all the other flight delays. “The infrastructure is coming apart,” I muttered, “just like Steve Bannon always wanted. ‘Burn it all down.’” We looked at each other uneasily. Then I admitted I’d been trying to say something of substance about Xania Monet all day.
This isn’t the sort of thing I enjoy writing about! Unfortunately for me, I’m stuck in The Séance of Blake Manor. Stuck? How can you be stuck? Thanks; I amaze even myself.
Early on I ‘lost’ the game because I spent way too much time loafing around looking at everything—as I, an old-school adventure gamer, am liable to do. Really, I was FAFO’ing. Fine. I started the game over, this time making sure to look at absolutely nothing unless it were definitely important to look at. (Looking at stuff eats up time on the game’s clock, by the way.) Currently I have a handful of guests I am supposed to “confront” or otherwise “act upon,” but they’re all seemingly attending the same event in the Drawing Room and will therefore be indisposed for the next hour. I want to use my time wisely, but no one is around to “act upon.” So I’m stuck! Or rather, I’m at a loss as to what to do next—a sort of internal impasse. I will not be consulting a walkthrough.