Wanna produce a pop hit? There’s an app for that.
Instagram and TikTok are full of musicians and producers who can show you how to make anything. Sure, there are some guitarists or keyboardists who create tutorials on how to play a certain song or riff. Even some who teach music theory as it relates to specific instruments. Its decent content, its educational, and music education is sorely missed in most schools. But there is another kind of content that certainly appears educational, but contains a different seed. I call it paint by numbers music. Guitarists will produce content like “How to write riffs like Eddie Van Halen,” or “how to get Jimi’s guitar tone.” Hip hop or electronic music producers generate vids like “How to create 90s drum and bass” or “Make a tap beat in 10 minutes.”
Maybe it is educational, I don’t know. What it feels like though, is reducing genres and historical styles to a template. OK, maybe a lot of it was a template. The 60s blues rockers nicked the template from the OG blues men and ran with it. Drum and bass, trap, drill, appropriated the template from house and hip hop. As Robert Plant once said – with perhaps a hint of guilt – we are just beggars and thieves.
But paint by numbers music content represents more than just the transmission of influence and stylistic homage. Its the reduction of musical vocabularies to sheer information, to content. The mystique of the process, of creative discovery, lays vanquished, replaced instead by an enumeration of stylistic markers, which are further winnowed down to technical processes. An artists once had to discover these things through trial and error and attempts at imitation. Personal style, invention, often happens when failing to properly trace, when emulation hits a snag and the enthusiasm of the process takes over. The possibility of reaching the zone of creative flow and novelty stifled by a formula. Formulas generated by the impossibly heavy weight of the past, where ts all been done, and and now you can do it too!
Kanye West once said something. I don’t remember the exact quote, it hardly matters. Something like “who cares how well you can play the guitar, I can do that shit in Fruity Loops in five minutes.” Guitarists were furious (online). Other “real” musicians took up the cause. How dare you denigrate those of us who play “real instruments.” But he was right. No one cares. If we found out today that Taylor Swift’s music was mostly generated by AI, and she still sang and performed, would anyone care if the beat was generated by a SomeGPT prompt? Is there any difference between having a machine trained on the history of pop music and then spitting out a track and say a famous producer who has “the formula” for a successful pop hit? How about a sample pack, or a chord change template? Why not go one step beyond? If its all paint by numbers, why not just let the machines do it, they are better with numbers anyhow.
The absence of a counter-culture means that sub-cultures exist as nothing more than repositories of semi-historical aesthetic choices, which in turn become commodity preferences. A mode of production that reproduces consistency and blandness, and at the same time reifies identification with a style. Retro styles, derivative aesthetics long for a lost past that once contained a future, and obliterate its possible becoming in the same gesture.