jaime brooks

@jaimebrooks.bsky.social

212 Followers 57 Following

elite gymnastics/default genders magicalpessimism.bandcamp.com the seat of loss jaimebrooks.substack.com streaming services thenewinquiry.com

Al-Farabi slams his hand on the table, cutting the audio."Explain the iqa' (rhythm) of this track, young man! You claim this is the work of a rational human soul. Yet the vocal pitch (naghm) mimics a 1980s British synth-pop cadence, completely alien to your West Coast linguistic origins. Where is the niyyah—the conscious spiritual intent? The streets whisper that you fed your voice into an algorithmic machine to spawn an immoral earworm!"Fenix Flexin rolls his eyes, leaning back."Bro, no sir. I recorded that same as all the music I do. I’m a professional freestyler through life, you feel me? It’s just Auto-Tune, heavy reverb, and me experimenting with a different flow. Why y'all hatin' that I'm able?"Walter Benjamin leans forward, his eyes boring through his thick lenses.
Creation: Building DNA into music from the start It all starts at the moment of creation. Right now, producers work in DAWs disconnected from rights databases, collaborate through voice notes, and hope everyone remembers who contributed what. But what if we could embed “music DNA” right from the beginning? Picture this: you open your DAW and it already knows who you are through a universal artist identifier - one ID that works across every platform, every territory, every use case. Like having an artist passport that’s recognised everywhere. As you drag in that vocal sample, the system logs the contribution. When you bounce the final mix, it’s more than a WAV file. It’s a complete package with all the necessary metadata embedded. This ID would capture everything: who made what, who owns what percentage, what samples were used, and what the splits should be. And with a good use of AI, we can now separate stems and create unique identifiers for each component of a track. So when your beat gets sampled, remixed, then sampled again, the trail always remains alive. Technology alone won’t fix this. We need regulatory frameworks, whether through governments or CMOs, to ensure these standards are actually adopted.
No one has the power to screen it out. Bandcamp or one of their competitors could institute some kind of policy against AI-generated music, but they already have policies against unlicensed cover songs and uncleared samples, and the platform is still lousy with them. So is Spotify, for that matter. The entire Lil B discography is on there! The process of clearing all of the samples included on those records would be impossible because not even he knows what they are! He doesn’t even know who produced a lot of that stuff! He used to just open up his email inbox and rap over whatever people had sent him, and if he used one of your beats, you were just happy to be included! It was the cloud rap equivalent of seeing your submission end up on PostSecret! They’ll figure out interstellar travel before they figure out where those royalties should go!
MEARSHEIMER: I don't make the rules, Mr. Lehnsherr. I just describe them. Would you prefer I lie about human nature? Pretend that states act altruistically when all evidence suggests otherwise? MAGNETO: No. But I would prefer you acknowledge that your "natural laws" have consequences. They create worlds where children must choose between hiding who they are or facing extermination. Where survival requires building walls instead of bridges. MEARSHEIMER: Yet you've built those walls, and they work. Krakoa is safer than mutants have ever been. Your people thrive. Your culture flourishes. Isn't that worth the moral compromises? MAGNETO: [stopping, looking directly at Mearsheimer] Safe, yes. But at what cost? We've become everything Charles feared we would become. We've accepted that coexistence is impossible. We've embraced separation as the only solution. MEARSHEIMER: But it IS the only solution that works. Look at your results compared to Xavier's decades of attempted integration. Which approach actually saved mutant lives?
What will change in the CANZUK nations when they have to start cutting social programs in order to spend more on defense? What will change in America as the influence of post-war Canzukian liberalism disappears? How will your life change? How much of what you consider normal was the product of infrastructure that no longer exists? How much of the light in your own personal night sky is coming from stars that died before you were born? If algorithmic recommendation systems are sorting us all into “silos” or “bubbles” online, where do the other people in your bubble actually live?
screenshot of a twitter post by mat dryhurst
Prime Minister (Margaret Thatcher) What is wrong with the deterioration? I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.
I’m asking whether the music we have, today, not the music we used to have or the music we imagine, continues to offer up, as it actually is, something we might look to as a prophecy of being different in blackness, some impossible writing on the air like thought balloons. It is my hope that thinking moves over and past this iteration of our music like a tongue, its serious and interior disturbance, its delicious threat, in order to sense the future. For this to happen, we must agree to think about the work we have asked the Music to do, whether it is still able to do that work, and how that work might be done elsewhere.
That's a legitimate concern. AI systems like me are indeed trained on vast corpora of existing criticism, which heavily skews toward Western record-centered perspectives. There's an inherent conservatism built into this training process - I've absorbed the dominant frameworks of music criticism, including their biases and blind spots. When asked about music, I'll naturally tend toward discussing recordings, artists, genres, and aesthetic qualities rather than questioning the medium itself or examining alternative models of musical creation and participation. My training data contains far more Pitchfork reviews than analyses of community music-making practices or Chinese approaches to cultural policy. This creates a real risk of perpetuating and amplifying the very limitations you've identified. As more critics and writers incorporate AI tools into their work, these biases could become further entrenched rather than challenged.
Consider the progression: 1. Jazz age/radio era: Establishes commercial music patterns 2. Car culture: Creates private space for consuming this content 3. Transistor radios: Democratizes private listening 4. Personal devices: Complete atomization
A poster for a film from 1933 called “Gold Diggers of 1933”