To access 300 more Retro articles for a week—over 12 sections of content—try Retro for free!

Get 7 day free trial

{Note: The NMDP offers exclusive playlists of contemporary music to help those too busy to track down great new music on their own find amazing new sounds. Retro-recommended songs first released in the 1970s appear in Retro’s “Singular Songs of the Seventies” series, instead, whereas songs from the 1960s appear in the “Lost Classics of the 1960s” series. I have eclectic taste in music, so I hope you’ll enjoy journeying through the past fifty years of music with me!}

While my expertise when I was a disc jockey was in American and British psychedelic music released between 1965 and 1972, I have been thrilled to have the opportunity to use Twitter, Threads, and other social media platforms to share the hundreds and hundreds of remarkable songs of more recent vintage I discovered in my decades of collecting LPs (and the countless hours I spent hanging out at a college radio station).

I hope these playlists will launch new conversations—including giving members of the Retro community a chance to share your own favorite songs.

Info Box: All Past Editions of the New Music Discovery Project

• Volume 1

• Volume 2

• Volume 3

• Volume 4

• Volume 5

• Volume 6

• Volume 7

• Volume 8

• Volume 9

• Volume 10

• Volume 11

• Volume 12

• Volume 13

• Volume 14

• Volume 15

• Volume 16

• Volume 17

• Volume 18

• Volume 19

• Volume 20

• Volume 21

• Volume 22

• Volume 23

• Volume 24

• Volume 25 (below)

If you’re a subscriber to Retro, feel free to let everyone know your favorite song(s) from among the ones below in the comments—and post your own favorite songs, too! I do take suggestions, so you may well see a song you’ve recommended in a future NMDP.

🎵 | New Music Discovery Project, Vol. 25 Playlist

Read more

To access 275+ more Retro articles for a week—over 12 sections of content—try Retro for free!

Get 7 day free trial

{Note: The NMDP offers exclusive playlists of contemporary music to help those too busy to track down great new music on their own find amazing new sounds. Retro-recommended songs first released in the 1970s appear in Retro’s “Singular Songs of the Seventies” series, instead, whereas songs from the 1960s appear in the “Lost Classics of the 1960s” series. I have eclectic taste in music, so I hope you’ll enjoy journeying through the past fifty years of music with me!}

While my expertise when I was a disc jockey was in American and British psychedelic music released between 1965 and 1972, I have been thrilled to have the opportunity to use Twitter, Threads, and other social media platforms to share the hundreds and hundreds of remarkable songs of more recent vintage I discovered in my decades of collecting LPs (and the countless hours I spent hanging out at a college radio station).

I hope these playlists will launch new conversations—including giving members of the Retro community a chance to share your own favorite songs.

Info Box: All Past Editions of the New Music Discovery Project

Read more

The Introduction to this album, which serves as its liner notes, and the two tracks (below) are free. The remainder is for full Retro subscribers. However, you can access free for a full week all 250+ Retro articles, including this Hounds LP and all others, by clicking the button below.

Get 7 day free trial

Hounds Music Library Index

Tracks, album links, and liner notes for the ten Hounds albums released so far can be found at the links below. Each Hounds album is different from the next in tone and beats, so if you find that you don’t respond to one, you may well respond to another!

Albums

• October 28, 2024

  • Gamer (below)

• June 2, 2024

  • Spycraft (album)

• September 10, 2023

  • Network (album)

• August 6, 2023

  • Piracy (album)

• July 31, 2023

  • Spacewalk (album)

• July 23, 2023

  • Midnight (album)

• July 16, 2023

  • Fliers (album)

• July 14, 2023

  • Transpecific (album)

Compilations

• March 1, 2025

  • Second Conversion (forthcoming)

• July 25, 2023

  • Conversion (compilation)

Gamer Liner Notes

Gamer is influenced by the past and future—and admittedly very little by the present.

It’s filled with chiptune, chillwave, lo-fi nineties bedroom pop, pagan dirges, noise-pop, post-rock, trance, and even hints of doom metal.

It features, as a bonus track, a melding of two other tracks that serves as the longest Hounds cut ever: “MMORPG,” which is fourteen minutes long and, like basically all of Gamer, is intended as a gaming-inspired audioscape you can live in.

In creating Gamer, I wanted to think—as frankly I’ve been trying to do with Hounds generally—about what the music of decades in the future might sound like, when we finally become fully immersed in the seeming inevitability of a post-rock and a post-hip-hop musical culture. In the same way Rock ceased to be the aural cornerstone of American popular music in the 2000s, the same fate likely awaits the equally well-won and hard-earned place Hip-Hop has had as the foundation for mainstream U.S. music.

That’s no judgment upon either Rock or Hip-Hop, of course, just an acknowledgment that popular music does a better job than—say—literary theory does of reinventing itself every thirty or forty years. By way of example, we’re now in the seventieth year of postmodernism in the American academy, and that’s no good; fortunately, music is less likely than almost any other art or intellectual pursuit to be such brazenly retrograde.

Metamodernism—the leading post-postmodern cultural philosophy, and coincidentally (or not so coincidentally) one of my primary research foci when I was in academia—will have its day in academia, just as rock and its many successors will give way to new modes fairly soon (keeping in mind that we’re only speaking of which aural mode constitutes the cultural dominant of an age; Rock and Hip-Hop will of course exist for decades, even centuries to come). Will what’s coming to popular music be anything at all like what listeners can hear on Gamer? Who knows.

One possible vision of the future is one in which anti-music microgenres are heavily influenced by niche digital subcultures in the same way that right now social media content on, for instance, TikTok seems to be headed that way. We can gradually see different content-creation substrata developing their own audio as well as video vibes; if that happens, I suspect gamers will drift off into their own sonic spaces every bit as much as the AI art crowd, food influencers, digital magicians, and Gen Z fashionistas.

I’ve been playing video games since I was six, and have been a video game journalist for about a decade. I even had the opportunity—I still can’t believe this happened—to teach gaming and the cultural theory that surrounds it for a few years at an R1 public flagship school, University of New Hampshire, before I retired from academia and became a full-time professional writer and artist. During my years as a professor, I found myself becoming only more and more invested in and engaged by the capacity of video games (which we don’t only think of as a visual medium but sometimes act as though it’s predominantly so) to create soundscapes as immersive as the visual wonders they offer.

What convinced me of this, I think, was chiptune. Was it merely nostalgia that caused me to feel that 8-bit, NES-style music simply worked not just as an accompaniment to a gaming experience but on its own? An interest in post-rock bands like Sigur Rós and Explosions in the Sky—two very different musical experiments, needless to say—provided a next step for me in my journey toward juxtaposing a lifelong love of video games and a somewhat more recent obsession with music (which didn’t really find me until I went to college in the 1990s).

