Anyone who knows me might be startled to think I’m publishing a campaign video for Donald J Trump. They would not be as startled as the dozens (no, it’s not exactly a viral video) of Trump supporters who found this song not to be entirely to their taste.
This is an AI generated song. I wrote the lyrics myself and used Udio.com to generate the music. I put the video together using stock footage. This is not a zero effort way of making music, but it happened way quicker than sitting down and writing and recording the music myself.
It’s a form of creativity I’m exploring at the moment as an addition to my plans for the year to make more music and write more new material. I don’t see it intersecting with my on stage work, nor with my plans to release original recorded songs, but I guess we’ll see. I will write more about my AI music project in the coming days, but for now, let’s look just at this song.
I love what the AI did. It’s similar to what I might have done, but it was created by a musical idiot that just knows how to ape styles. I curated the various options produced by the AI, and tailored the lyrics to fit the vibe of the song as it was built incrementally.
What’s lovely is the way the model degenerates and introduces a new singer at a critical moment in the song, which I wouldn’t have thought to script, but which lifts things near a punchline.
It’s really good fun.
Unless you’re a Trump supporter.
They weren’t happy. They couldn’t understand the sarcasm and the mirror it raises up to the behaviour typical of Trump supporters, though I also threw in some moderately unreasonable ad hominem attacks and accusations into the mix… because why not, eh?
As one commenter put it:
Indeed, it attracted the very behaviour it’s joking about.
Initial YouTube recommendation algorithm interest has subsided, and I’m sure the song will take its place in the long list of forgotten bits of superficial satire hanging around the internet.
But my feelings of creative burnout have been replaced by something new. I’ve created so much stuff in the last few days that my brain is reeling. More on that soon…
Ashley Frieze 