Future shock is a very real phenomenon, and everyone is currently experiencing it, if they're not busy starving to death or otherwise distracted.
It only begins to truly occur to me in the past few months that for the whole of human history up until very recently, there were a whole lot of challenges involved with being someone else.
An author could write a book under a different name, but if they were using initials and trying to be gender-neutral, or if they had a name that people might identify with a particular nationality or skin color, whatever actual gender they were or whatever they actually looked like in the flesh was all very likely to become very apparent to everyone if they ever went out and gave a talk or an interview. You could present yourself as whoever you wanted to in writing, but only in writing. If you were to be heard or seen it was much different.
Of course such challenges have not stopped people who are compelled for any number of different reasons to present as someone very different from the person they might have grown up being. I know many people who have long been drawn to presenting as a different gender, who are compelled to go to great lengths of all sorts to convincingly present as another gender, and identify as such.
I have known many people who have sought to present themselves as being from a certain nation, region or social class other than the one they are from, who have again gone to great lengths to dress differently, act differently, learn a whole new set of social mores and ways of being, change their accents, learn new languages, and then master a particular regional dialect of that language.
Still, even after decades of living as another gender, only a tiny minority of the most convincing trans people can really pass as the gender they identify with, if they grew up with another gender. If I'm talking to someone it usually takes a few seconds at most to notice that they did not grow up with the gender they now identify as.
Even after decades of living in New York City, my nanny, as Lola called herself, could never entirely lose her vaguely German accent. She never admitted to being German, or Jewish, and always claimed she was from London, England, where she had been sent as a teenager while her parents back home in Germany were left to die. Presumably terrified of being identified as a German or a Jew for most of her life, or for whatever other reason not wanting to be known as such, Lola still never managed to master either the English or the New York accent. Up until the time she was near death, everyone wondered where she was really from, and then on her deathbed the German came out.
It's hard to be someone else, no matter how much you want to be. It takes a lot of work, and then after all that effort you only may have managed to convincingly change one little aspect of your identity, with the others all remaining the same. For example, maybe you change your gender, but you're still an English-speaking white person from somewhere in the midwest, or wherever.
In the entertainment industries it's all a bit different, as far as messages and messengers go. In music and film, for the most part, some people are writing the songs and the scripts, and other people are doing the acting.
But historically it was a tiny fraction of society that ever got to have the experience of being a professional songwriter, writing songs for someone else to record for a record label. It was a small fraction of society who ever had the chance to write a screenplay that might come to life in a cinema with actors speaking your words as if they were their own.
In the past few months it has come to the attention of millions and millions of people around the world that everything has now changed.
As with the physical world, it's still possible to spot a "fake" online, but the vast majority of time people don't. For example, according to something I read recently, 34% of the music on the streaming platform, Deezer, has somehow or other been determined to be AI-generated, but 97% of listeners can't tell the difference. (The remaining 3% are largely professionals in the entertainment industries, I'm guessing.)
As a songwriter myself, I long ago observed that you can write a song from a perspective other than your own, and do so very convincingly, and movingly. With many of the songs people think of as iconic in various ways, people are often surprised when they learn that Aretha Franklin's hit, "Respect," was not written by a woman. Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" was not written by a Black person.
I am a person of a certain background, and for keen observers certain things are immediately obvious, upon hearing my voice for a little while. I'm male, from somewhere in the northern parts of the US, and probably white. If I'm to be seen as well as heard, my whiteness can be easily confirmed at that point. Other things can be inferred, but these three characteristics of gender, nationality and race are big ones.
Even being from this background, though, I began to understand long ago as a performer myself that despite being who I am, I can sing from a perspective very different from my own -- say, from the vantage point of a Palestinian refugee -- and, judging from the tears flowing down the faces of my Palestinian audience members on so many occasions, I can still hit the nail on the head.