Gamer is more or less the culmination of this trip for me.

When I first found music as an obsession in the nineties, it was—ironically—sixties music that did the trick for me. Some of my favorite tracks from those early years of loving that decade’s music, even before I started DJing on the radio as a specialist in the era in 1996, were sixties instrumentals. “Telstar” by The Tornadoes, “Let’s Go (Pony)” by The Routers, “Walk Don’t Run” by The Ventures, “Space Walk” by The Astros, “Classical Gas” by Mason Williams, “Love Is Blue” by Paul Mauriat… it was an amazing period for songs without lyrics. Add that to my love of the Atari 2600 and the NES, my fascination with nineties indie-pop and even contemporary classical (e.g., Wim Mertens), and Gamer probably began to be born many, many years before I had the time or inclination to create it. My interest in poetics generally, this being the idea of crafting an aesthetic vision inductively based on everything you love and everything you are, is also a big part of all this.

So if you hear baroque electronic flourishes in the instrumentals of Hounds generally and on Gamer specifically, but also a tendency toward atonality and cacophony, know that it’s coming from a place of love and genuine passion—not nihilism. The songs of Gamer are supposed to be difficult spaces you can enter, muck about in and enjoy. I do really hope you find that to be your experience.

I suppose I should also mention that the title of the album is intended to do more than conjure up the nicer aspect of retro (as opposed to contemporary) gaming subcultures.

That is, I like the double-duty “gamer” does as both an avocation and an imperative.

On the one hand, one chooses to be a gamer; on the other, to the extent the word also signifies the ability to roll with life’s many punches, we really have no choice, do we?

Gamer was written during a very dark time in America, and probably for that reason a time in which I had more dark thoughts and anxiety than usual. So if you hear some of those moments in the music, and are put in mind by the album’s title of the way video games are both to be enjoyed and withstood—as a kind of endurance test requiring a gamer in the second sense of the word—you’re definitely hearing what I myself heard and was feeling as I made music in a presidential election year in the United States.

This will probably be the last new Hounds LP for a while—a forthcoming compilation, Second Conversion, that I’m quite excited about notwithstanding—I’m glad that it ends with the longest and I hope most complex soundscape in the Hounds catalogue, one that is capacious enough for us to imagine ourselves climbing inside it together and staying there for a long while.

{Note: A link to the subscriber-exclusive Gamer playlist at YouTube can be found at the very bottom of this article. I’m hoping to get most or even all Hounds tracks up on iTunes in the next year or two. See the Hounds index above to get early access to the entire Hounds oeuvre.}

Gamer (2024)

1. “Adventure”

2. “Arcade”

Read more

To access 250+ more Retro articles for a week—over 12 sections of content—try Retro for free!

Get 7 day free trial

{Note: The NMDP offers exclusive playlists of contemporary music to help those too busy to track down great new music on their own find amazing new sounds. Retro-recommended songs first released in the 1970s appear in Retro’s “Singular Songs of the Seventies” series, instead, whereas songs from the 1960s appear in the “Lost Classics of the 1960s” series. I have eclectic taste in music, so I hope you’ll enjoy journeying through the past fifty years of music with me!}

While my expertise when I was a disc jockey was in American and British psychedelic music released between 1965 and 1972, I have been thrilled to have the opportunity to use Twitter, Threads, Post, and other social media platforms to share the hundreds of remarkable songs of more recent vintage I discovered in my decades of collecting LPs (and the countless hours I spent hanging out at a radio station). I hope these playlists will launch new conversations—including giving members of the Retro community a chance to share your own favorite songs.

Info Box: All Past Editions of the New Music Discovery Project

• Volume 1

• Volume 2

• Volume 3

• Volume 4

• Volume 5

• Volume 6

• Volume 7

• Volume 8

• Volume 9

• Volume 10

• Volume 11

• Volume 12

• Volume 13

• Volume 14

• Volume 15

• Volume 16

• Volume 17

• Volume 18

• Volume 19

• Volume 20

• Volume 21

• Volume 22

If you’re a subscriber to Retro, feel free to let everyone know your favorite song(s) from among the ones below in the comments—and post your own favorite songs, too! I do take suggestions, so you may well see a song you’ve recommended in a future NMDP.

🎵 | Link: The New Music Discovery Project, Vol. 23 Playlist

(1) Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Breathless” (2004)

(2) Chris Bathgate, “Serpetine” (2007)

(3) Mk.Gee, “Are You Looking Up” (2024)

(4) Being Dead, “Godzilla Rises” (2024)

(5) Art d’Ecco, “Only Ones” (2022)

(6) Jayo, “Worst Case Scenario” (2023)

(7) Jane Remover, “Magic I Want U” (2024)

(8) WU LYF, “We Bros” (2011)

(9) Radiohead, “You and Whose Army?” (2001)

(10) Sufjan Stevens, “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” (2023)

To access 225+ more Retro articles for a week—over 12 sections of content—try Retro for free!

Get 7 day free trial

{Note: The NMDP offers exclusive playlists of contemporary music to help those too busy to track down great new music on their own find amazing new sounds. Retro-recommended songs first released in the 1970s appear in Retro’s “Singular Songs of the Seventies” series, instead, whereas songs from the 1960s appear in the “Lost Classics of the 1960s” series. I have eclectic taste in music, so I hope you’ll enjoy journeying through the past fifty years of music with me!}

While my expertise when I was a disc jockey was in American and British psychedelic music released between 1965 and 1972, I have been thrilled to have the opportunity to use Twitter, Threads, Post, and other social media platforms to share the hundreds of remarkable songs of more recent vintage I discovered in my decades of collecting LPs (and the countless hours I spent hanging out at a radio station). I hope these playlists will launch new conversations—including giving members of the Retro community a chance to share your own favorite songs.

Info Box: All Past Editions of the New Music Discovery Project

• Volume 1

• Volume 2

• Volume 3

• Volume 4

• Volume 5

• Volume 6

• Volume 7

• Volume 8

• Volume 9

• Volume 10

• Volume 11

• Volume 12

• Volume 13

• Volume 14

• Volume 15

• Volume 16

• Volume 17

• Volume 18

• Volume 19

• Volume 20

• Volume 21

If you’re a subscriber to Retro, feel free to let everyone know your favorite song(s) from among the ones below in the comments—and post your own favorite songs, too! I do take suggestions, so you may well see a song you’ve recommended in a future NMDP.

