The Doomsday Clock has advanced another second towards midnight. If we are to believe all the warnings it must be about 4.15am by this stage. But it wasn’t a scurrilous world leader or overly ambitious despot this time. No, no such bloody luck.
It was Xania Monet, the, em, well known R&B singer, whose song How Was I Supposed to Know breached the Billboard R&B radio charts at number 30. Xania had previously featured in charts like R&B Digital Sales, Hot Gospel Songs and Emerging Artists. But this is big. This is significant.
The issue with Xania is that she doesn’t exist. She is 100% AI-generated. She is the first AI artist to feature in a radio play chart. This is a red-letter day. But there is no family celebration. Mr and Mrs Monet are either unmoved or not plugged in. With AI you even save on champagne.
Her manager, Romel Murphy, is over the moon. “Her song is resonating with the masses,” he says, and her 146,000 followers on Instagram agree. On Apple music she is described as a “highly expressive, church-bred, down-to-earth vocalist in the vein of Keyshia Cole, K. Michelle, and Muni Long”.
They don’t mention Beyoncé or any of Beyoncé’s songs. They don’t need to but I suspect someone will eventually. Someone like Beyoncé, or Beyoncé’s manager, or Beyoncé’s legal team.
And it is only beginning. Billboard reckons that in the past few months there have been at least six AI generated or AI assisted artists that have debuted on various Billboard rankings. They say it is getting harder to say what is AI assisted and what isn’t but it extents to all genres: Pop, Rock, Gospel, Country, you name it.
There have also been cases of songs being uploaded to the profiles of dead musicians. The estate of country singer, Blaze Foley (singer of the hit Clay Pigeons and who died in 1989) noticed recently that a new song, a cover called Together, had been added to his works. There was even art work, but none of it was him.
The point of such an exercise is to place a song into his profile so that it will then make its way onto Blaze Foley connected play lists where it will earn streams and revenue from people who think they are listening to that artist. Spotify should change its name to Devious.
It’s ironic that in a week of such AI-generated shenanigans Lily Allen should release West End Girls, while David Byrne submits to a Louis Theroux interview. Two actual artists exploring and discussing different aspects of the human condition, in art and in music.
Allen has made a modern day Blood on the Tracks. She reveals, with excruciating honestly the details of her marriage breakdown. There is fear and hurt and pain and anger and yet also melody and killer hooks. And she did it all in 16 days. Byrne laments how his lack of social skills made life impossible for his friends in Talking Heads.
Real people, talking, singing, writing about real life. Making mistakes, apologising, trying to move on. It why I listen to music. It’s why I go to the well. It is why music is my North star.
There is an actual magician behind the Xania curtain: Telisha Nikki Jones, a “poet” from Mississippi. She writes the lyrics that Monet is seen performing. Suno, the generative AI music creation program does everything else.
I visited her Facebook. It looked more like the webpage of a graphic artist than a poet. Someone said they were “crying in the bathroom” listening to the music. I can only presume that these are the actual songwriters, crying because Suno is creating uncopyrighted music from the copyrighted songs it was illegally trained on. Their copyrighted music.
Monet sings Gospel songs, one of these is called Let Go, Let God. I don’t know if that is an AI God or the actual man himself. But I do wonder is there an AI equivalent of the Ten Commandments. And surely Thou Shalt Not Steal means the same in all universes, even the Meta one.
But what of the song? It starts with a hint of Whitney Houston before heading 100% , lyrically and vocally into Beyoncé territory. If I was Beyoncé I’d be asking questions: “Suno me old mate, how many of my records do you have exactly?”
Alexa, Dry November or not, make me a strong drink.
