"Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the world, and I’ll stand on
Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that."
Steve Earle

Apparently, Steve Earle dialed those sentiments back in later interviews, but I think he should have doubled down.  Dylan is a fraud.  He is the world's first one-man, artificially-intelligent boy band.  Read THIS article by Miles Mathis to have your iconos clasted violently against a brick wall of reasonable doubt.  Miles Mathis can be overly critical, and it seems unlikely that everything he suggests in every one of his articles is true, but his perspective is definitely worth considering.  His article on BOB DYLAN ruined Dylan for me.  To my surprise, it was a relief.  I haven't listened to Dylan regularly since.

So, who's the new AI Bob Dylan?  Kanye East?  Taylor Slow?  Bland Bunny?

AI itself?

This is a song a friend of mine prompted for me.  We were talking, and he took excerpts from the conversation and plugged them into the machine.

Here's the prompt he used:

"ok, here we go..... write a song about a young man named Nathan who lives life like he wants to.  He doesn't have much except for his loving kitty Louie and his trusty van.  He's lived by the lake, bathing in the waters of the lake, shaving in the restrooms of Walmart.  He loves to sing and is a Christian man.  He loves Christ and can't wait to meet him in heaven.  Louie, his kitty loves his papa and is gets really depressed when papa is gone form a while while at work.  Nathan loves to sing and has talent using his guitar.  There's not much that will stop Nathan and Louie from living their dreams.  Nathan spent time living in Mexico and even speaks the language."

2.7 seconds later, these lyrics were generated in their entirety:

Lakewater & Grace

Verse 1
Nathan wakes with the sun on glass,
Van doors open, morning passes fast.
Lake water cold on a tired face,
Freedom humming in a wide-open space.
Razor sings in a Walmart light,
Mirrors know him by name at night.
Doesn’t own much, doesn’t complain,
Got a road, a song, and a little faith.

Chorus
He lives how he wants, yeah, he lives it true,
With a guitar string prayer and a sky so blue.
Just a man, his van, and a cat named Lou,
Lakewater and grace get him through.

Verse 2
Louie curls where the engine sleeps,
Golden eyes, little promises he keeps.
When papa’s gone and the days run long,
Lou waits quiet, but the van feels wrong.
Work takes time, but love stays near,
Every mile ends with a welcome here.
Purrs like thunder when the door comes back,
World gets right in a heartbeat flat.

Chorus
He lives how he wants, yeah, he lives it true,
With a guitar string prayer and a sky so blue.
Just a man, his van, and a cat named Lou,
Lakewater and grace get him through.

Verse 3
He sings to the hills, lets the river hear,
Six strings talking when the truth is clear.
A Christian heart, eyes set above,
Counting the days till he meets his Love.
Mexico taught him another tongue,
Same old hope in the songs he sung.
Different roads, same steady flame,
Everywhere home, everywhere His name.

Bridge
No gold watch ticking on his hand,
Just borrowed time and a promised land.
When the night gets heavy, he looks ahead,
Heaven’s calling like the words he said.

Chorus
He lives how he wants, yeah, he lives it true,
With a guitar string prayer and a sky so blue.
Just a man, his van, and a cat named Lou,
Lakewater and grace get him through.

Outro
Nothing much can stop a dream like this,
When love’s the map and faith’s the compass.
Nathan sings on, Louie stays close,
Two hearts rolling wherever hope goes.

Within 30 minutes, 2 versions of "Lakewater & Grace" were delivered to my friend's artificial doorstep.  Music, arrangement, instrumentation, vocal style....  A song about me and my cat traveling around Mexico, Colorado, wherever... and living in a van.  Lyrics in less than 3 seconds, entire production (with alternate version), ready in half an hour.  I was moved by the gesture, so I posted them to my online platforms.

Why not.

The song has prompted a conversation in my outer circle about AI and music.  We're talking about it, and I find myself wondering out loud which is better, which is worse:  AI, or Napster?  Napster, or AI?  Does it even matter.  Should we even try.  And if it does, should we dig our graves out of sight?  Shall we bury our bones in the ground, in sound, or in the sky?  Is the cloud where good ideas go to smoke trees when the Master isn't looking?  Is the algorithm the warden of a warehouse of compliance training?  A glass half full of empty promises?  A tired conversation?  A laboratory of weird, engineered sensations?  Is it a factory of suggestive, subliminal undergarments where free will goes shopping for an uninformed decision, to obfuscate the vision with uniform precision, to learn the laughter of self-righteous derision, perhaps to even

Die?