🎵 | Link: The New Music Discovery Project, Vol. 22 Playlist

(1) Jesse Welles, “Payola” (2024)

(2) Gravenhurst, “Only a Northern Song” (2012) [Cover of the Beatles]

(3) Ginger Root, “There Was a Time” (2024)

(4) Hether, “Oidar” (2020)

(5) Artemas, “I Like the Way You Kiss Me” (2024)

(6) Cleffy, “Meet You at the Graveyard” (2023) [Nightcore Cover]

(7) Welles, “Rock n’ Roll” (2019)

(8) Kabin Crew, “The Spark” (2024)

(9) Seraphina Simone, “Cherry” (2020)

(10) Warpaint, “Billie Holiday” (2011)

(11) Grant Lee Buffalo, “Mockingbirds” (1994)

(12) Matisyahu, “One Day” (2009)

This content is free. To see 225+ more Retro articles across 12 sections, try Retro for free now!

Get 7 day free trial

{Note: The NMDP offers exclusive playlists of contemporary music to help those too busy to track down great new music on their own find amazing new sounds. Retro-recommended songs first released in the 1970s appear in Retro’s “Singular Songs of the Seventies” series, instead, whereas songs from the 1960s appear in the “Lost Classics of the 1960s” series. I have eclectic taste in music, so I hope you’ll enjoy journeying through the past fifty years of music with me!}

While my expertise when I was a disc jockey was in American and British psychedelic music released between 1965 and 1972, I have been thrilled to have the opportunity to use Twitter, Threads, Post, and other social media platforms to share the hundreds of remarkable songs of more recent vintage I discovered in my decades of collecting LPs (and the countless hours I spent hanging out at a radio station). I hope these playlists will launch new conversations—including giving members of the Retro community a chance to share your own favorite songs.

If you’re a subscriber to Retro, feel free to let everyone know your favorite song(s) from among the ones below in the comments—and post your own favorite songs, too! I do take suggestions, so you may well see a song you’ve recommended in a future NMDP.

🎵 | Link: The New Music Discovery Project, Vol. 21 Playlist

(1) Jungle, “Back on 74” (2023)

(2) Parcels, “Lighten Up” (2018)

(3) Two Door Cinema Club, “Something Good Can Work” (2010)

(4) AJR, “The Good Part” (2017)

(5) Dressy Bressy, “I Found Out” (1999)

(6) Moselle, “Pesticides” (2024)

(7) Beulah, “Don’t Forget to Breathe” (2003)

(8) AJR, “Steve’s Going to London” (2023)

(9) Real Estate, “Water Underground” (2024)

(10) Franco Battioto, “Ruby Tuesday” (1999)

The Introduction to this album, which serves as its liner notes, and the first track (below) are free. The remainder is for full Retro subscribers. However, you can access free for a full week all 250+ Retro articles, including this Hounds LP and all others, by clicking the button below.

Get 7 day free trial

Hounds Music Library Index

Tracks, album links, and liner notes for the nine Hounds albums released so far can be found at the links below. Each Hounds album is different from the next in tone and beats, so if you find that you don’t respond to one, you may well respond to another!

Albums

• October 28, 2024

  • Gamer (forthcoming)

• June 2, 2024

  • Spycraft (below)

• September 10, 2023

  • Network (album)

• August 6, 2023

  • Piracy (album)

• July 31, 2023

  • Spacewalk (album)

• July 23, 2023

  • Midnight (album)

• July 16, 2023

  • Fliers (album)

• July 14, 2023

  • Transpecific (album)

Compilations

• March 1, 2025

  • Second Conversion (forthcoming)

• July 25, 2023

  • Conversion (compilation)

Spycraft Liner Notes

Between 2018 and 2020, I authored three national bestsellers focusing on the political career of the 2024 Republican Party presidential nominee. All of these nonfiction works were curations of reliable major-media reporting from around the world and stretching back decades; they were works of biography, not political philosophy, and in writing and publishing them I became the Donald Trump presidential historian with the most bestselling works on this controversial man’s late-in-life political turn.

Whenever you write about a controversial figure—any celebrity, really, whether in the realm of politics of any other—you immediately draw fire from quarters loyal to that particular figure, and my books about former President Trump were no exception. As one of the books was about noncriminal international political collusion; and another about an overseas criminal conspiracy not directly involving Mr. Trump; and another about political corruption in Washington that did indeed involve Mr. Trump, and for which broad course of conduct he’s presently facing both civil and criminal cases in response to, it was easy for those who didn’t read the books themselves beyond their titles—Proof of Collusion (Simon & Schuster, 2018); Proof of Conspiracy (Macmillan, 2019); and Proof of Corruption (Macmillan, 2020)—to presume that all three were the work of a political partisan seeking to spin wild conspiracy theories about a highly polarizing public figure rather than hard-earned, professional-grade work-product from a man who’s been an attorney, a journalist, a historian, and an author for decades.

I recall once, at a time two of the three books mentioned above were on bookshelves in stores across America, being asked to give a lecture on “conspiracy theories” at the University of Miami. I declined, stating—truthfully—that I have no interest in such nonsense, and so I wouldn’t have anything to say about it to undergraduate students. Beyond a brief span of months in my mid-childhood when, as a bonding exercise with my late father Robert Abramson, we watched every James Bond film then available for VHS rental, I don’t even have any interest in the sort of spycraft and intrigue that gives rise to conspiracy theories. I believe the Earth is round; that we did in fact land on the Moon; that John F. Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman; that Sasquatch, The Abominable Snowman, ghosts, and the Chupacabra don’t exist; that aliens have never visited Earth (and thus dead extra-terrestrial bodies aren’t stored Area 51 or anywhere else); that the September 11 attacks weren’t an inside job, but just the work of foreign terrorists; that former president Barack Obama was born in the United States and is a Christian; and that Elvis Presley is, sadly, dead. In fact, I even disagree with leading political figures like Hillary Clinton or the late Harry Reid about whether the United States Air Force has ever encountered an unmanned spacecraft of extra-terrestrial origin (a view that places me at odds with many upstanding veterans and even some folks at the Pentagon). I have less interest in conspiracy theories than almost anyone.

But I did write three bestselling books concerning events that America’s very real and not-at-all-mythological intelligence community have understandably taken an abiding interest in, and I therefore have spent a lot of time researching the people, places, and events of the latter half of the last decade and the early part of this one that were the subject of federal investigations by both the U.S. House and Senate intel committees.

