When I was a teenager, I played the guitar. When I was in highschool, I played in bands.
It was the late 70's so there were a couple different roads that were available to the aspiring guitar god. You could be a traditional rocker and play stuff like the Stones or Clapton, BTO or Springsteen, you could be West Coasty like the Eagles, Jackson Brown or those wannabe Jazz guys in Steely Dan or you could choose the route I took, playing punk inspired music. I loved the punk energy and eventually settled into a second wave Ska groove that I'm still stuck in over 40 years later.
Cue the 80's and my graduation to University. Punk was out and we were hit by a wave of news music. (I can't recall the term we had for this) At the forefront of this tsunami was the synthesizer.
The synthesizer was the antithesis of everything we stood for. It was the epitome of corporate culture. Electronic music, beeps and boops, or worse yet pretending to be violins (like we really cared about violinists). This junk is going to put musicians out of business. Computers are going to write music AND play it back. Real music is dead now and only computer programming nerds will make music.
To be fair I kinda liked Kraftwerk back in the day and Gary Numan and Depeche Mode were cool. Nevertheless I bought into the hype that the era of the guitar was over and the landscape would be filled with soulless computer composed elevator music.
I'm hearing the exact same conversations today, but these conversations are centered on AI generated art and video. AI is weird, AI is rudimentary, AI is terrible, and AI will put real artists out of work. My perspective paints a slightly different picture. AI is all of those things, but like the synth before it, AI is a tool. Having access to a synthesizer didn't make you a musician or bless you with talent. In the right hands a synth gave a talented musician a new form of expression.
The good ones ran with it and created unforgettable sounds and the music of a generation.
Let's see what real artists do with AI before we pass judgement.
Keith Beckles
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