Uh Oh, We're in Trouble

An 'A.I.-crafted' duet, featuring the likeness of rapper Chris Brown and k-pop idol Rose dropped eight days ago, sounding better than any original, human artist

Photo by Eric Nopanen on Unsplash

“…This AI-crafted track captures the bittersweet cycle of love and heartbreak, where passion pulls two souls back together despite the pain…. ‘Falling Again’ is a sonic journey through the complex emotions of love that keeps pulling you back despite knowing the risks. This duet tells a story of vulnerability, longing, and the magnetic pull between two hearts that can’t let go. Ideal for fans of soulful R&B and emotional K-pop pop crossovers. Created by NEOX — the future of AI-powered music meets raw emotion….”

I’m currently listening to Denny Zeitlin play Rodgers & Hart’s “Falling in Love with Love” on piano. The jazz standard, originally from the 1938 Broadway musical, “The Boys from Syracuse,” is from his June 6th album on Sunnyside Records — With a Song in My Heart: Exploring the Music of Richard Rodgers.

The Rodgers & Hart Songbook inspired a lot of jazz standards for a lot of aspiring and established jazz vocalists and instrumentalists, looking for a new thrill in old favorites. The popular composer/lyricist duo practically invited musicians to play around, leaving songs open to improvisational give-and-take, transforming a cute little pining-away love ballad into a thing of magnificent creation.

Interestingly, Lorenz Hart would put lyrics to the music Rodgers composed, usually for entertainment/storytelling purposes, which seems harder to do. Yet, Hart did it in a poetic, T.S. Eliot quietude that fit with the exceptionally roundabout way Rodgers sculpted his early music — both lending an other-worldly, cinematic scope to a simple scene of a love-lorn widower or wife.

Nothing wasted, nothing lost.

“I weave with brightly colored strings
To keep my mind off other things;
So, ladies, let your fingers dance,
And keep your hands out of romance.

Lovely witches,
Let the stitches
Keep your fingers under control.
Cut the thread but leave
Your whole heart whole.

Marry maids can sew and sleep.
Wives can only sew and weep!

Falling in love with love
Is falling for make believe.
Falling in love with love
Is playing the fool.

Caring too much is such
A juvenile fancy.
Learning to trust is just
For children in school.

I fell in love with love
One night when the moon was full.
I was unwise with eyes
Unable to see.

I fell in love with love
With love everlasting,
But love fell out with me….”

— “Falling in Love with Love”

Rodgers & Hart were responsible for profound, often underrated, deceptively complex, embraceable, yet focused, clever 20th century odes to long-lost, forbidden, quirky, quietly celebratory love we could all relate to, such as “My Funny Valentine,” “My Romance,” “You’re Nearer,” “Have You Met Miss Jones?,” “Isn’t It Romantic?,” and “Where or When.”

They were swoon worthy for listeners, but hard to sing for performers and harder to play for musicians.

Zeitlin plays the reinvented cover like a master class in jazz, taking huge swaths of flyaway melody and harmony and blowing helium into their malleable latex until they float toward some forgotten pinkish sky. His weathered hands reveal the years, of experience, unmitigated joy, and holding on for dear life on spritely, ever-downward-spiraling keys.

“Falling in Love with Love,” the way Zeitlin plays it, is one of my favorite instrumental jazz standards, and he did it at the Piedmont Piano Company in Oakland, CA in front of a live, appreciative audience. They sit in rapt splendor, letting him perform, and then, when the last notes waft through the air…roses on parade…the audience is heard clapping and saying, “yeah!”

“I have memories, from when I was two or three years old. I was sitting on my parents’ lap while they were playing, putting my little hands on theirs and going along for the ride kinesthetically…. [My parents] just let me do my thing, and when I was seven I requested to start studying the piano….” — “Denny Zeitlin: ‘The Heart of the Matter’” by Alex Walsh, “Member Profile,” afm6

That’s what music is supposed to be. That’s what music was, for a lot of us growing up, up until now, when we’re seeing something else entirely flooding the network — something fake, a little too perfect-looking, just off by an odd word choice here and there.

A.I. strikes again!

Earlier today, a random YouTube video caught my eye: rapper Chris Brown and BlackPink k-pop idol Rosé staring forlornly in the rain, under the VEVO banner of “Chris Brown Ft ROSÉ — ‘Falling Again’ (MUSIC).”

So I took a listen, and began to feel my entire body shiver with goosebumps. Then, I felt my eyes tear up, as if to cry, just imagining these two coming together, vocally.

Chris Brown can sing? Rosé really sounds quite lovely here, not a note out of place. When is the official music video of the two of them coming out? The music is pleasantly pop, the lyrics (mostly) well-rounded. I’d like more of this.

I’m such a Boomer that I took this video seriously.

Usually, I’m pretty good about picking out A.I.-generated content. The faces in the images are a little too smooth, a little off, the words — a little generalized and lazy, like a surly Gen Z teen fending off his mom’s incessant curiosity — straining to sound normal, with one or two connecting dots placed wrong, as if reading subtitles in a k-drama and the male lead says, “of” when he should say “with” in a throwaway greeting.

But I had just woken up, in my defense, and their voices were so sweet together. Brown’s wasn’t as polished, so that worked in A.I.’s defense.

I had no idea until I went looking for any mention of this new single on social media and someone said it didn’t sound like Rosé’s voice. Then, I went back to the YouTube video, saw the dreaded words, A.I.-generated and music, in the same description, felt a chill go up my spine — and my heart sank.

This new pop song wasn’t even real in the sense that Chris Brown and Rosé, the human beings, got together in a studio to record it.

“Falling Again” is nearly perfect as a ready-made, seamless Top 40 hit, except for two crucial lines: “Hearts on the line, but we pretend | That this time, we won’t break.”

Those lines don’t fit the rest of the song, read clumsy, and don’t rhyme. But then again, a lot of songs coming out in the 21st century are like that, which makes me think that maybe we’ve been taken over by A.I. a lot longer than we think.

Maybe in the uncomfortable encounter with a government clerk who stares blankly when she thinks she’s done instructing you — with as few meaningful words as possible — on the next step after you’ve successfully passed a written driving test… Maybe the instructions on the latest vacuum cleaner that make no sense without someone in front of you showing you what to do rather than telling you… Maybe the new-fangled, convenient shortcuts made available to us, emojis and slang in place of real talk, exponentially encroaching and astro-turfing on our innate humanity that just wants to shoot the shit and hang out.

Maybe everything going from hand-made to programmable, since the advent of ‘70s prog-rock/‘80s synth-pop, then going online, the CD/digital takeover, the filtered avatar Zoom jam sessions, cut and pasted in place of real, live bands.

Maybe all of us getting primed for this since the worst cold and flu seasons to ever hit the United States, three-two years before COVID-19 dropped a bomb on us. We’re still picking up the pieces of our broken souls, some of us will never get back whole.

Aren’t we all trying to be more like Jesus, a self-professed god, perfect in every way? What a horrible load to carry (for slaves).

I’m falling for it. Me. Miss Independent, Free-Thinker Rebel Without a Cause.

The A.I.-generated insta-pop-hit, “Falling Again,” is damned good, maybe too good, maybe even better than anything humans have come up with centuries before — at least for the masses who don’t know any better.

Once A.I. figures out how to use prepositions properly, while leaving a semblance of a human touch, about 1.5 percent for the retro-vinyl collectors, we’ll all be taken in, unable to tell the difference between real, hard-won music and the fake stuff we’ve been brainwashed to consume, like it’s caviar, wagyu steak, and Janis Joplin.

God, I miss her, screaming into the night…

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Review coming by the end of this month.