Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas [Auxjack Remix] - Ella Fitzgerald
There a few rules for the music that appears in the newsletter: I only send out songs that I like, I don’t repeat any songs already sent in previous years, and I don’t repeat a particular artist (e.g. Sharon Jones) or carol (e.g. Jingle Bells) in a single year.
Does this song break the rules? It’s a remix of a song that appears on Ella Wishes You A Swinging Christmas, which is the same 1960 album on which you’ll find her take on Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!, which I shared four days ago. Do you remember the mid-aughts debates about “remix culture”? You can get a sense them reading David Byrne’s notes on the Creative Commons CD he put together for Wired Magazine in 2004:
By nature, musicians are thieves. Nicking a bit of this song and a lick from that one, shaping their style on the riffs of those who came before, musicians are experts in the art of acquisition… At root, sharing and stealing music start from the same impulse: Cribbing is creation. Building on what other musicians have done - with or without their blessing or collaboration - is what it takes to make new music, music that will delight and sustain people.
I have been delighted and sustained by various remixed or otherwise derivative works. The Verve Remixed albums were on heavy rotation at home at just the right teenage time to mold my taste in music. The parts of the internet I grew up on were fandom-focused Livejournals and Tumblrs, and today’s silly fancams spark joy by reminding me of giggling at the family computer as I watched the winners of the Anime North AMV awards.
This year, many friends have been delighted by generative art, and the same visual algorithms were repurposed for music generation in a release just last week. Does this delightful technology bring the sustainability (financial and emotional) of new art into question? Or is the criticism of these algorithms just a repeat of the same old debates about theft that we had because of garageband remixes and mp3 blogs?
I don’t know. When I was feeling sad in August about how my custom illustrations aren’t such good gifts now that similar images can be generated in seconds, my girlfriend said something that I’m still upset about, along the lines of “you know, I thought the parts of human labour that would be automated first would be the boring and meaningless ones, but instead we're automating art".
I worry about the shallow glossiness of generated content, a banal celestial bureaucrat at your fingertips, a picture of the future that is nothing but smalltalk emerging from an inhuman face, forever. Art has never been my livelihood, so this worry is smaller than some others I have about how language models and other algorithmic intelligences are likely to transform our lives in the coming decades. If you’d like to read a near-future story that evokes this small worry very precisely, though, I recommend Eager Readers In Your Area!, an original work hosted on a website where I have surely read hundreds of thousands of words of fanfiction.
Wondering what new kinds of theft (and creativity) are yet to come,
- Tessa