I'm not ashamed to admit this album had me fooled for about 2 hours.  This is a really great album.  It's also completely fake.  A product of the artificial underground scene in San Francisco in 1969, as conceived by AI last year.  Better days.  An amazing time to be alive.

I'm glad I was there.

I don't see a threat.  I see a new frontier.  The human element becomes the conductor of an artificial symphony.  The machine itself is the clay in the hands of the artist.  It was inevitable.  Since this is the best new music I've heard in years, I'm not going to lament the loss of what has been gone since Napster came out.  I've played that dirge to death.  What I am going to do is make a non-committal attempt to understand this process better.  Depending on what's required hardware/software-wise, I may look into it for myself.  No promises.  And probably not unless some playing money comes in.  Thanks to my 2 paying Patreon subscribers (and 1 or 2 others), I have working money, enough to not die, today, but nothing to play with.  I've been waiting for the 2 paid subscriptions to come in so I can afford the antibiotics for my zombie bite; without them, I wouldn't waste my money on something as unimportant as life-saving medication.  Cat food, and not living in the van, is more important.

"Life," please.  All the musicians I know are either pissing short-form content into the social media outhouse, committing suicide by buying land in New Mexico, or teaching guitar.  I would rather collapse on the side of the road while walking through the Baja.  If you're going to go out, go out with your boots on.

The guitar was collecting dust, so I put it back in the case.  It makes a great TV stand.  I can't write on that instrument anymore anyway.  A different guitar, surely, but not my work truck.  Who takes their work truck for a joyride?  I've cobbled together music videos from mostly-free AI generators over the last few years (and oh how quickly that has evolved), and now people are coming up with entire fake bands that blow the socks off anything you can do with a bunch of bartenders with a bass guitar habit, wasting decades trying to convince zealously unimaginative people that serving drinks is a phase, and playing music is the goal.  They are obstacles, without exception, and have made the entire English language uninhabitable.  I can't stand living within its cold, sexually-incontinent confines.  You're a god, I get it.  The least you can do is keep your pants on.   My respect for a culture that demands I beg its least-interesting, most-entitled people for attention for another 20 or 30 years died during the Poor Man's Nick Cave Tour in 2018, and I started my Patreon with enough disinterest and ennui to sink the moon,

But now we have this.  I see something interesting to do, at last.  Granted, it may take a $100/week subscription to some Chinese AI server that manufactures digital fentanyl with which to kill fake American pop stars.  It may take months of playing with it to figure out how to make something good,

Or who knows. Maybe it takes a week.

Diane Ashworth, a fake marine biology dropout from UC Santa Cruz

Maybe I won't bother with it at all.  It surely isn't free.  But I don't see a threat.  I'm not comfortable enough to be threatened by it.  I always kinda shake my head at videos of gringos freaking out about losing their jobs.  It's like going back to the early 2000s.  "Where have these people been?" I wonder to myself, with an air of amazement that there are still people who think it's normal to have a regular paycheck, or a bank account at all (I didn't have a bank account for 20 years).  What are you afraid of?  Of COURSE you're going to lose your job.  Of COURSE the family is going to shun you.  Women?  Non-existent.  There are no women in this world.  Street junkies maybe, but who wants to go back to that?  Women mean family anyway.  No matter how cool she is, she's a mom at heart.  It's a good thing, but it's not for everyone.  You have to be a provider, and be willing to put that above everything except God.  It's not optional, so if you can't do it, or you're not rich, don't bother.  So yeah, no.  Women are ghosts.  I don't even see them anymore.  Just enough to not bump into them at the store.  I miss them, but I don't have any money, and I'm way too old to have any desire to start a family, so there's no way.

The cultural landscape has been toxic for decades anyway.  People for whom art, beauty, truth, and morality are constructs that exist on a spectrum of subjective relativity don't get to lament the complete lack of love in their lives.  I mean, it's possible.  But demanding unfailing, devoted love while insisting everything is subjective is like writing a love song when you're broke.

A writing exercise, at best.  Actually, it's not the same at all.

At least the song is true.

Like subjective truth, love is a matriarchal construct on the spectrum of delusion, a subjective luxury item for weak, spoiled people who sleep indoors and are accustomed to bathing in private (or at all).  Of COURSE you're going to be single.  Of COURSE you'll be living in the car, brushing your teeth in the city park on Christmas, and being exhausted all the time from staying invisible to normies and police.  Normies are apparently an endangered species.  Well, welcome to it.  If I sound bitter, it's only out of habit.  I haven't been bitter about it in awhile.  Not for a month, at least.  I'm totally free of difference about it.  So when I say, "welcome to it," I mean it.  The music industry was the canary in the coal mine, and musicians who haven't died yet, in spite of every reason and even desire to die as immediately as possible without making the irrevocable mistake of actually committing suicide,

Are here to give you hope.  You'll survive.  You're going to lose everything, but you will survive.  Your energy expenditure ratio will probably be somewhere around 5:1.  You'll spend five years of energy every year, just to keep your face clean.  Keeping cops off your tail because your tags and registration are expired, which will be almost always, will make it 8:1.  You will talk to lots of cops.  You'll stop quoting the 4th amendment after about 10 years, because you will realize the real battlefield is in Heaven, not the legal system.  It's going to be really rough for people who think they're oppressed, but who are actually the oppressors.  Lindsay Clancy apologists, mainstream liberals, and the like.  That hammer is going to come down hard.  Most of them won't make it.

Oh well.  Welcome to the music industry.

The world can always use bartenders.

Or bass players, as the case may be.

These days,

What's the difference?

See you in the artificial underground, if not sooner.

Thanks for listening.