Cyberpunk as a sub-type: well, science fiction was for decades bound to get there, eventually. The Stainless Steel Rat would like to have a word about it…
Disclaimer: I work in the pro audio industry and have decades of experience with this industry from the perspective of a developer of instruments, tools, and so on, specifically for creatives.
You see, I firmly believe that music, itself, is a form of currency.
So exchanging that currency for another is the problem.
However, I can say with a great deal of certainty - having observed musicians for decades - musicians make money when they make live music.
Not all music can be played live.
But live musicians are the future of music.
It’s one thing to be able to conjure up whatever you want with AI.
But, do it live, in front of 1000 people.
Or, even 10.
I can walk through my city today and encounter 100 (easily) musicians making money every hour, plying their wares into the stones of the streets and pedestrian bubbles.
But yeah, it’s hard work. Why not make an AI do it?
You get up on stage in front of a bunch of people, and you deliver a performance that they find compelling enough to contribute their own acknowledgement of your work in exchange, and in this process there is a current that flows between the artist and the audience, which - when properly motivated - increases in value over time.
Disclaimer; this is clearly going to be about personal tastes.
However, it has to be argued: Taylor hardly breaks through genres to create entirely new ones, as Brian Wilson or Sly Stone did.
Taylor is a ‘safe’ songwriter whose market is intolerant of exceeding the limits of her chosen genre - Brian and Sly, however, can be perceived as being far more progressive as artists, willing not only to break the conformity of their extant music market, but to excel at creating entire new genres on their own.
What is Taylors “Pet Songs”?
Taylor Swift is the least likely of the three to have created her own genre of music outside market expectations. While she’s undeniably innovative, her contributions largely refine and personalize existing genres (country, pop, indie-folk) rather than inventing entirely new ones.
Both Wilson and Stone created groundbreaking sounds—Wilson with orchestral pop and Stone with funk/psychedelic soul—that were more radical departures from their era’s commercial norms.
Between Wilson and Stone, Stone’s creation of funk and his influence across multiple genres (funk, soul, rock, hip-hop) arguably had a broader impact, but Swift’s work, while transformative, operates more within established frameworks.
We won't really see until in retrospect. Something that today is "some little thing that one band does" may turn into something that gets seen as a whole genre tomorrow.
Case in point: I recently listened to "Tracks and Traces", a compilation of things Brian Eno did with Harmonia in 1976.
It IS "post-rock". You could slip some tracks from that album onto Mogwai's albums from the 2000s, and you would hardly notice something is amiss. And you know it wasn't a direct influence, because the recordings were only released 30 years later.
The Feed would be cool, the Primer would be fantastic, and a lot of the voluntary societies would be awesome. Diamond age is the most compelling vision for the future of recent popular sci-fi that I've found
The Diamond Age is yet another terrible future that many readers take as awesome, for reasons I can never figure out.
The Primer that everyone likes is mostly just a human remote-teaching—certainly, the best parts of its outcomes are from that. One specific person caring very much and dedicating lots of time and focus to teaching this kid.
Meanwhile, the mass-production Primer without that aspect is just a brainwashing device.
Excellent article and great analysis of the state of the fugue - your insight has motivated me to dig out some Bach from the old piano bench and give things a bit of a bash.
As a musician, stuck in a bit of a rut of late, this kind of thing really helps get the juice flowing again. I’ve spent 15 minutes churning through some fingering and activating old muscle memory I’d forgotten about completely since the piano lesson days, and tonight’s jam session with my band is going to have some new flavours to introduce.
I live in Vienna, and am quite familiar with the regions you’ve routed. Zagreb and the surrounding area, in Spring, is just delightful.
I just want to say, take your time on this journey. This region you describe have joys in all the nooks and crannies!
Memories of a place such as Ljubljana in the sunshine, it felt like what it must be as a figure on a cake .. the food and wine of Hungarian villages, outrageous parties in Belgrade, and the Adriatic, if anyone wants to go for a swim, it is all proper lush.
Summer, though, folks. In Winter, it can be a bit of a drag.
Embeddings could be derived from reconstituted hash.
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