I listened to The Velvet Sundown so you wouldn't have to

The guitars cry. And so do I.

All art is artifice.

Even music.

The moment you create something for consumption, it is a commercial product.

And yet, many of us have this notion that the artists we love are or should be authentic.

But they aren’t necessarily

As much as someone like Mick Jagger or Bob Dylan is a living, breathing, carbon-based individual, they are also icons—carefully constructed personas who we accept as authentic because they have been sold as such by the industry or the publications that fawn over them.

Nor are the Beach Boys, whose members didn’t always play on their iconic records (and mostly didn’t surf, for that matter).

Then, there are the blatantly inauthentic artists—the ones assembled, packaged, and sold to the public like Corn Flakes or Coca-Cola.

That encompasses everyone from The Archies and NSYNC to Gorillaz and The Monkees.

In some cases, like The Monkees, they Pinocchioed their way into a kind of authenticity.

I can name songs and albums by all these Frankensteinian artists that I love, in some cases even more than the artists I am meant to love because they mean it, man.

Because they are really good.

There are real songwriters who crafted them, amazing musicians who played them, talented vocalists who sang them, and name producers who gave them a sound that just popped on radio.

In other words, you can hear the human touch in all of them, whether it is the subversiveness of Sugar Sugar or Feel Good Inc.

That brings me to The Velvet Sundown.

You’re probably sick of hearing and reading about this.

I am too.

But for those of you who aren’t in the loop, The Velvet Sundown is a “band” that was suspected for weeks of being AI.

The resulting chatter has been so omnipresent and sustained that the creators of The Velvet Sundown felt compelled to update the band’s Spotify page to describe it as a “synthetic music project guided by human creative direction.”

They also see fit to refer to what they have created as an “artistic provocation,” one meant to challenge the “boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI.”

I can say that I have never found artistic provocation as dull as The Velvet Sundown.

I mean, if you want provocation, listen to Captain Beefheart or late-era Scott Walker.

The Velvet Sundown is a damp squib.

It is too dull and too earnest to remotely offend, apart from the fact that it is a thing that is.

It challenges little apart from maybe your attention span or proclivity for ennui.

Whatever guidance of this there is by “human creative” seems nominal.

I’d wager it was likely “create a classic rock anthem that doesn’t rock too hard and doesn’t rock too soft, but just right.”

It is Goldilocks Rock.

I will admit I base this summation mostly on exposing myself to Dust on the Wind, apparently their most popular song, on UToob (I don’t Spotify for many reasons).

I didn’t expect much and, at least in that regard, the song didn’t disappoint.

I will concede that the opening chords reminded me somewhat of Terry Reid’s To Be Treated Rite from his long-lost classic album Seed of Memory.

The song itself solid, midtempo rock that vaguely leans toward country and folk, but a country and folk that has been deracinated, resulting in something that has no perspective or heart.

That is reinforced by the lyrics, which are equally vague. Here’s how the song opens:

Dust on the wind

Boots on the ground

Smoke in the sky

No peace found

Rivers run red

The drums roll slow

Tell me brother, where do we go?

I’d say if your rivers are running red and there is dust and smoke, maybe you just want to go inside.

You might also want to tell your roadie to exercise more care with your drum kit.

It hints at war like a diary entry from someone who has never experienced it, much less watched a documentary about it or looked up the word in a dictionary.

Impossibly, it gets more inane from there:

Raise your hand

Don’t look away

Sing out loud

Make them pay

Are we at a concert?

Is make them pay just a reminder to collect everyone’s ticket when they enter?

Who knows?

The AI that made this song certainly doesn’t

But no sooner are we asked to make someone unnamed pay, the song turns on a dime to tell us to:

March for peace

Not for pride

Let that flag turn with the tide

Setting aside all the fun I could have with that reference to pride, I’d prefer to be pedantic and say that flags don’t turn and certainly not with the tide.

They are only likely to get soaked.

But who needs to make sense when “Guitars cry out, bullets fly, mama prays while young men die.”

Are the young men dying because the guitars are crying? Or crying bullets?

Lyrics like this would make George Harrison’s guitar laugh or despondent before they would ever make it weep.

Maybe even moreso when the AI’s idea of a guitar solo rears its ugly head.

By the end the whole thing cracks under the strain of its own pseudo profundity:

Smoke will clear

Truth won’t bend

Let the song fight to the end

What truth? What song? How does the smoke clear?

But the big question I have is who is this for?

People who want songs that contain messages that don’t speak to the moment?

That don’t seek to challenge your perspective?

That don’t even have a perspective?

This is a song that attempts to be all things and ends up being nothing.

It is music, but it is music whose heartbeat is that of an algorithm trained on the components that go into a song, but not how those components become one.

Even its construction feels uncertain and off-putting.

And the band name sounds like something some kid would come up with after smoking oregano and thinking they’re high.

Ultimately, it isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever heard, but it sure is among the emptiest experiences I’ve ever had.

Because it is devoid of all the things that have made music a lifelong obsession for me.

It is proforma.

Neil Peart may have opined that ‘all this machinery making modern music can still be open hearted,’ but it has to have heart in the first place.

That’s a truth that won’t bend.

And The Velvet Sundown’s ‘hit’ is like smoke that clears because there’s no fire there.