What If The Whole AI Songwriting Thing Blows Up In My Face?
A small minority of loud meatbags keep telling their followers to hate AI music no matter how good it sounds. Watching that is like watching a kid get piled on. Or a young Godzilla getting swarmed by little humans before the real fire starts. It plants a chilly doubt: that through social pressure that has nothing to do with fairness, they might still crybully the whole thing into the ground before it finds its place.
On the plus side you’ve got two million Suno users and a hundred million listeners who like the music when the vibe is good and do not care how it was made. Against them stand some of the dumbest people I have ever encountered. They are out there with murder in their eyes and their megaphones. The big companies sue over artistic voice. Popular influencers crank the volume on anyone shouting “Fuck AI” and try to cancel the ones who won’t join the chorus.
Except Dre. Nobody cancels Doctor Dre.
And in the middle of that circus I keep making albums. Dozens of them. They are the best work I have ever done.
These are not songs generated from nothing. They are synthetic covers of my own words and melodies that had me delivering pizza in my thirties and mail in my forties to keep the fire alive. I am not giving up on what I sacrificed to preserve.
So how does this actually work?
We support the AI producers we meet on Instagram. We talk to each other, share what works, buy each other’s records, leave comments that are not just fire emojis. We build a tight little ecosystem around the people who are actually building instead of waiting for permission from gatekeepers who already decided they hate the tools of the twenty-first century.
We put money and time into radio and broadcast efforts that treat the song as a song. Play the record. Talk about the lyric, the hook, the arrangement. Do not spend the first thirty seconds announcing how it was made. Listeners usually know and do not care. The ones who want to argue about process can go paint houses.
We also need more writing that draws a clean line between two different things people keep lumping together. Pure generative output that starts with a prompt and ends with a finished track is one animal. Synthetic covers of a human writer’s lyrics, melody, and structure, often with human vocals mixed in, is another. I live in the second area. My notebooks, my voice, my taste, my decades of doing this the hard way made 90%. The remaining 10% is a studio that does not sleep and does not roll its eyes. Humans matter. I like human music, too. I dislike binary thinking.
We need to aggregate listeners who want something evergreen, something like the music I try to create, meant to last a thousand years. Producers who are still figuring it out in public, and the stations willing to play the music instead of the controversy, is enough to keep going. Courage is needed. Contempt as well, but not too much, not corrosive contempt for the ones who will never, ever, ever get it. Pity them.
If the whole thing blows up in my face I will still have made really good records. Legendary records that can be played again and again. A fire on a cold day, perhaps, but my hand are warm.