And I was, in 2022, contacted by the House January 6 Committee to assist it with its historic investigation of the January 6 insurrection. And I have been in touch with congressional investigators whose remit includes intelligence matters; these are not spies, however, merely civil servants investigating potentially criminal conduct of a transnational character. Have I been contacted by actual spies through third parties? Yes, but my interest in what they have to say is limited to what public evidence can corroborate, and thus in what a responsible lawyer, journalist, nonfiction author and presidential historian would report. While I may indeed believe that we live in a time when certain U.S. and world leaders are willing to act in ways that would shock the national conscience—or what is left of it—I suspect that a less naive and optimistic researcher (not that I have ever thought of myself as particularly naive or particularly optimistic) would note that history confirms leaders of all stripes have been engaging in astonishingly dispiriting conduct for centuries or even millennia—so the present is little different.

When I started thinking about what I wanted the eighth Hounds album to become, I was mindful, first and foremost, about the tonal and narrative adventures the other seven albums had sought to take: trips to outer space (Spacewalk), to the inside of a computer (Network), to the high seas (Piracy), to the world of video gaming (the still-unreleased Gamer), to locations that are often destinations for globe-trotting travellers (Fliers) and more. I was looking to explore something quite apart from anything I had yet considered or worked with tonally, and because I’m a huge film fan—if not a fan of spy films (I’ve missed the last several Bond films, and don’t expect to ever remedy that)—I thought that maybe something in the nature of a film score would be appropriate.

Then I thought, bemusedly, “What about a spy movie filled with conspiracy theories come to life?” These liner notes give you a pretty good sense of how I arrived there.

So what you will hear on Spycraft is a sort of deliberately over-the-top rendition of a spy film, perhaps partly in earnest homage to my father (who passed away this decade, and who really did strike a connection with me at a time I was struggling by renting and in some cases watching with me the entire Bond oeuvre) but certainly in significant part as a tongue-in-cheek, good-natured rejoinder to those who have wrongly imagined me as a man with an interest in spycraft, melodramatic intrigues, and conspiracy theories.

I am, in fact, like all of you, just a man who loves his country and who wants to see its aging democracy survive for centuries more. And ensuring this requires the exact sort of fidelity to rule of law and the exact sort of attention to detail in political journalism that I hope my curatorial journalism has helped advance. I would much rather that we be living in a different time, in which international news about illicit collusion and/or illegal conspiracies and/or contemptible corruption weren’t part of our daily news diet.

In the album below, each track is titled with a term of art in international espionage, with a sort of implicit narrative undergirding the track order that I have in my mind’s eye but won’t unfold here, as I certainly think listeners can and will author their own appropriate narratives. After all, this is, ultimately, the score to a movie that doesn’t exist. I so encourage you to hear in it sonic echoes of whatever images of spycraft you already have in your head just by way of being alive and alert in the postwar decades.

So even as I hear the killer of our protagonist whistling in “Wetwork”, you might not.

(Alternately, I suspect some of these songs—“Firefight”, “Exfiltrator”, “Turncoat”—could make for good workout music, as they aim to situate us in dramatic moments.)

You can find much more on the language of espionage—including definitions for any of the song titles below whose meaning you don’t immediately recognize—at this link.

With all that said, I very much hope you’ll enjoy Spycraft! I hope it has a sort of energy and vitality you respond to even if, like me, you have no particular interest in either the work of spies or the boundless imagination(s) of our nation’s conspiracy theorists.

{Note: A link to the subscriber-exclusive Spycraft playlist at YouTube can be found at the very bottom of this article.}

Spycraft (2024)

1.Bagman

2. Asset

Read more

To subscribe to Retro ($6 a month) and gain instant access to its 250+ exclusive articles and reports across twelve sections of content, click the button below. You can cancel at any time.

Subscribe now

Introduction

So you’re just now making the decision to get into Taylor Swift’s oeuvre. Where do you start? This report is here to help you make that decision.

This is the second entry in Retro’s National Consensus Series—a mass data curation that aims to answer the most pressing questions in art. The first entry in the series, which focused on finding the national consensus of the best films of Wes Anderson, can be found here.

Rules

Only rankings that included all ten Taylor Swift albums prior to The Tortured Poets Department were used (see the section below for the rankings for Swift’s latest LP).

Albums were assigned points based on their standing in a given ten-album ranking; thus, an album ranked tenth received 1 point, and an album ranked first received 10.

Publications’ handling of Swift’s re-released albums was honored: that is, some chose whichever album version they deemed better to rank; some jointly ranked original and re-released albums (putting both in the same spot in the ranking); and some ignored the re-releases or ignored the original releases (if they were re-released) categorically.

If a publication ranked The Tortured Poets Department, that ranking was ignored for the purposes of the ten-album ranking below—but it was then noted for inclusion in the appropriate section of this report (see the “The Tortured Poets Department” section).

Revelations

Read more

This content is free. To see 225+ more Retro articles across 12 sections, try Retro for free now!

Get 7 day free trial

{Note: The NMDP offers exclusive playlists of contemporary music to help those too busy to track down great new music on their own find amazing new sounds. Retro-recommended songs first released in the 1970s appear in Retro’s “Singular Songs of the Seventies” series, instead, whereas songs from the 1960s appear in the “Lost Classics of the 1960s” series. I have eclectic taste in music, so I hope you’ll enjoy journeying through the past 50 years of music with me!}

While my expertise when I was a disc jockey was in American and British psychedelic music released between 1965 and 1972, I’ve been thrilled to have the opportunity to use Twitter, Threads, and other social media platforms to share the hundreds and hundreds of remarkable songs of more recent vintage I discovered in my decades of collecting LPs (and the countless hours I spent hanging out at a radio station). I hope these playlists will launch some new conversations—including giving members of the Retro community a chance to share your own favorite songs.

If you’re a subscriber to Retro, feel free to let everyone know your favorite song(s) from among the ones below in the comments—and post your own favorite songs, too! I do take suggestions, so you may well see a song you’ve recommended in a future NMDP!

🎵 | Click Here for The New Music Discovery Project, Vol. 20:

Free Playlist

(1) Infinity Song, “Metamorphosis” (2023)

(2) Miracle Fortress, “This Thing About You” (2007)

(3) Jeff Cormack, “Sunshine’s Gone” (2013)

(4) Penelope Scott, “Cigarette Ahegao” (2020)

(5) Syd Arthur, “First Difference” (2012)

(6) Surrogate Sibling (Dieter Dolezel), “Tellur” (2018)

(7) Djo, “End of Beginning” (2022)

(8) Noga Erez, “Views” (2021)

(9) Akon, “Lonely” (2003)

(10) Crayon Fields, “Back, Front, Side, Low, High” (2006)

(11) Beulah, “Emma Blowgun’s Last Stand” (1999)

(12) Ben Salisbury & Suvi-Eeva Äikäs, “Lullaby” (2024)

This content is free. To see 200+ more Retro articles across 12 sections, try Retro for free now!

