Boum Boum (Merry little Christmas!) - Sped Up - Maryse Letarte (mp3)

I am old enough that I still prefer to do this newsletter as mp3s because it's “cross-platform” or whatever, and I couldn’t find a way to buy an mp3 of this song, which I’m pretty sure I first came across via an algorithmically-generated spotify “song radio” of a different chanson de noël.

If I were younger, maybe I would have recognized “sped up” as a tiktok remix style; a lot of viral audios are pop songs that have been sped up in an app like capcut; if you watch shortform video content, you’ve probably heard some of these (I do and I had, though I know short videos are bad for me). Record labels are now releasing official sped up versions, which if nothing else helps chart performance, since they’re grouped together with the original when counting plays.

I’m unsettled by the uncanny valley of qualityslop into which this falls. I am annoyed that I like this version more than its original speed, even though the vocals are clipped and the piano frantic. I don’t know if it’s better, but it holds my attention more, like a podcast on 1.25x. The description on the official-looking youtube versions reads, in part,

Main Artist: Maryse Letarte
Producer: Maryse Letarte
Composer Lyricist: Maryse Letarte
Composer: Maryse Letarte
Lyricist: Maryse Letarte
Arranger: Maryse Letarte
Music Publisher: Maryse Letarte

Auto-generated by YouTube.

I am getting acquainted with the arc of distrust that rises in me as I start to wonder whether some online media, text or song or, increasingly, video, is AI output. It’s routed through my disgust response, I think: oh no, this, too, is impure. I am more and more bought into the conclusion that it’s rude to show AI output to people, unless you flag it as such. From that essay:

For the longest time, writing was more expensive than reading. If you encountered a body of written text, you could be sure that at the very least, a human spent some time writing it down. The text used to have an innate proof-of-thought, a basic token of humanity.

Now, AI has made text very, very, very cheap. Not only text, in fact. Code, images, video. All kinds of media. We can't rely on proof-of-thought anymore. Any text can be AI slop. …

There's nothing wrong with using AI. When you do, you know what you're getting. The transaction is fully consensual. But whenever you propagate AI output, you're at risk of intentionally or unintentionally legitimizing it with your good name, providing it with a fake proof-of-thought.

Anyway. I ripped this song from youtube because the sped up version isn’t available from Maryse Letarte’s bandcamp. I don’t like it as much as before I tried to track down its mp3. I’m still not entirely sure it was her label that put this song on streaming. Do they do this automatically for every single? Did she okay it? Did she need to? Nightcore remixes, or whatever the kids are calling them now, are fine, right?

I find myself wishing for watermarking, so that I could relax my vigilant detector for whether the content I’m consuming is tainted by the cheapness of its production. I know this isn’t new, not exactly; James Bridle’s Something is wrong on the internet was published only a few months after Attention is all you need, so I can’t blame current generative AI models for the creeping inhumanity of the internet. But they have accelerated it, and sometimes I just want to buy a somewhat silly Christmas song and then I end up feeling weird about the media environment instead.

Boom boom,
Tessa