THE NAKED CITY: A EURO-VISION OF THE FUTURE 

The Eurovision Song Contest is over for yet another year and I have to say I am disappointed the runner up, Croatia’s Baby Lasagna did not take out the major prize with his beautifully crafted song ‘Rim Tim Tagi Dim’. The title alone is pure poetry in anybody’s language. Okay it’s easy to be facetious and cynical about this annual festival of musical kitsch but ever since Australia has bludged its way into the madness, I feel obliged to do so.

It’s a ratings winner here for SBS TV, regardless of the quality of the music, and this year’s controversy over the Israeli entrant and subsequent protests has only added to the theatre. Every year however the songs themselves present as very much secondary to the actual performances, greatly enhanced by the gyrating dancers and mind popping pyrotechnics – not to mention the near hysterical audiences. That’s probably because the songs have become so banal, contrived and devoid of any originality that only a thousand throbbing strobes can save them.

Globally speaking Europe, apart from the UK, has never been a great producer of pop songs apart from a few success stories like ABBA and Aqua. Whoops, I forgot about Plastic Bertrand and ‘Ça Plane Pour Moi’. For the record a translation of the first verse:

“Wham! Bam! My cat, Splash

Is rolling around on my bed

He swallowed his tongue as he drank all my whisky

As for me, I’ve hardly slept, I feel empty and reprimanded

I had to sleep in the gutter

Where I had a flash of inspiration

Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh

In four colours”

If you do concede that the Europeans have produced the odd universally popular hit record in the past, then you might acknowledge that they have come virtually to the end of the creative road – given the appalling nature of songs at this year’s contest. Most sounded like that had been knocked up with an AI program and here lies the scariest prediction of them all. Not that Baby Lasagna will change his name to ‘the artist formerly known as Spaghetti and Meatballs’ but that every future Eurovision will be dominated by AI. 

If you are a trawler of YouTube and similar sites you might have noticed a growing proliferation of spoof songs put out by content creators such as ‘Obscurest Vinyl’ and ‘Vinyl Nightmares’, to name just a few. They are not the first to produce AI generated songs but what we have here is the complete package – from the synthetic voice, through the backing band and vocals and even the actual album artwork in some cases. 

There’s a current obsession with ‘recreating’ a ‘60s/‘70s retro soul sound, with distinctive Afro-American voices belting out songs like ‘I’m STILL Whooping That Ass’, ‘You Drive Like Shit’ and ‘I Cleaned My Ass With Your Toothbrush’. Whether the lyrics are a total AI creation or the result of the creator’s prompting, the emphasis is very much on the scatological and crude sexual humour. Most of the song titles don’t deserve being repeated here and they are obviously designed to shock and capture attention. 

Toilet humour and sexist innuendo aside most of the tunes have a retro authenticity that sounds very convincing. Added to this are the encouraging endorsements left in the comments section, which play along with the deception that everything is actually real. 

“Man, I remember sitting in the backseat of my aunt’s Buick and she would BLAST her 8-track of this. My uncle always got so humble in the passenger seat.” 

This is just one example of how music can be manipulated and many of the spoof creators are out to make a buck, not only with YouTube returns but sidelines like flogging t-shirts and their artwork services. The floodgates are open for a rash of similar postings, all enhanced by AI, and eventually making it near impossible to tell what is real or just a sophisticated leg pull. 

The Eurovision Song Contest puts bad music on a pedestal in an act of cult-like worship. It green lights the way for an even more soulless and manufactured entertainment industry where genuine original talent is smothered by out of control technology. Artificial Intelligence is the perfect partner in crime for this travesty and its impact has only just begun.