There were mix tapes provided by friends, which soon became CDs, which became playlists. Then the playlists started getting different, curated not by the human beings around me, but by algorithms designed to show me what I already like. This can lead things to feeling a little stale, a little samey samey and ultraprocessed. I hear only what I want to hear, and that makes me feel like a stagnant pond.
In the last six months, there’s been a new shift in the approach to recommendation. Take, for instance, my recent tendency to listen to Parisian jazz. A sultry chanteuse singing wistfully of l’amour jazzie is chill enough to take the edge off of any commute, but…the algorithms being the algorithms…my lists were getting a bit stale. So I went looking for more, and from artists I didn’t know. What I found was dozens of new albums, all filled with voices I’d never heard. Like, say, Eva LaNuit, whose music filled my car on a recent drive. Je n’ai pas change, purred the voice beneath a guttural sax, and I thought, who is this?
Her versions of old standards felt like slipping into a well worn shoe. Tight and interestingly constructed improvisationally, her sound was exactly what I was looking for, exactly. So I looked her up when I got home, and of course, she doesn’t exist. She’s an AI simulacrum, her voice and her tightly tasteful backup band all constructed from extant music and prompts from a user in Morocco, ones and zeros. She is not the droid I am looking for.
But many people are in this strange new age. The AI “band” Breaking Rust recently had the best selling streaming single in all of country music, with the unsettlingly good single Walk My Walk. An AI “artist” called Solomon Ray has repeatedly topped the Gospel charts, which is remarkable for a singer that literally has no soul. The songs are catchy, the songs work, and once you listen to one, the machine just keeps serving them up, over and over again. The cup of AI slop runneth over, and I want nothing more than to wash it all from my mind. It is a new thing, and there’s plenty of it.
There come times when societies fall into decadence, when they forget their purpose and what makes them good, and culture begins to rot. How, if one lives in such a time, do you restore your sense of self and sanity? How do you commit to reclaiming what was lost?
In first century Judah, you did that by being baptized. Baptism finds its spiritual foundation in the mikvah, an ancient Jewish practice of self-purification and cleansing. That practice literally washed away impurities of the flesh, allowing a person to return to connection with community. By the time of Jesus, baptism had become a way to renew one’s commitment to God’s covenant of faithfulness and justice, as the Temple in Jerusalem became more and more woven up with the greed and moral rot of the Herodian dynasty. Herod the Great and his incestuous brood were interested only in their own gain, and that corruption trickled down to the priesthood and the temple, an edifice wrapped in gold and ego.
Out in the desert wilderness, John the Baptist wasn’t just there because he liked the feel of camel hair and the satisfying crunch of protein rich locust chitin. He was there to share a message to a people who knew they had lost their way, who sensed that all around them had yielded to the siren song of greed and power, and who felt the loss of their identity as a covenant people.
And so the ritual of baptism became a way to recommit yourself to the faith of your people, symbolically representing the washing away of sin through the washing of the body.
In Christianity, that ancient sacred tradition was continued. It became the symbolic entry into the Way that Jesus taught, a sign that we have turned away from the way of life defined by mammon, domination, and brokenness, and instead turned ourselves in joy to the good news and the new life it proclaims.
New life, however, doesn’t mean the things we tend to think it means. It doesn’t mean more of the things that our society teaches us to view as success. It is explicitly and intentionally not that. There is nothing more dangerous to our souls than hearing only what you expect to hear. If we are walking the Way of Jesus, it means day after day recalling the purpose established in our baptism.
So what to do, when the songs around us are no longer truly human, and when the mediating structures that connect us no longer do so?
I wonder that, in my listening to the music that fills my hours. It’s not that AI-generated music is bad in the abstract. It is not, not any more, not like the amusingly incompetent bluegrass hymn I had an AI make in praise of Poolesville Presbyterian church a year ago. Just twelve months ago, the best AI could do worked for two verses, then descended into something that sounded like speaking in tongues, which isn’t particularly Presbyterian.
