Aside from their greatness, what do these two exquisitely crafted pop singles have in common? Maybe nothing at all. Neither is too relevant. None of them have any great social motives. But after many weeks of repeated listening, I eventually connected them to two potential extinction threats written on my brain’s whiteboard—the rise of artificial intelligence and the collapse of our ecology. You know, summer fun.
Kylie first. She’s one of the most fearsome steamrollers pop music has ever known, as evidenced most recently by her 16th studio album, Tension, which was finally released into the autumn breeze last Friday (technically, the last day of summer). , 127 days after the release of lead single “Padam Padam”, a mechanically luxurious dance track in which the singer’s automatic pickups begin to resemble an echocardiogram. “I can tell you’re in it ’cause I can hear your heart beating,” Minogue sings. “We’ll fall, we’ll fall” And here, just as she did in 2001 with her career-defining hit “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” Minogue attaches an energetic melody to one of our most vital organs the way teenagers attach a chewing gum to the underside an elastic band. table.
From May to June, “Padam Padam” took a fast journey from TikTok curiosity to Pride Month anthem, but it also generated some background resonance during the early summer debate about AI-generated music—specifically, a song that sounded like a superstar duet Drake and The Weeknd. As anxiety about the future of non-human music-making on the Internet intensified, the robotic sheen of “Padam Padam” helped me temporarily organize my feelings.
Those feelings are: machines trying to sound like people will never be as interesting as people trying to sound like machines, because in music we care about effort. We want to hear the work. We want tears-sweat-blood, even when the artist (Kylie, Kraftwerk, whoever) hides all three fluids and pretends to be a robot. But with AI, the whole point is to eradicate effort. There’s no trying. This may suggest that our fundamental unease with AI-generated music has less to do with its soullessness and more to do with its ease. And while this problem will certainly become even more acute as AI tries to obsolete various areas of human endeavor in the coming seasons, this little credo should hold me back for now: If it doesn’t require effort, then it’s not music.
Billie Eilish knows what effort is. Tasked with writing a song for Greta Gerwig’s star-studded Barbie soundtrack, she ended up expressing an innate fear of being alive in a universe that made no clear sense. (And if you think that serious pop stars are incapable of bringing depth to summer blockbusters aimed at children, please go back to Prince’s prophecy – “I’ve seen the future, and it’s hard” – in the Batman franchise back in 1989. For 12 years before Eilish was born.)
Eilish says the whole exercise helped her get over her songwriting slump, and that singing from the perspective of a complex doll helped her better understand her complex self. “What was I created for?” the arrangement is sparse, just piano and strings, reminiscent of either amniotic fluid or emptiness, with Eilish tiptoeing around the edges of a whisper, threading the central question through her verses, reaching a conclusion of sorts in her chorus: “I don’t know how to feel, but I want to try”.
So a pop song is a lot like a Barbie doll. You can imagine it as you. You can imagine yourself like this. Either way, it’s something designed to help turn imagination into reality. And this summer, imagination seemed to fail, and reality grew even hotter – the hottest season ever recorded on this fragile blue marble. Eilish knows all about it too. Sometimes she wears a T-shirt that says “THERE IS NO MUSIC ON A DEAD PLANET.” And while her song Barbie doesn’t directly address our climate crisis, it does reflect the struggle to get things done in a world that’s heading in the wrong direction.
Listen to this again. Next summer may be hotter.