There’s an earthquake rolling through our civilization, the slow murder of the human figure from every corner of life.
Speaking about music, in my case, I keep realizing more and more that people, especially the younger generations, are losing the sense of what’s real, what’s made by human hands, and what’s counterfeit.
Censorship keeps growing, cultural intelligence is circling the drain, and wouldn’t you know it, artificial intelligence and the people pushing it get to do whatever the hell they want.
The other day I was wandering around YouTube and stumbled into the horror show of fake albums by dead artists. I saw a “new” Ray Charles record and thought, hell, I never heard this one before. I clicked on it, and out came this synthetic swamp, some machine trying to wear the skin of that giant, Ray. Then I noticed the recommendations were packed wall-to-wall with this stuff… playlists everywhere. It’s an infestation. We gotta shovel this garbage out before it buries everything. How the hell do they allow this?
And then I thought: well, maybe somebody really wants this. Maybe somebody wants to deform the human face in everything. Wants to sedate us. Wants to make the absurd feel ordinary, feed it to us with our morning coffee like it’s nothing. Meanwhile, day by day, artists disappear, music dies, and all that’s left is the shadow of it, the faint back-alley echo of what authenticity used to sound like.
I find it absurd, this pleasure people seem to take in replacing themselves with something else. Replacing their own hands on the piano with a machine, their skin with plastic, the sound of their own voice with some synthetic digital makeup.
Would you let somebody make love to your wife or husband right in front of you just because you were told it’s “you,” only polished up into some better version?
Would you steal a trophy from a race you never ran, sitting on a bench the whole time with a burger dripping grease down your hands?
Would you feel worthy of it? Proud of it?
Or would something deep down inside you know damn well it was empty?
I mean, we lost the feeling of actually being here in this world. We shoved every piece of our lives into those little black electronic mirrors we carry in our hands or prop up in front of our faces. We don’t wonder anymore. We don’t walk outside and ask ourselves what the hell that blackbird is hollering about to the neighbors, or why that catfish jumps clean outta the water like he’s yelling at the cats, “you ain’t catching me today, you dirty bastards.”