Get 7 day free trial

{Note: The NMDP offers exclusive playlists of contemporary music to help those too busy to track down great new music on their own find amazing new sounds. Retro-recommended songs first released in the 1970s appear in Retro’s “Singular Songs of the Seventies” series, instead, whereas songs from the 1960s appear in the “Lost Classics of the 1960s” series. I have eclectic taste in music, so I hope you’ll enjoy journeying through the past 50 years of music with me!}

While my expertise when I was a disc jockey was in American and British psychedelic music released between 1965 and 1972, I’ve been thrilled to have the opportunity to use Twitter, Threads, and other social media platforms to share the hundreds and hundreds of remarkable songs of more recent vintage I discovered in my decades of collecting LPs (and the countless hours I spent hanging out at a radio station). I hope these playlists will launch some new conversations—including giving members of the Retro community a chance to share your own favorite songs.

If you’re a subscriber to Retro, feel free to let everyone know your favorite song(s) from among the ones below in the comments—and post your own favorite songs, too! I do take suggestions, so you may well see a song you’ve recommended in a future NMDP!

🎵 | “The New Music Discovery Project, Vol. 19”: Free Playlist

(1) Katie Von Schleicher, “Wheel” (2020)

(2) Claud, “Soft Spot” (2021)

(3) Kikagaru Moyo, “Nazo Nazo” (2018)

(4) Sophie May, “Worst Thoughts in the World” (2023)

(5) Video Age, “Away From the Castle” (2023)

(6) Beach House, “Superstar” (2022)

(7) Marina and the Diamonds, “Mowgli’s Road” (2010)

(8) Doja Cat, “Paint the Town Red” (2023)

(9) Hobo Johnson, “Uglykid” (2019)

(10) Phoebe Bridgers, “Fake Plastic Trees” (2020)

{Radiohead cover}

(11) Youth Lagoon, “Rabbit” (2023)

(12) Phoebe Bridgers, “That Funny Feeling” (2021)

{Bo Burnham cover}

Note: The essay section of this long Retro report is provided for free, along with one AI track. To access the full article, click the button below to sign up for a free seven-day trial of Retro.

Get 7 day free trial

Introduction

This professionally curated Retro series features five AI-created songs in each volume, offered in no particular order. The titles appearing above each track were supplied by the artists who used AI to produce these songs. None of these songs are endorsed by their listed performers. They are intended solely for education, as they illuminate important uses of a new technology.

In the first edition of this series, I offered some preliminary thoughts about AI music. If you’re interested in following along as the “Best AI Music in the World” series expands and evolves within the Music section of Retro, I do hope you will read that—admittedly lengthy, far-ranging, and alternately personal and theoretical—essay.

One of the points made by the essay is just how rapidly AI music is developing. And nothing could be a better indicator of this than just looking at the last year of major-media news. It seems that everyone is now talking and writing about AI music and doing so with enormous urgency. On April 11, 2023, The Financial Times reported that

Universal Music Group (UMG) has told streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple, to block artificial intelligence services from scraping melodies and lyrics from their copyrighted songs, according to emails viewed by the Financial Times.

UMG—which controls about a third of the global music market—has become increasingly concerned about AI bots using their songs to train themselves to churn out music that sounds like popular artists. AI-generated songs have been popping up on streaming services and UMG has been sending takedown requests “left and right”, said a person familiar with the matter.

The company is asking streaming companies to cut off access to their music catalogue for developers using it to train AI technology.

More recently, the New York Times reported that “[state and federal] lawmakers are beginning to contemplate questions about authorship and ownership around creative machines [because] the stakes for creative businesses are high.”

According to the Times, the three key questions being asked right now are these:

1. “What is owed to the creators of the original material?”

2. “Does ‘[the] fair use [doctrine]’ apply?”

3. “Who owns the output of generative A.I.?”

To Retro, the answers to these questions seem straight-forward—though it will no doubt take a good deal of time for state and federal courts to work through them.

The Future of AI Music

Ultimately, AI cover versions of non-public-domain songs will have to give royalties to the original artists, just as cover versions and their artists have done for decades now.

The fair-use doctrine will be applied or not based on the usual considerations for its application, including whether an existing song has been sampled but materially altered and whether there’s a parodic, critical, and/or educational purpose in play. And while courts currently don’t recognize “algo jockeys”—the digital artists who, like early graphic designers, use text and their technological know-how to make artifacts they couldn’t create using their own motor skills—as copyright holders, it’s likely AI music will at some point in the future become, at least in some fashion, copyrightable.

In the meantime, the three questions asked above will have the short-term effect of making it that much harder to locate AI music online—unless you habitually go deep into the bowels of YouTube and TikTok or locate obscure user-made Spotify playlists.

Indeed, after the scores of “takedowns” relating to the Drake & The Weeknd AI song “Heart on My Sleeve”, it has already become notably harder to find full AI-generated tracks online (particularly those that are produced in the style of a famous artist, and even more so if that artist is still alive). Far more common, now—a phenomenon we will see in this particular edition of the “Best AI Music in the World”—are AI covers of existing tracks by popular living artists, usually but not always by artists who have passed away or are, for various reasons, particularly unlikely to issue takedown notices on YouTube.

The chief remaining question for AI music, however, is whether and when it will be embraced by working artists on the grounds that it could be tremendously lucrative for them. One can imagine a near-term future in which—in the same way artists now release singles or EPs featuring a single song alongside some remixes of it sanctioned by the artist—new singles are accompanied instead by AI tracks of other artists singing the same song. These professionally produced AI tracks would of course be made with the permission of these second (and third and fourth, as the case may be) artists, with these other artists expecting royalty payments even though they’ve not done any work themselves. Indeed, while of course we’ll continue to see collaborations between big artists in perpetuity, AI could transcend the limits of time, space, money, scheduling, and other logistics to permit virtual collaborations that couldn’t be orchestrated otherwise. (Imagine, for instance, foreign releases of U.S.-published music that allow local listeners to hear how the songs might be sung by local artists they already know.)

The Upshot

In short, in business—and entertainment is a business—profit always finds a way.

The anger that accompanied the emergence of “covers” in the 1960s faded away once America’s legal system developed a way for artists who had had their songs covered to benefit from it. Suddenly, artists were not only okay with cover versions of their songs but starting writing new songs, more than they ever had before, that they from the jump intended to see hit big with other artists. They might record their own version for posterity and for their own self-satisfaction, but they knew that the real money lay in having someone else with either a different voice or a different fan base or a different appeal or a unique connection to the lyrics of the song perform it for a mass audience.

