I was listening to music with a friend while we played video games and shot the breeze the other evening. Our playlist is eclectic. One of the songs that cycled through was Feel Good, Inc. by the Gorillaz.

That was released over 20 years ago already. oof. If that embedded video doesn't play where you are, I'm sure you can find it elsewhere. It broke out of obscurity to hit the charts.

Anyway, the main thing I wanted to note was the structure of the song. It has distinct movements in its short 3-1/2 minutes. The band is "virtual" in the sense the members are all fictional animated characters, but real human beings wrote and performed the music. For the video, 2D and 3D animation were designed and drawn, not generated by an algorithm. This song was, and remains, special. The lyrical obscurity and allusions still mean something.

As it stands now, pop music has trended more and more toward formulaic nothingness, or else we remember what broke out of that background blandness that may have always been there. In any case, A.I. slop can only manage to swim in that soup of mediocrity from which it is drawn, but it can hide there too well if we continue to tolerate boring nothingness from corporate studios.

I also listen to a lot of folk music, and you can go see local bands play real instruments in person for any genre, but I especially like the folk music scene because you simply can't fake authenticity like that. I picked this one from a channel I found with loads of folk music festival videos from around the Pacific Northwest.

I am also tangentially a metalhead - not obsessed with the genre, but I have more in my rotation than one might expect, too. Some think of metal as just a wall of noise, but many bands are proficient musicians with a deep understanding of music theory. They play intricate and complex music with extra volume and distortion. That takes real talent, especially live.

Is it cheating to link prog metal? I say not for my illustrative purposes.

Anyway, authenticity will soon have its own value in the market, whether measured in money or attention. We will see a divide far more heated than the electric vs, acoustic or guitars vs. synthesizers feuds of the past.

I probably should have made this into a post of my own.