One of the great regrets of my life is never seeing the Birthday Party live. The Birthday Party, for those unaware, was the second band of Nick Cave’s storied career. It was in fact the same band as Cave’s first group, the Boys Next Door, but with more than a name-change. Somewhere along the metamorphosis, the group sloughed off the fey New Wave skin (“A bunch of snivelling little poofs,” bassist Tracey Pew self-deprecated) and became something altogether darker and more vicious. Increasing drug addiction undoubtedly had a lot to do with it, but the Birthday Party are renowned as one of the most literally fearsome acts ever to take a stage.
I nearly saw their last-ever show, but opted instead to go to a party where I hoped to make out with a particular girl. I didn’t, of course, and so I missed out on an iconic rock experience. Let that be a lesson to you, kids.
But that was only the beginning of Cave’s career, which has spanned nearly four decades since. To my mind, he peaked with the first two albums of his next and ever-since incarnation, the Bad Seeds. That’s a purely personal prejudice, though: for many, Cave has only gone from strength to strength. Horses for courses.
What cannot be denied is that the man knows a thing or two about writing songs. The Mercy Seat, for instance, builds and builds on what seems like repetition, but isn’t, quite, until the last line punctures the entire, Biblical, edifice of self-pity: “But I’m afraid I told a lie”. Not even Baudelaire ever conjured quite such a vision as Mutiny in Heaven, imagining paradise as a garbage-strewn junkie hell.
So, when “Mark”, a fan from Christchurch sent Cave a Chat GPT “song in the style of Nick Cave”, he had quite a bit to say about it. Little of it good. The future of creativity under the banal influence of AI “doesn’t look good, Mark. The apocalypse is well on its way. This song sucks.”
What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty. ChatGPT may be able to write a speech or an essay or a sermon or an obituary but it cannot create a genuine song.
Some years ago, James May made the same point by playing two successive piano pieces. One, an AI-created “in the style of Beethoven”, the other a genuine Beethoven creation. The difference was stark. The first was undeniably music: it had notes, strung together in a coherent melody… but it sucked. It was clearly, as May said, “merely the vomit of a digital contraption”. On the other hand, the Moonlight Sonata was written in the throes of unrequited love and, “you can tell.
Because a machine doesn’t feel love, it doesn’t feel suffering either. And that’s why machines will only ever write sucky songs.
Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.
Great, even moderately good, songwriting:
“Is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering.”
A machine will never understand how to write something as simple and as heart-wrenching as “Please tell Mom this is not her fault” (from Blink-182’s Adam’s Song), let alone put pure rage into such metrical fury as “I’m a street-walkin’ cheetah with a heart full of napalm” (the Stooges, Search and Destroy).
This is what we humble humans can offer, that AI can only mimic, the transcendent journey of the artist that forever grapples with his or her own shortcomings. This is where human genius resides, deeply embedded within, yet reaching beyond, those limitations.
As a fellow wordsmith, even if of a different and lesser sort, I understand perfectly Cave’s irritation at being so poorly imitated.
It may sound like I’m taking all this a little too personally, but I’m a songwriter who is engaged, at this very moment, in the process of songwriting. It’s a blood and guts business, here at my desk, that requires something of me to initiate the new and fresh idea. It requires my humanness.
Even my introduction to this post wouldn’t be possible without the minor adolescent tragedy of missing both a transcendent rock’n’roll experience and the chance to cop a feel in the darkened back yard of a suburban party.
Mark, thanks for the song, but with all the love and respect in the world, this song is bullshit, a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human, and, well, I don’t much like it — although, hang on!, rereading it, there is a line in there that speaks to me —
‘I’ve got the fire of hell in my eyes’
— says the song ‘in the style of Nick Cave’, and that’s kind of true. I have got the fire of hell in my eyes – and it’s ChatGPT.
The Red Hand Files
For the masochistically curious, here’s the vomit of a digital contraption in its full mediocrity:
Verse 1:
In the depths of the night, I hear a call
A voice that echoes, through the hall
It’s a siren’s song, that pulls me in
Takes me to a place, where I can’t begin
Chorus:
I am the sinner, I am the saint
I am the darkness, I am the light
I am the hunter, I am the prey
I am the devil, I am the savior
Verse 2:
I walk the streets, with my head held high
I’ve got my demons, but I’ll make them fly
I’ll dance with the devil, and I’ll play his game
I’ll be the one, to call his name
Chorus:
I am the sinner, I am the saint
I am the darkness, I am the light
I am the hunter, I am the prey
I am the devil, I am the savior
Bridge:
I’ve got the blood of angels, on my hands
I’ve got the fire of hell, in my eyes
I’m the king of the abyss, I’m the ruler of the dark
I’m the one that they fear, in the shadows they hark
Chorus:
I am the sinner, I am the saint
I am the darkness, I am the light
I am the hunter, I am the prey
I am the devil, I am the savior
Outro:
So come with me, to the edge of the night
Where the darkness and the light collide
We’ll walk the line, between the good and the bad
And we’ll see, who comes out on top in the end.