Is AI much different? So long as a track is performed with the permission of the artist whose voice is used (who presumably doesn’t have the time or inclination—for either reputation or timing reasons—to do a live cover version)? Many artists would relish the idea of passive income of this sort not just to get rich but to help fund their own future projects. And because AI tracks can help songs and singers jump genres, they create an opportunity for, say, a country singer to reach a hip-hop audience or vice versa, something that ordinarily would only be possible with an enormous investment of time and energy by the artist(s) involved in such attempts and/or collaborations.

Just so, the estates of deceased singers must know that when a singer who has passed on goes viral for having their “voice” used in an AI track that millions hear, that (a) keeps the artist’s name and story and reputation alive and relevant; (b) could lead to new fans for (and purchases of) the original music by the said artist (which will almost always sound better, and more suited to the artist, than the AI track that people have already come to love, meaning a better chance of new-fan adoption); and (c) expands the cultural impact and artistic oeuvre of a deceased artist in ways that are exciting and showcase the versatility of that artist’s native talents. And as long as every AI track is transparently labeled as such—and even in these early days of AI, almost all of them are, as creators who fail to do so know they will be called out and chastised by the public and then punished by social media platforms like YouTube—no music fans are being misled into thinking a late singer or band performed work they really didn’t.

The history of technological innovation—and indeed artistic innovation as well—is that major innovations are first met with anger, then rejection, then curiosity, then bemusement, then acceptance, and finally crystallize within a culture as though they’d always been there. There’s candidly no reason to believe AI music will be any different.

{Note: On rare occasion, songs that appear in this series may be unsettling to certain viewers due to their ability to mimic human singers both living and deceased. Please know that any such upset is unintentional. These artworks are intended to surprise, delight, illuminate and amaze, not provoke negative emotions or physical responses. However, because AI-generated work product is definitionally already lodged deep in the “uncanny valley”, occasional strong reactions to the songs in this series from some listeners are to be expected. Certain tracks are prefaced by a “curator’s note” that briefly explains why I find the work to be of artistic merit.}

(1) Whitney Houston, “Bohemian Rhapsody” (Queen cover)

(2) Frank Sinatra, “Wonderwall” (Oasis cover)

Read more

This content is free. To see 200+ more Retro articles across 12 sections, try Retro for free now!

Get 7 day free trial

{Note: The NMDP offers exclusive playlists of contemporary music to help those too busy to track down great new music on their own find amazing new sounds. Retro-recommended songs first released in the 1970s appear in Retro’s “Singular Songs of the Seventies” series, instead, whereas songs from the 1960s appear in the “Lost Classics of the 1960s” series. I have eclectic taste in music, so I hope you’ll enjoy journeying through the past 50 years of music with me!}

While my expertise when I was a disc jockey was in American and British psychedelic music released between 1965 and 1972, I’ve been thrilled to have the opportunity to use Twitter, Threads, and other social media platforms to share the hundreds and hundreds of remarkable songs of more recent vintage I discovered in my decades of collecting LPs (and the countless hours I spent hanging out at a radio station). I hope these playlists will launch some new conversations—including giving members of the Retro community a chance to share your own favorite songs.

If you’re a subscriber to Retro, feel free to let everyone know your favorite song(s) from among the ones below in the comments—and post your own favorite songs, too! I do take suggestions, so you may well see a song you’ve recommended in a future NMDP!

🎵 | “The New Music Discovery Project, Vol. 18”: Free Playlist

(1) Young Jesus, “The Weasel” (2023)

(2) Alban Claudin, “Resilience” (2023)

(3) Japanese Breakfast, “Paprika” (2021)

(4) The Divine Comedy, “Love What You Do” (2001)

(5) Genesis Owusu, “Get Inspired” (2022) [NSFW]

(6) Melenas, “Bang” (2023)

(7) Jain, “Makeba” (2015)

(8) Gorillaz, “Plastic Dream” (2010)

(9) Guster, “Manifest Destiny” (2006) [NSFW]

(10) Kikagayu Mogu, “Cardigan Song” (2016)

Retro is celebrating “Retropalooza” all November. Click below to get 30% off any type of Retro subscription. Thank you for making Retro one of the Top 20 History substacks in the world!

Get 30% off for 1 year

{Note: This series offers ten-track playlists of contemporary music. Many of the songs in this series previously appeared on the Twitter feed linked to Retro. Songs that were first released in the 1970s will appear in Retro’s “Singular Songs of the Seventies” series instead, while songs from the 1960s appear in the “Lost Classics of the 1960s” series. I have eclectic taste in music, so I do hope you will enjoy this bracing journey through the music of the past three decades!}

While my expertise when I was a disc jockey was in American and British psychedelic music released between 1965 and 1972, I’ve been thrilled to have the opportunity to use Twitter and other social media platforms to share the hundreds of amazing songs of more recent vintage I discovered in my decades of collecting LPs (and the countless hours I spent hanging out at a radio station). I hope these playlists will launch some new conversations—including giving members of the Retro community a chance to share your own favorite songs in the comment-fields below.

So if you’re a subscriber to Retro, feel free to let everyone know your favorite(s) from among the songs below in the comments—and to post your own favorite songs, too!

(🎵) “The Goodnight Playlist, Vol. 17” @ YouTube: Listen Now

(1) LABRYS, “Deeper” (2017)

(2) Portugal. The Man, “Waves” (2013)

(3) 26fix, “Stone Killer” (2023)

(4) Pinegrove, “Darkness” (2018)

(5) Matthew Puffett, “Lower the Anchor” (2021)

(6) Mitski, “Bug Like An Angel” (2023)

(7) Thom Yorke, “Suspirium” (2018)

(8) Atari Jones, “Lunch n’ Breakfast” (2016) [NSFW]

(9) Helen Jane Long, “Doll” (2007)

(10) Jean-Michel Blais, “Amour” (2022)

(11) H. Hawkline, “I Need Him” (2022)

(12) Ruth Moody, “Dancing in the Dark” (2013)

(13) Small Paul, “Miner for a Dream” (2023)

(14) Momma, “Medicine” (2022)

(15) Metro Boomin, A$AP Rocky & Roisee, “Am I Dreaming” (2023) [Warning: Flashing Lights in Video]

Introduction

I don’t pretend to have a special expertise in Native American music—either popular or traditional—in the way I do British and American psychedelic music from 1966 to 1972, the subject of the twenty-five-volume “Lost Classics of the 1960s” series here at Retro Music.