Sure, why not.  All that, none of it, and

More.

The future is a bright and shining

Whore, a dirty, drunken

Star,

But if you want to know which one is

Worse, the answer is, of course, a

Car, a cur, a

Curse, a school bus converted into a party

Hearse,

A drink of water from a polluted dancing

Nurse...

A dead-end sign on a neverending rhyme scheme.

A theme song for a funeral.

A situation tragedy.

A roaming Roman

Numeral...

A magic bullet on a snow day.

A tragic, would-be pulpit,

Stranded on the

Roadway.

The answer is a bird that cannot

Fly;

It's Napster, in a word, and this is

Why:

AI will never replicate the soul.  Nothing it writes will ever resonate, with anyone.  And so what if it does.  AI may someday figure out how to copy the act of invention (which would be fun to hear.  A genre "invented" by AI.  Why not), but it will never invent anything.  It can create a facsimile of a style, a photo

Copy of a

Pile

Of anything you want, but it will never churn your

Guts.  It will never have a broken

Heart.

It will never kiss the

Sky.

It will never wonder

Why.

Napster, on the other hand, is the equivalent of ordering a meal at a restaurant, giving the waiter a penny, and acting genuinely confounded and offended when the waiter tells you the bill is in fact larger than what you would like it to be.  You don't dictate the price of the meal to the restaurant, and you don't get to decide the cost of maintaining a culture.  You don't give the mechanic a dollar after fixing your water pump, and wonder what his problem is when he says he can't do the work.

But you do it to musicians.  You've been conditioned to believe you're entitled to our labors, for free.  Compared to that,

AI is an all-you-can-eat buffet of artless, unthreatening amusement.  So...  Who cares.  The damage was done 20 years ago.  In culture, like everything else, you get what you pay for.  But it's okay.  If the above habits apply to you: Don't worry about it.  It's alright.  You were used.  Coerced.  Incentivized.  Anybody would take a hundred dollars off the street.  Just, realize the damage that's been done, and how you were manipulated into enabling it.  So that, when the half-eaten piece of spoiled meat lands on your plate,

You neither cry to the waiter, nor enable the thieves by eating it.

You send it back.  Say, I'm sorry, but this isn't what I ordered,

And walk out the door.

"Lakewater & Grace" is (or is about to be) available on all the digital dreaming platforms.  Super-awkward, unnatural-sounding AI title and all.  Who cares if it's real.  The thought behind it was real, the motive behind the prompts was good, and I appreciate them both immensely.  Thanks to my friend for plugging my story into the machine, and to the machine for, well,

For nothing.  The machine didn't have any motives.  It only did what it was programmed to do, so there's nothing to celebrate, condemn, or thank.  It can't steal my soul, and nothing it says will ever resonate in the hearts of the living, so why not play with it before it gets infested with demons and is used to control and monitor the entire world?  That's the real danger of AI.  Songwriting will always belong to human beings.  There are legions of brilliant, unrecognized artists bleeding out onto the street in front of you every day.  Buy one of them a sandwich, or a house.  It's neither write nor wrong to right a song.  So,

Pay no mind to the technocratic hole.  If you want to avoid it, appreciate the work of the humanoid soul.  Do not engage in recreated hate.  Reclaim the appreciation of beauty as a way to inoculate yourself against the real machine, before it's too late.

The soul you save will be your own.  And if AI does turn out to be a pox on the music industry in ways that only well-known artists could possibly understand,

The damage it does would never have been possible without Napster.  And anyway, there are a lot worse lyrics out there, written by "real" "songwriters" than "mirrors know him by name at night."  Maybe AI will root out the talentless chaff and force them back into another industry where they belong, at last.  If it can do that, I'll hire it to play the cigarette flute in the next incarnation of The Wild Bores.

Thanks for listening.