Bi-Weekly-ish newsletter #35 w/ 4K Talking Heads 💬👥, Ai Kanye🤖🎤👑, Succession📈👑💼, Wim de Bie🎭🎬👨🎨, and Ai art in MOMA🖼️🤖🏛️.
Hi reader!
Welcome to edition number 35 of the bi-weekly-ish newsletter by me, Marcel Alexander Wiebenga. As always, a curated compilation of cultural goodness around music, tech, and art, this time around, with some Talking Heads, Kanye AI and music rights, Succession money & power, Wim de Bie, and how machines see and create art.
Liking, sharing, and all that is truly appreciated as I’m trying to grow this list into stratospheric proportions.
Enjoy!
Marcel
1. The Suit That Stole the Show
Talking Heads Stop Making Sense's 4K Remastered Re-release
"Stop Making Sense," the film that showcases an alloy of three Talking Heads live performances from the perspective of a concertgoer, is almost 40 years old. The film, together with "Gimme Shelter," "Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii," and "Wattstax," is considered by many to be one of the greatest in the filmic sub-sub-genre.
Due to its iconic status and upcoming 40th anniversary, the film is now being re-released in theaters this summer in a slick 4K remastered version, together with a limited edition 2-LP set and digitally with two previously unreleased songs that can be pre-ordered here.
In a funny and quirky trailer for this upcoming late-boomer-spend-fest, director Jordan Hall spies on David Byrne as he picks up his iconic giant suit at the dry cleaners.
I'm looking forward to watching this film again in cinemas this time, but you can watch the original right now on various local streaming platforms or this more questionable site. Fun and quirky trailer below.
2. Why AI-Generated Voices Are Not Yet Revolutionizing the Music Industry
And How They Might Long Term
Something I was sent by a multitude of individuals last week is a video created by one Roberto Nickson. Roberto founded Eluna.ai, a company that "covers and sets the rapidly rising world of Artificial Intelligence." The video starts with Roberto speaking with Kanye West's voice and explaining how he posted videos featuring the AI Kanye West voice covering famous songs. The songs sound great and, unsurprisingly, went viral shortly after. Consequently, millions of Tweeters tumbled over each other to sensationalize the event by claiming that "This will change everything in the music industry!!!!1!"
I'm here to say… nah!
This is not going to change everything.
This is, by now, first and foremost, a gimmick, a party trick similar to the David Guetta party trick from a few weeks ago, albeit a remarkable and improved one.
Have a look below at the initial post and my continued thoughts beneath.
Some people have been asking me how the music landscape will change over the next few years due to these AI developments. A question that is, of course, the million (billion, trillion, kazillion)-dollar question and only possible to answer accurately for people with an operational crystal ball. I lack a crystal ball, but I do have ideas that conceptualize how AI will influence music for listeners, creators, and the industry, and the suggestion that it is now possible for anyone to create Kanye songs and release, distribute, and monetize them is factually incorrect.
Apart from the arguable quality of the potential works (this is someone lyrically imitating Kanye) and the cultural relevancy (audiences traditionally listen to an artist's personal experiences translated into musical works of art that have, therefore, meaning and the ability to communicate), many murky watered legal issues are in play as well.
Like a person's image, a voice has portrait rights that, to various extents, are protected all over the planet. These portrait rights are why in 1989, Young and Rubicam had to pay $400,000 to Bette Midler for using an imitation of the singer's voice in a commercial for the Ford Motor Company and similarly why in the mid-80s, Tom Waits sued Fritos for using his. These rights are why music creators looking to release, distribute and monetize works with AI-generated famous voices or brands looking to use these works will not be able to do so without being at the center of long, drawn-out, and expensive copyright lawsuits.
Having that said, licensing AI-generated recognizable voices (or image likenesses), both current and from the past, is a great potential business model for the future. Just imagine having Elvis, Tupac, or Frank Sinatra vocally come back to life to record new material and do duets with the stars of now, or have the likes of Snoop Dogg, Beyoncé or George Clooney at scale be available for digital appearances; the latter we already recently saw in a Lenovo campaign, with AI Queen Latifah endorsing small businesses.
3. Succession Season 4
A Saga of Suffering and the Super-Rich
Gearing up for Succession's final season (season 4), I rewatched the entire first three seasons, and it's simply incredible! For those not in the know, Succession is an HBO show somewhat similar to Game of Thrones in that it is about power structures within families, but without dragons, white walkers, giants, and irrelevant-to-the-story nudity.
Leading up to season 4, plenty of YouTube explainers can help you understand those power structures, with this specific one being the best by far. However, what makes Succession such a tremendous and well-told story is how it explains how being rich makes all the characters in the show extremely miserable; this is opposed to shows like Entourage, Gossip Girl, or films like The Wolf of Wall Street, which essentially fetishize extreme wealth.
Although I am far from financially wealthy, I have encountered riches and wealthy families in the past. What struck me was their common feature: a patriarchal figure who, even in death, continued to hold a tight grip over everyone, with all its consequences; for me, it is this that makes Succession such a fantastic show that is streamable right now. Explainer why being rich makes people miserable below.
4. Remembering Wim de Bie: Master Satirist
Also Remembering his Innumerable Characters
Last week, Wim De Bie passed away at 83. Wim de Bie, together with Kees van Kooten for 38 years, created various programs for Dutch broadcaster VPRO where they satirized current affairs.
Watching "Van Kooten en De Bie" became a Dutch tradition that included the Dutch version of Chinese takeout, sitting on the couch with a “plate in lap,” and national football on TV, followed by the illustrious duo and their countless characters. Some of these characters, like the near-hermit Walter de Rochebrune, straight-talking union official Aad van der Naad, Memien Holboo, and dimwit muscle man with a big heart, Tedje van Es, co-founder of the spoof but al to real political protest party "De Tegenpartij," have become part of a Dutch shared identity and our cultural staple.
It's impossible to accurately explain De Bie's influence on Dutch culture and do justice to it. Luckily, some of their sketches have English subtitles on YouTube, and the humor holds up.
The one below stars Carla and Frank van Putten, a dominant, overbearing widowed mother and her 40-something-year-old son who doesn't want what his mother wants, all the while imagining his true ambition of being with a blonde and big-chested woman, only for that dream to end abruptly as he speaks the famous words: "But I don't have a girlfriend, but I've been treated for that."
Sounds odd? Just watch!
5. How to See Like a Machine
The Art of Autonomous Dreaming
When discussing creativity and AI, we predominately discuss what AI creates and less about how AI creates. In an episode of How to See, an online series by the MOMA, three artists, Kate Crawford, Trevor Paglen, and Refik Anadolare interviewed, about the ways that AI and machine learning algorithms are demanding new approaches to art-making by diving into the latter.
Artist Refik Anadol's interest is in machine learning algorithms that humans don't strictly monitor. For Unsupervised, an exhibition currently at MOMA in NY, he asked himself how a machine, if it had only data from the MOMA collection for input, would parse the history of modern art on its own and, as an autodidact, what kind of art it would create.
To do so, he made an algorithm that uses "unsupervised learning," which essentially interprets unlabeled data to discover hidden patterns or data groupings without human intervention to do just that, creating a machine that is autonomously trying to dream, speculate and imagine instead of replicating and mimicking a learned reality.
Below is the interview, and I wish I could be in NY to attend this.
Thanks again for reading!
Liking, sharing and all that is appreciated.
Marcel