Personally, I’m a little less excited at the prospect of hearing “young Brian” sing something he already sang as an older Brian, but I can still enjoy it if it sounds good.
That's actually what I'm most excited about, particularly as I continue to explore why I don't care much for later Beach Boys music (particularly Love You) and Brian's solo stuff. Would I appreciate Love You more if it was sung by a younger, less vocally thrashed Brian? If nothing else, it's a troubleshooting tool. Dae Lims made a Love You track sung by a 60s Brian and I really like it. This tells me that part of my distaste for that album is Brian's voice. Turns out I really can't stand Brian's vocals from the 70s until about BWPS. Hearing some tracks from those decades sung by a younger Brian gives me a new appreciation for them.
And obviously Im most interested in filling in the gaps of the unfinished stuff...like you know...that one album
I have to say and no offense, Im not a big fan of the vocal swaps like McCartney singing Caroline No or Brian singing More Today Than Yesterday. They just make me wish I was listening to the real thing. Perhaps if you had the Boys doing a more Beach Boy esque track like some of The Association or the end of Judy Blue Eyes I might warm up to that aspect of AI utilization.
Yes, of course "breathless" is a bit of hyperbole. But I see an enthusiasm in some cases for the AI stuff that I don't see for the actual music (meaning *all* of the other music, not just the top-tier stuff), and there is some unavoidable absurdity to that, in my opinion.
I don't think I'm shaming anyone; I think an accusation of being patronizing or maybe sort of didactic, might be a more accurate accusation. To be clear, I'm not intending to do any of that either. But I acknowledge that kind of saying "People, listen to the THOUSAND hours of real music instead of the fake music" is unavoidably going to kind of come across that way.
I don't think I'm likely going to change anybody's mind, but I think it's just worth kind of chewing on alternative viewpoints *within* the realm of this topic, just on occasion at least. As I said, I haven't been butting in here scoffing at every new fake AI vocal that gets dropped or anything.
I dont want to step on toes or nothing but I do see both sides of the pro and anti ai faction here to an extent. Some of these mixes just don't sound quite right to me, but I don't know if that's the AI being fake or maybe mixing decisions I disagree with like too much reverb/echo or something. (Im not an audio engineer.) No offense to the people who make this stuff, and my offer to pay real money for a crash course in how to do it, or taking their time to help me fill in bare spots of my own SMiLE still stands. That said, there is definitely a certain "fake" quality to the new vocals I can't shake off. Im not being a luddite, I guess I just have less tolerance for obvious audio production than some--like how I consider BW88 unlistenable due to its overly dense arrangements while to others it's great. I know there were overdubs and trickery even on Pet Sounds but there, either it was restrained enough or Brian was just *that* talented it doesn't stand out to me the way autotune, Joe Thomas or AI does. Maybe if I listened "blind" I wouldn't think "a machine is singing" necessarily, but I'd think "that production is off, they're digitally editing it beyond what sounds good to my ears."
To be fair, I feel that way when listening to most pop music post-00s. I remember when Taylor Swift made an ass of herself at the grammys the other year and everyone said "ugh she shouldn't have even won, SOS by SZA was the best album this year!" So, to see what the kids are into I guess, I checked that out and was just left totally cold. Like, there isn't even a melody, I can't make out what she's saying most of the time and when I can it's dumb, feels autotuned and just sh*t. It just seems to be the way music is in the post-digital world. In my ideal scenario, we'd use it for editing, isolations, restoring lost vocals with the singer's preserved voice (albeit sparingly and tastefully) while leaving the actual recording and mastering to be as analog as possible. No autotune, no digital instruments, no computer trickery. Call me gramps, but it just sounds so much better that way. (I know there's still great indie bands out there too.) The recent headline about everyone accidentally making a fake AI band the #1 on spotify makes me think, that could only have happened in a world where everyone was already primed to listen to fake sounding robots anyway. What's that last step to phony-ville when you're already used to autotune?
I understand the perspective of "there's so much music in the vaults to dig thru, so many comparable groups, why focus on fanservice ai projects?" Yet at the same time, we shouldn't have to sit through every mediocre concert recording the band ever shot just to have the right to listen to anything "new" either. This is more directed at a faction of the fanbase I encountered in '15 that may not even exist anymore but some people have this attitude that if you haven't listened to every obscure scrap of material, if you focus on one part of the discography over others (me with SMiLE), you're not "as much of a fan" or something. Like, I took a lot of heat for not listening to the post-Love You stuff until one day deciding "yeah, let's finish off the BB's discography" and made the mistake of posting reviews with the byline "yeah Im hearing this for the first time" and the response would be like straight vitriol that it took me so long...but like, these albums suck and everyone knows that so why is it a requirement to listen to bad music just because this group did it? To prove Im a real fan and suffered through the right of passage, what? I shouldn't have to pretend to be excited to listen through the band's D-list material. Even in the case of good concert albums/bootlegs, the album version almost always sounds better to me, so why do I owe it to anyone to listen to an inferior version of a song I already know? Bragging rights? More power to those who prefer a live sound, or a different version to mix it up, but that's not me. Lei'd in Hawaii does nothing for me though I love the Smiley aesthetic.
My MO with music consumption I guess is to find a couple artists, listen to their stuff I like until I hit a wall then jump ship and check out someone else who popped up organically on my radar (like how reading about SMiLE led me to Monterey and those acts, especially Hendrix, or a youtube playlist led me to Italian film soundtracks from the '60s). I am the midpoint between the boppers who just listen to the top 40 hits they get through pop culture osmosis and the hardcore fans who insist on plowing through 20 years of drek just because it has my favorite band's name on it. So, while everyone else is arguing about whether to listen to Mike Love's concert footage from the '90s or '66 Brian-AI sings Metallica, I'm gonna be over here digging through the rest of Piero Piccioni and Marvin Gaye's discography until I find another rabbit hole.
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