Similarly, my background is one very oriented towards different forms of acoustic music. I developed an appreciation for punk rock and hip-hop after I was well into adulthood, and I think this comes across to aficionados of punk or hip-hop in various ways. People who are into these forms of music, however, tend to still manage to identify with what I'm doing, if we connect with each other. I play in a lot of punk venues as a result.
The limitations are still there, however. The message is being delivered by the messenger. When one of my songs develops a life of its own and starts getting sung by other people who may not know who wrote it, this is always very exciting -- the art being appreciated truly for the art's sake, perhaps having nothing to do with the original messenger. But generally, that's not what happens, and the songs are being delivered by me.
For live performance we still of course have all sorts of these limitations. But as songwriters, anyway, the ceiling has suddenly been lifted. No longer do you need to be one of those people who can afford to hire a band, a recording studio, engineer and producer, and get them to convincingly record your songs, if you want to hear someone other than yourself do them.
It's been months now and I'm still dizzy from the experience. It's an ongoing, daily dose of future shock.
It is crazy to be able to work as a lyricist with a brilliant bunch of AI multi-instrumentalists, despite their often strange ways of interpreting my prompts, because we always eventually end up with amazing results. It is crazy to be able to tell them to play the song in whatever musical styles I want to explore, and with some editing, for the songs to work that way so well. I no longer need to be an acoustic guitarist with an obvious punk influence, or a lyricist from a folkie singer/songwriter background who has a penchant for hip-hop. I can now form a folk-punk hip-hop band, no problem.
What blows my mind the most, however, is the whole gender thing. Ever since I started writing songs with my AI band, I have not once felt compelled to write a song for a male voice.
I can choose the vocalist's gender, and I can give the band lots of other instructions, general and very specific. As with a human band, what they'll do with my instructions is hard to predict, but that's why we keep working on it until we get it the way I want it, again just like with a human band in a studio, aside from everything happening a hundred times faster -- and aside from sitting alone with my laptop, rather than having fun hanging out with other human musicians in a studio.
There is a subtlety to presenting a song as a woman singing, with a female voice, that in many ways is hard to explain. It's both as powerful and as subtle as choosing instrumentation, or stylistic musical choices for the band, and how it's interpreting the song, and relating to the content of the lyrics.
Most of the past several dozen songs I've written as Ai Tsuno (the name of my AI band, or the singer of the band, or both) have been very much in keeping with most of the songs I have written as David Rovics -- they have been about the war on Palestine, Trump's imperialism, labor struggles, and other current events. Even so, being able to sing about these things with a woman's voice is, along with the amazing production values and extreme stylistic variation available to work with, what makes the AI band phenomenon that now exists such an intoxicating one, for me.
When I was just starting out with this altogether new experience, for the first several dozen songs I wrote obsessively about three subjects. One was the idea of being someone or something else, a reality which working with AI was constantly confronting me with. Another was AI itself. The third, and most dominant in the beginning, was sex.
I have written a lot of erotic fiction under a pen name, mostly really written for a very select group of intimate friends who share the same kink as me, but also published in appropriate forums so other like-minded kinksters might enjoy it.
Initially I thought as Ai Tsuno I might be doing the same sort of thing, but with songs. As I wrote these kinky, DS-themed lyrics, though, it became more and more obvious how completely normative it is in popular music circles for more than a century now for a man to be writing songs about sex from the perspective of an enthusiastic Sub that are intended for a woman to sing. Normally we just call that pop music.
Ai Tsuno's more sexy material does have a very enthusiastic audience among my small kink circles, but I deigned to publish the songs along with the rest of them because, for the most part, these songs are no more riske than anything Madonna or Lady Gaga sings, and no more cultish than your average gospel song. So I eventually figured, what the heck, I'll just advise people that if they don't want to hear songs about sex, don't listen to pop music, generally, or to Ai Tsuno's first three albums.
There's my report for today from the AI music-generation rabbit hole I've largely been living in now for months. More news when I dig a little deeper here...