But I know enough about the general shape of music history…

Read more

{Note: This series offers ten-track playlists of contemporary music. Many of the songs in this series previously appeared on the Twitter feed linked to Retro. Songs that were first released in the 1970s will appear in Retro’s “Singular Songs of the Seventies” series instead, while songs from the 1960s appear in the “Lost Classics of the 1960s” series. I have eclectic taste in music, so I do hope you will enjoy this bracing journey through the music of the past three decades!}

Subscribe now

While my expertise when I was a disc jockey was in American and British psychedelic music released between 1965 and 1972, I’ve been thrilled to have the opportunity to use Twitter and other social media platforms to share the hundreds of amazing songs of more recent vintage I discovered in my decades of collecting LPs (and the countless hours I spent hanging out at a radio station). I hope these playlists will launch some new conversations—including giving members of the Retro community a chance to share your own favorite songs in the comment-fields below.

So if you’re a subscriber to Retro, feel free to let everyone know your favorite(s) from among the songs below in the comments—and to post your own favorite songs, too!

(🎵) “The Goodnight Playlist, Vol. 16” @ YouTube: Listen Now

(1) Vampire Weekend, “Harmony Hall” (2019)

(2) Teddybears, “Yours to Keep” (2000)

(3) Noah and the Whale, “5 Years Time” (2008)

(4) Bishop Allen, “Things Are What You Make of Them” (2003)

(5) Yael Naim, “New Soul” (2007)

(6) The Lazy Eyes, “Tangerine” (2022)

(7) Mates of State, “Now” (2008)

(8) Voxtrot, “Your Biggest Fan” (2006)

(9) Ratatat, “Wildcat” (2006)

Subscribe now

(10) The Lazy Eyes, “Fuzz Jam” (2022)

{Note: This series features ten singular seventies songs at a time, offered in no particular order but intended to be approximately the length of an LP. Among the genres you will find in this series are rock, pop, folk, soul, funk, reggae, prog, punk, glam, disco, art rock, jazz rock, early electronica and much more. Dates—to the best of my ability—are recording, not release dates.}

Introduction

“Seventies music” has a problem.

The first three (even five) years of the decade are sometimes treated as an extension of “sixties music”—as they’re often referred to as part of the Long Sixties, a notional period spanning from 1963 to 1972—even as most music listeners enamored with the music of the 1960s to the point of listening to such music on satellite radio exclude works from 1974, 1973, 1972, often 1971, and sometimes 1970 from the library of music whose continued airplay and notoriety they endorse and sponsor. This can leave 1970, 1971, 1972, and to a lesser extent 1973 and 1974 in a “limbo” within U.S. music history.

Meanwhile, the last three—sometimes even four—years of the decade are so defined by genres of music many love to hate (e.g., disco) or “proto-” versions of music that was as or even more popular in the early 1980s (e.g., New Wave, rap, and punk) that it’s all too easy for anthologists and even DJs to put music from these years into its own cloister.

What gets lost in this perpetual squeezing from both ends is what I often think of as the quintessential sound(s) of the decade—subgenres that lived and died entirely in the 1970s, with little trace of them before or after. (To be clear, I mean little trace of them in purified form; it must of course be said that these subgenres were influential on much that followed).

So consider, for instance, the so-called “singer-songwriter” subgenre. Or funk. Or the heyday of British folk. Prog rock. Indie punk. Glam rock. Zamrock. Or Krautrock.

There are even iterations of power pop that I would say only existed in the 1970s.

And what about yacht rock? Jazz rock? The unique features of early metal? Classical minimalism? “Art rock.” Afrobeat.

The music critic Robert Christgau once noted that, though 1969 was the final year of the 1960s, the slogan “the sixties are over” is one that “one only began to hear in 1972 or so”—“began,” I emphasize here, because the effect of that thinking was to at once create a Long Sixties that extended into 1972 or even 1973 (a good four years into the seventies) and to crowbar public sense of what the “seventies” meant to music into an ever smaller and smaller window of time. Eventually, I’d submit, the term “seventies music” came to mean, to many, nothing more than songs from 1975, 1976, and 1977.

Even 1978 and 1979 somehow got consumed—though in this case by the 1980s, the decade that saw many artists or bands who got their start in 1978 or 1979 go wide.

I was born in late 1976 and have no independent memories of the 1970s. I dislike disco and am left cold by much early New Wave music. When I entered college in 1994, I discovered The Beatles and began an obsession with the Long Sixties that continues to the current day (and is encapsulated in both the “Lost Classics of the 1960s” series here at Retro and my former AM radio show from the late 1990s). So it took me many, many, many years to fully appreciate that the seventies has gotten a bad rap and that I am as guilty as anyone of helping to author it.

Why do I say that?

Because as a longtime lover of sixties music, I tend to take any songs from the first four years of the seventies that I enjoy and think of them as a “carryover” from the sixties. I also, in similar fashion, attach to the music of my youth—“eighties music”—the best songs from 1978 and 1979, not because I heard the songs at the time (I was an infant) but because by the time I began watching MTV in 1985 many of the best songs of that era in American music were from bands clearly rooted in the very late 1970s.

In other words, I was doing my best to strangle out of the term “seventies music” any meaning at all. And as someone who thereafter became not just a DJ but an active music critic, and then after that someone who taught “meme music” and other digital-age musical detritus at the university level, I realize now that I sometimes let my own music-history biases creep into my public-facing content.

With this new Retro series, I hope to make things right.

But in my own way, as ever.

I’m not as interested in seventies music that clearly reached escape velocity from the dustbin of history: Aerosmith, say, or (as a three- or four-hit wonder only), Boston. I grew up on Billy Joel, including his hits from the 1970s, so I’m not worried about how his legacy is faring. The same goes for James Taylor, Bruce Springsteen, and Queen.

On the other hand, while I’m intrigued by one-hit wonders, I’m not as invested in just making a catalogue of artists that were good approximately once over the course of a decade.

I have always been, instead, a “hidden gem” sort of guy, as horrifyingly cliché as that term has become not just in music but in other arenas—like video games—since the advent of the internet.

So I started this essay by writing that “seventies music has a problem,” but really, as I think this brief essay has likely established, it’s I who have a problem. And while I’ve no doubt that the very best historians of seventies music don’t have this particular issue I’ve here described, I’m equally certain if I as a former DJ and music critic and cultural studies professor who regularly listens to music published between 1970 and 1973 does indeed have this problem, a good many others do also. So hopefully this series will help remedy it, and even more importantly, introduce you to some fantastic songs you’ve never heard before!

