May 13ths

Today's Songday is based on the 5/13/1977 Keith Haring journal entry, apparently when he was hitchhiking from Minnesota to North Dakota. 

"Took a bus to 1-94 and caught a few little rides and then a truck ride all the way to the border of N. Dakota where we ate three cheeseburgers and drank some beers. It was all farmers and when I went to the bathroom they all talked about my hair...Rednecks! Then we got a ride from a pilot who likes Bachman Turner Overdrive and then a truck ride into N. Dakota."

This was arranged for string quartet and became one of the Shortets:

5/13/2012

Duck Dunn died at 70 in Tokyo.

5/13/2015

Music in 2015 is where cubism was 100 years ago, ready to be redefined for better or for worse. Perhaps this type of rhythmic structure eluding the bar line is the perfect expression for life in the teens, as we may look back at it 100 years from now, which is how long it may take for music to completely change.

[5/13/2025: AI music can’t be avant-garde (yet) or even postmodernist–unless the data sets are set up to be that way, allowing for experimentation. But who’s going to pay a monthly fee to be avant-garde?] 

5/13/2024

When I think about AI now in comparison to music technologies in the mid and late 80s, I see it as being provisional and experimental, and interesting in that way. When I got my first cassette 4-track in 1988 it was basically a way to experiment. In 2024 I think it’s still in that phase. People who are using it now are how I used it in the late 80s with my new 4-track, such as turning the tape over, using different tape speeds, recording found objects and sounds. It was all about experimentation, yet in the flow of other more “serious” things, or where the experiments turned into something traditionally usable.

If ChatGPT and LLMs existed in 1988 people would be experimenting as they would with tape, and would be very popular and everyone would be making mixtapes and sharing them around. There would be millions and millions of cassette tapes and it would be overwhelming—huge mountains of cassettes of people experimenting with the new technology. It’s a good thing that the mountains are now digital. 

[5/13/2025: It’s astonishing how much the AI scene has changed in only 1 year. Back in 2015 when one of the first AI-generated tracks was released, Daddy’s Car with its warbly vibe, I thought it was like the DIY cassette era, but it went beyond that–in a bad way. AI-generation is not a tinkering as it was in 1988–it’s making fully-produced music for your own radio station. It’s interesting in a different way, but not experimental at all. The process is more getting an idea to fit within particular categories or “programs”].