Soullessly manufactured happiness

A song that used AI to clone the voices of Drake and The Weeknd has been removed from Spotify. But which existing tracks already sound like generic shite made by robots?

I Gotta Feeling, Black Eyed Peas
From the background ‘strings’ to Fergie’s vocoder harmonies, every single element of this song sounds highly synthesised, and not in a good 80s way. The lyrics are so bland it’s like being aurally lobotomised, and it’s impossible to believe Black Eyed Peas or producer David Guetta have experienced any feeling in their lives that wasn’t ‘meh’.

Stand By Me, Oasis
If you fed all of the most plodding, derivative indie songs of the 90s into an AI songwriting machine, it would quickly spew out Stand By Me. It’s Oasis’ most boring song, and that’s saying something: so tedious, dreary and un-rock’n’roll that it’s now the soundtrack for a building society advert.

Happy, Pharrell Williams
‘Because I’m happeeeeeeee’ trills Pharrell over a catchy tune that initially feels like it could lift your spirits. Unfortunately, after approximately 30 seconds you realise it’s a soullessly manufactured happiness that sounds like it was clinically assembled on a production line by robot slaves in a bleak, dystopian future.

How You Remind Me, Nickelback
‘I want a rock song,’ you command the AI, ‘that sounds like every rock song ever written, mushed together and extruded as a musical poo.’ And this is what you get. It could almost be by Nirvana, it could almost be by Metallica, and yet it’s more monotonous and drab than either of those bands could manage even at their worst.

TiK ToK, Ke$ha
Looking for a feather-light piece of nonsense about a Valley Girl getting pissed, all washed over with so much autotune that it may as well be sung by a computer? Have a listen to TiK ToK, if you can get past the inanely ‘different’ stylisation. Despite the theoretically edgy subject matter, it’s utterly sanitised and sounds more like it was written by an algorithm fed with thousands of hours of PG American teen movies, rather than a human.

The Daily Mash

Of course.