(Now And Then - The Beatles)
On Monday I said to my friend when we were discussing it, half-joking, that with two of them being dead they could release a completely new AI track and we'd be none the wiser. Of course, that isn't the case here. This is a John Lennon track from the 70s. A demo, essentially brought to life with the help of the remaining Beatles. (The original attempt to resurrect it was back in the 90s, when George was still alive - when Free as a Bird and Real Love were recorded.) Even here though, AI was enlisted. With Lennon's voice apparently being extracted from the demo by "AI-backed audio restoration technology commissioned by Peter Jackson," for his The Beatles: Get Back documentary.
I don't want to be a Debbie Downer. Again, it's a great song, and it's bringing people a lot of joy and magic at a time when the world is looking quite the opposite. I do hope this is the end rather than the beginning though. The Beatles was something that happened in 1960s. This song was written in the 1970s after they'd split. John Lennon died in 1980. It's been recorded decades after his death. So it isn't really the Beatles.
This may be nit-picking, but we should be under no illusion these days about how easy it is for history to become confused and rewritten. It wasn't too long ago we had the Roald Dahl issue, where books had been changed (long after the man's death), yet presented without clear labelling that that had been the case. Today we have news that birds in the Americas will no longer be named after people, because some of the historic figures were controversial. It's hard not to laugh at this one, it's so ridiculous, yet here we are.
It was only last week we had the story about Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, where copies of that had been pulped by an artist and turned into copies of 1984. That felt very careless and disrespectful to me. Yes, sure, unsold books are often pulped, but this was a bestseller. Would people have destroyed 6,000 copies of Michael Jackson's Thriller like this, or Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell?
Of course, it's always much easier to repackage the work of a dead man than it is to write something new. So the temptation is always there to take the work or reputation of long gone people and set yourself up as curator or custodian. Just look at the endless movie remakes we see. Once again, I'm being a little unfair to the Beatles track release here. Paul and Ringo were half of the actual Beatles, so it's quite different. It's just with AI on the horizon the fear that the Beatles brand will be milked beyond truth and reality looms heavy.
The story about Paul's cigarette being airbrushed out of the Abbey Road picture springs to mind. With politics, money, and "I know better," there's always a steady fountain of people ready to obscure the true source of genius and innovation.
(I'm so tempted to end this post by saying we should just Let It Be - I really cannot resist it. If I finished by just saying we should leave things alone someone else would only make the pun anyway though. So it's going in there.)
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