Nick Cave Kicks Out The Jams While All the World’s AI Moshes in the Pit

In this great post over at Brain Pickings – Maria Popova shines a light on Nick Cave’s answer to a fan question about future artificial intelligence creating ‘perfect songs’ with no humans needed. The short answer is, yes they will, but the long answer is they still won’t be the same.

Nick fucking lays it down and single-handedly summarizes what I’ve been feeling but was unable to get out in any coherent way when I’ve been thinking about the future of music in an AI world. Get over there and witness his glory for yourself.

I don’t feel that when we listen to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” it is only the song that we are listening to. It feels to me, that what we are actually listening to is a withdrawn and alienated young man’s journey out of the small American town of Aberdeen — a young man who by any measure was a walking bundle of dysfunction and human limitation — a young man who had the temerity to howl his particular pain into a microphone and in doing so, by way of the heavens, reach into the hearts of a generation.

Nick Cave

Amen, Brother.