On Artificial Intelligence

and '80s Drums Sounds

I haven’t found the quote I needed, but I’m going with this anyway. However scrappy or badly expressed.

Somewhere, some time ago, Peter Buck, guitarist in R.E.M., said something like —

Listen back to us and everyone else, we were the only band in the 1980s with a bearable drum sound.

(If you can help me track it down, please do.)

The sentiments of this are backed up by some words I did find, which were Michael Stipe, singer in R.E.M., saying —

At the time, in the early ’80s, everybody wanted the vocals really loud and the drums really loud because it was post-disco. And no matter who you were, if you turn the drums up, you’re more likely to have a head [start]. And we were like, ‘Turn the drums down, turn the vocals down,’ we were the people that were saying, ‘Turn everything down.’ We want everything quieter...

— on a recent-ish Broken Record podcast with producer Rick Rubin.

You may not love R.E.M. as much as I do, especially their albums before Document — when their drum sound also became unnecessarily BIG and FORWARD. But you surely know what I mean when I say ’80s drum sounds.

Examples: Starship, ‘We Built this City’, Daryl Hall & John Oates, ‘Maneater’, Berlin, ‘Take My Breath Away’, The Waterboys, ‘The Whole of the Moon’.

Now, there’s a lot of Gen X nostalgia for these songs, and a great deal of fondness from Millennials for the soundtrack to their parents’ generation. See Stranger Things.

However, today it’s easy to choose to listen to something else. You can have your #ThrowbackThursday, but then escape into ambient or classical or jets descending toward wherever.

I lived through the near monoculture of big drums, on Radio 1 and Top of the Pops, and when I look at art — all art — produced by Artificial Intelligence, that’s the flashback I’m having.

AI is today’s smug syndrum backbeat.

AI is a pervasive four-four thump thump.

Yes, I’m reacting to just this slightly naff 2024 moment in AI’s development, and, yes, I am not young — I am well aware of both these facts.

(Aside: I agree with Noam Chomsky’s characterisation of AI as ‘plagiarism software’. Wrestliana and Ghost Story were among the 191,000 books used to train generative-AI systems.)

AI is hugely more than a current style. It’s only doing what people ask it to do, as well as it can. And if I ask it to make me an R.E.M. song in the style of Murmur, I’m sure it’ll come up with a fair imitation of Bill Berry’s drum sound.

The point I’m trying to make is that it’s the musical virtues that we lost when ’80s drums took over — a live relationship between musicians, including speeding up and slowing down; air and sweat and heartbreak in the room; brilliant mistakes, accidental overtones; human frailty; unplastic soul; the good stuff — that’s what’s being gladly eliminated now. The usual litany of analogue intangibles.

All of which AI can probably already mimic, if given a clear enough prompt, and I soon might not be able to tell whether I’m listening to an R.E.M. bootleg or a MuseNet agglomeration of all Berry-Buck-Mills-Stipe’s stylistic tics.

I’m probably in a minority, but I think most of the decisions, artistic and social, that were made in the 1980s were very bad ones.

I have very little nostalgia for the birth of neoliberalism.

If we’re heading for an AI monoculture, I already want out.

I know what it sounds like.