Losing our Music

Authors: John Stonestreet and Dr. Timothy Padgett

According to a recent article in The Atlantic, there’s a new hit band that doesn’t really exist. Velvet Sundown got one million hits on Spotify before the wider public realized they were completely AI-generated. Manufactured musical acts are nothing new, but at least boy bands and The Monkees were made up of dancing, singing, living humans.  

Velvet Sundown’s two albums have a coffee house vibe. Band photos, history, and song lyrics can all be found online for this group that doesn’t exist. Apparently, they also have a social media strategy. When my colleague Tim Padgett shared the Atlantic article online, the band “liked” his post. One of their own social media posts reads, “They said we’re not real. Maybe you aren’t either.”  

Could there be a better encapsulation of our moment than this? Disembodied art. Music without a musician. Will anyone care as long as they like it? 

The 1999 film “The Matrix” is a dystopian tale of an ordinary man who discovers his entire world is an illusion manufactured by artificially intelligent robots. Part of the story is that humans are easily captive because of their addiction to ease and escape.  

In 2021, the star of the Matrix films Keanu Reeves had dinner with some friends whose teenage daughters had not seen the film. When he explained the plot, the girls were puzzled. Why would anyone want to leave the illusion? One of them even said, “Who cares if it’s real?” Reeves’ reply was, “That’s awesome!”  

No, it’s terrifying. For a generation or more, art, music, and entertainment has been all about the individual experience. There’s no right way to listen, view, or understand. In fact, there’s not really anything to understand since meaning is a matter only of interpretation. In this culture-wide application of the “reader response” theory about literature, it doesn’t matter what the artist intends or how anyone else understands it. It doesn’t even matter if what the artist creates is good. Now, in the case of Velvet Sundown, it doesn’t matter if there’s an artist at all. 

On one hand, innocuous AI-generated music playing in the background of a road trip or the kitchen may not mean all that much, if we were a different kind of culture. But we aren’t. We’re a culture detached from truth and a moral vision for our imaginations. We’ve detached identity and purpose from who we truly are, made in the image of God to reflect our Creator and Source of all truth. Beauty has, in large part, fully succumbed to mindless sensation. Crassness has become a substitute for excellence.  

It’s certainly notable that music has played such a prominent role in the history of the people of God. Whole sections of God’s revelation to His people come in the form of song, from the Psalms to large sections of the prophets. The songs of Moses, Deborah, Hannah, and Mary all punctuate the redemptive work of God. Throughout every expression of the Church, Christian worship has been characterized by song. 

Because God created humans to worship, music is inescapably a form of worship, for better or worse. Ultimately, real people should be creating music because people were created to worship with music. As the psalmist sang, “My lips will shout for joy, when I sing praises to you; my soul also, which you have redeemed.”