Instead of a Dream

 

AI songs based on this entry:

7/19/2012

Art is said to die sometimes. But it is not the series of marks or gestures displayed on a surface; it is the ideas behind the marks that die. Painting is alive in the caves of Lascaux, but the stories of impaling a bison are long dead.     

As with all AI-generated music, the lyrics are tweaked along the way, so even if you use a "seed," the songwriter becomes the "genetic engineer".

The images are both by Richard Prince from his Cowboy series, where he, as well as a cadre of other artists, known as the Pictures Generation in the 70s, appropriated existing images from magazines, such as Marlboro advertisements, and used them as readymades. They both seemed to go well with the music and lyrics, as contemporary art, being a kind of stunt, or "ideas behind the marks". Some of the Prince prints exceed $1M on the secondary market.

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A lead sheet (Version 1). It's interesting to transcribe some of these and actually play them. This way you're not completely "cheating" or just being a "musicist"

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P.S.:  It's okay to make up a story after you thought you've already told it. Very often with lyric-writing it's all wordplay. Once you think you have a final lyric and you (kinda) know the story, it might become clearer over time. It tells you some of the things you might have been trying to say. Sometimes you have to trust that what seems to be nonsense can eventually gather meaning. It's important for artists to ultimately clarify it to the extent that it can be communicated. In the end, you can say, "that's what I'm saying".

Alternate titles:

- Plain Box of You
- Nothing Before
- Secrets Disappear
- A Mystery Appears 

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On the Richard Prince Cowboy I used : I understand that it's a photo of a photo and it's interesting conceptually--like taking screenshots of Google Street View and treating them as photographs, or taking photos of the TV--but the distinction is that a photographer was in that scene as well and you're looking through their camera as a kind of "telescope". What would have been the better strategy was to make it a collaboration and share in the profits. Prince wasn't the only artist that was doing the same kind of appropriation. Robert Heinecken did that too but he was making collages. 

 

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Out-Takes: All the others that had issues but were otherwise listenable. The last track is so amusing with that bawdy vibrato. The vocals always amaze me.