Playlist

(🎶) “Singular Songs of the Seventies, Volume 1” at YouTube: Listen Now

Tracks

(1) The Flamin’ Groovies, “Shake Some Action” (1972)

(2) Alive n’ Kickin’, “Tighter, Tighter” (1970)

(3) Arthur Russell, “I Couldn’t Say It To Your Face” (1976)

(4) The Distractions, “Time Goes By So Slowly” (1979)

(5) Jeanette, “Porque Te Vas” (1974)

(6) We Intend To Cause Havoc (W.I.T.C.H.), “Introduction” (1972)

(7) The Members, “The Sound of the Suburbs” (1979)

(8) Can, “Vitamin C” (1972)

(9) Mud, “Dynamite” (1973)

(10) Blues Image, “Ride Captain Ride” (1970)

{Note: This Retro series features five AI-created songs in each volume, offered in no particular order. The song titles appearing above each track were supplied by the digital artists who used AI to produce these songs. None of the songs below are endorsed by their listed performers.}

Introduction

All of the songs below are AI-generated and are intended purely for entertainment.

In the first edition of this series, I offered some preliminary thoughts about AI music. If you’re interested in following along as the “Best AI Music in the World” series expands and evolves within the Music section of Retro, I do hope you will read that—admittedly lengthy, far-ranging, and alternately personal and theoretical—essay.

One of the points made by the essay is just how rapidly AI music is developing. And nothing could be a better indicator of this than just looking at the last few months of major-media news. It seems that everyone is now talking and writing about AI music and doing so with enormous urgency. On April 11, The Financial Times reported that

Universal Music Group (UMG) has told streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple, to block artificial intelligence services from scraping melodies and lyrics from their copyrighted songs, according to emails viewed by the Financial Times.

UMG—which controls about a third of the global music market—has become increasingly concerned about AI bots using their songs to train themselves to churn out music that sounds like popular artists. AI-generated songs have been popping up on streaming services and UMG has been sending takedown requests “left and right”, said a person familiar with the matter.

The company is asking streaming companies to cut off access to their music catalogue for developers using it to train AI technology.

More recently, the New York Times reported that “[state and federal] lawmakers are beginning to contemplate questions about authorship and ownership around creative machines [because] the stakes for creative businesses are high.”

According to the Times, the three key questions being asked right now are these:

1. “What is owed to the creators of the original material?”

2. “Does ‘[the] fair use [doctrine]’ apply?”

3. “Who owns the output of generative A.I.?”

To Retro, the answers to these questions seem straight-forward—though it will no doubt take a good deal of time for state and federal courts to work through them.

Ultimately, AI cover versions of non-public-domain songs will have to give royalties to the original artists, just as cover versions and their artists have done for decades now. The fair-use doctrine will be applied or not based on the usual considerations for its application, including whether an existing song has been sampled but materially altered and whether there’s a parodic, critical, and/or educational purpose in play. And while courts currently don’t recognize “algo jockeys”—the digital artists who, like early graphic designers, use text and their technological know-how to make artifacts they couldn’t create using their own motor skills—as copyright holders, it is likely AI music will at some point in the future become, at least in some fashion, copyrightable.

In the meantime, the three questions asked above will have the short-term effect of making it that much harder to locate AI music online—unless you habitually go deep into the bowels of YouTube and TikTok or locate obscure user-made Spotify playlists.

Indeed, after the scores of “takedowns” relating to the Drake & The Weeknd AI song “Heart on My Sleeve”, it has already become notably harder to find full AI-generated tracks online (particularly those that are produced in the style of a famous artist). Far more common, now—a phenomenon we will see in this particular edition of the “Best AI Music in the World”—are (a) songs performed by humans that use AI-generated lyrics, and (b) AI “covers” of existing (in some cases obscure) tracks by popular artists.

{Note: On rare occasion, songs that appear in this series may be unsettling to certain viewers due to their ability to mimic human singers both living and deceased. Please know that any such upset is unintentional. These artworks are intended to surprise, delight, illuminate and amaze, not provoke negative emotions or physical responses. However, because AI-generated work product is definitionally already lodged deep in the “uncanny valley”, occasional strong reactions to the songs in this series from some listeners are to be expected. Certain tracks are prefaced by a “curator’s note” that briefly explains why I find the work to be of artistic merit.}

1 | Freddie Mercury, “Thriller” (Michael Jackson cover)

2 | Michael Jackson, “Eye of the Tiger” (Survivor cover)

3 | Freddie Mercury, “Don’t Look Back in Anger” (Oasis cover)

4 | Mark Thurau, “Superman’s Too Late”

Curator’s note: The lyrics for this Mark Thurau song were created by AI—specifically by running a very large number of 1990s indie-pop and pop-punk songs through an AI program to produce the “median lyrics” for such a song at that point in music history.

5 | Kanye West, “Viva La Vida” (Coldplay cover)

Curator’s note: I’ve been wondering about—and disappointed by—the fact that so many of the best AI covers feature Kanye West’s “voice” or someone else “covering” a West track. I suspect that one of the reasons (and this would also explain why there are so many AI songs connected to musicians who have passed away—particularly if, like Michael Jackson, they passed away under a cloud of controversy) is that at this point AI engineers feel more comfortable testing the waters of AI music with an artist they deem unlikely or unable to make much of a fuss over their experimentation. But then there is an alternative, and I think considerably more romantic, interpretation: an artist like Kanye West has so thoroughly ruined his professional and personal life with his antisemitism and his apparent reluctance to treat his ongoing mental health struggles that many songs simply sound more meaningful, now, in his voice. A great example is Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida”, a song about a once-admired man fallen into desperate straits. The lyrics of the song could easily be describing West’s own descent into self-delusion and hatred, which makes the track below an intriguing listen even if, as ever, I could wish that far fewer of the best AI tracks now available—keeping in mind there really aren’t that many, yet—involve a man with views as hateful as West’s.

Read more

{Note: This series features ten lost sixties classics at a time, offered in no particular order but intended to be approximately the length of an LP. Among the genres and subgenres included in the series are rock, pop, folk, soul, funk, reggae, psychedelic pop-rock, psychedelic folk, folk-rock, folk-pop, proto-electronica, proto-punk, early prog, early …

Read more

Introduction

It has a Wikipedia article. It featured a Top 20 Melody Maker hit. It has what is surely one of the best non-hit pop songs of the 1960s, “Creeping Jean.” It offers an addicting blend of British Invasion pop-rock, dance-hall moddishness, a circus- and busker-like ambiance, Bob Dylan, The Byrds, and British folk music that at times echoes obsc…

Read more