Blur frontman Damon Albarn recently talked about Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) being used to create songs. Speaking with Musikexpress, he said via Twitter:
“If the A.I.s are the future of music, then we’re gonna need better drugs to get us through it.”
It was noted that YouTube is full of AI covers and it also features Kurt Cobain covers. Here is what he said on the matter:
“At least your example it’s good! But when it’s Sinatra or Snoop it’s absurd. Anyone who has so much time to sing songs through a Michael Bublé filter and put them on the internet is a f***ing idiot.”
Just four years after Blur won the so-called Battle of Britpop, pipping Oasis’s Roll With It to the UK No 1 spot with their own Country House, the London band were virtually unrecognizable on 1999’s 13: a sixth album that replaced pop hooks and parping horns with shrapnel riffs, bleepy noises and a sense of creeping dread.
With frontman Damon Albarn nursing his breakup from Elastica’s Justine Frischmann on the lyric sheet and producer-of-the-moment William Orbit adding an icy sheen from the mixing desk, this was music to clear a house party. You either loved it or you hated it.
But whatever you thought of 13, Coffee + TV was irresistible: a sunkissed pop classic built on a thunking Tele rhythm and a haunted verse vocal from guitarist Graham Coxon. “Coffee + TV,” he told Total Guitar in 2012, “is about the idea that you feel like a piece of sh** in a crap job, and you want to marry someone and get away from it all.
“Damon was writing it,” Coxon continued, “and he said, ‘I can’t get anything together for this’, so I said, ‘Well, I’ll write some lyrics tonight’. So I went home, and had a big row with my girlfriend, because I’d gone through some old sketch books looking for little bits of writing that might help with this lyric, and she thought that I was writing a song about an old girlfriend. So she went off her head at me! I sang the verse, because in Blur it was basically that thing where if you write the words then you sing, like the ‘Oh my baby’ bits in Tender.”