Now, it’s perfect, seamless, exactly what you want, exactly what you expect.
The easy Turkish-delight sweetness of it is as tempting as the songs that filled the ears of Odysseus with yearning as he strained against the mast.
So I attend to every new song I hear with care. If the images accompanying the music are all AI generated, that’s a marker. If the musician has no history, no story, and seems to have just popped into existence a month ago, that’s a marker. I ask myself, is this the real life, or is this just fantasy?
I scrub my playlists clean, and seek instead real human voices, in all our most beautiful variety and difference.
But many people are in this strange new age. The AI “band” Breaking Rust recently had the best selling streaming single in all of country music, with the unsettlingly good single Walk My Walk. An AI “artist” called Solomon Ray has repeatedly topped the Gospel charts, which is remarkable for a singer that literally has no soul. The songs are catchy, the songs work, and once you listen to one, the machine just keeps serving them up, over and over again. The cup of AI slop runneth over, and I want nothing more than to wash it all from my mind. It is a new thing, and there’s plenty of it.
There come times when societies fall into decadence, when they forget their purpose and what makes them good, and culture begins to rot. How, if one lives in such a time, do you restore your sense of self and sanity? How do you commit to reclaiming what was lost?
In first century Judah, you did that by being baptized. Baptism finds its spiritual foundation in the mikvah, an ancient Jewish practice of self-purification and cleansing. That practice literally washed away impurities of the flesh, allowing a person to return to connection with community. By the time of Jesus, baptism had become a way to renew one’s commitment to God’s covenant of faithfulness and justice, as the Temple in Jerusalem became more and more woven up with the greed and moral rot of the Herodian dynasty. Herod the Great and his incestuous brood were interested only in their own gain, and that corruption trickled down to the priesthood and the temple, an edifice wrapped in gold and ego.
Out in the desert wilderness, John the Baptist wasn’t just there because he liked the feel of camel hair and the satisfying crunch of protein rich locust chitin. He was there to share a message to a people who knew they had lost their way, who sensed that all around them had yielded to the siren song of greed and power, and who felt the loss of their identity as a covenant people.
And so the ritual of baptism became a way to recommit yourself to the faith of your people, symbolically representing the washing away of sin through the washing of the body.
In Christianity, that ancient sacred tradition was continued. It became the symbolic entry into the Way that Jesus taught, a sign that we have turned away from the way of life defined by mammon, domination, and brokenness, and instead turned ourselves in joy to the good news and the new life it proclaims.
New life, however, doesn’t mean the things we tend to think it means. It doesn’t mean more of the things that our society teaches us to view as success. It is explicitly and intentionally not that. There is nothing more dangerous to our souls than hearing only what you expect to hear. If we are walking the Way of Jesus, it means day after day recalling the purpose established in our baptism.
So what to do, when the songs around us are no longer truly human, and when the mediating structures that connect us no longer do so?
I wonder that, in my listening to the music that fills my hours. It’s not that AI-generated music is bad in the abstract. It is not, not any more, not like the amusingly incompetent bluegrass hymn I had an AI make in praise of Poolesville Presbyterian church a year ago. Just twelve months ago, the best AI could do worked for two verses, then descended into something that sounded like speaking in tongues, which isn’t particularly Presbyterian.
Now, it’s perfect, seamless, exactly what you want, exactly what you expect.
The easy Turkish-delight sweetness of it is as tempting as the songs that filled the ears of Odysseus with yearning as he strained against the mast.
So I attend to every new song I hear with care. If the images accompanying the music are all AI generated, that’s a marker. If the musician has no history, no story, and seems to have just popped into existence a month ago, that’s a marker. I ask myself, is this the real life, or is this just fantasy?
I scrub my playlists clean, and seek instead real human voices, in all our most beautiful variety and difference.
And I start considering my tendency to use AI for things that once would have been the realm of artists and photographers. Those images were only there, after all, to market my writing, to create a visual splash on social media platforms I no longer use. Why use them at all? Perhaps now is the time to make that change.
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