Hip, hip hooray, we’re merrily skipping towards the world Altered Carbon’s directors always dreamed about. It's a world where AI and algorithms make finding and listening to music easier than finding a needle in a haystack, that's if the needle was a street lamp and the haystack was three blades of grass.
Altered Carbon is a show set in a future where humans can swap bodies, like the main characters in an orgy, by simply downloading themselves onto space-age SD cards. The point here is that the rapid advancement of AI means that not only can we find and listen to almost any and every song ever made in a matter of seconds, but also that Chat GPT’s hip cousins can give us song recommendations. While this is great for quickly putting together a festive season road trip playlist, it feels like it's missing something. Back in the analogue days, putting together a Christmas playlist meant discovering music the good old-fashioned way, by having a good ear or knowing someone who'd spent a chunk of their lives becoming cool. Now all it takes is a shuffle button and the hope that Siri isn’t in the mood to listen to Ariana Grande all day.
This isn't a diatribe about how there were real musicians back in the day (I hope). Nope, AI-driven streaming services are brilliant. For the cost of one double Jameson per month, you can access nearly every piece of music ever created. Feeling dramatic? Type in Vivaldi and flap your arms about like a drunk conductor. Want to shake your legs on a yacht? Type in Sexy Redd. What’s more, there are thousands of lists recommended by faceless bots from the other end of the void that will guide you. Hell, if you listen to one artist, your phone will tell you, “listen to more like this”. If you're stumped deciding what to listen to, ChatGPT has suggestions. Apparently, it really likes the new Billie Eilish album. All of this is wonderful, but it's bleached some of the connections we used to make, when discovering music was still a tactile experience.
For instance, to say that my father loved music when I was growing up would not be an adequate description of what I saw. He didn’t listen to music the way we do now, which is constantly. For him it was a treat. Something to be savoured. Every Sunday, we'd get back from church and be banned from disturbing him. He’d annex the entire living room, flip through stacks of old CDs and records, find his muses for the day and then play them as loud as the speakers would allow. Then he’d pour himself a drink, read the paper, and happily hum to himself until the sun went down.
At the time, the sounds of John Coltrane, Shirley Bassey, Chuck Mangione and countless others sounded like noise to me. But that changed. When I got older, I found myself flipping through mounds of CDs and vinyls, looking at names I didn’t recognise. Occasionally, I’d pop one on and have a listen. Back when discovering music was still a physical act, choosing something to listen to meant donating an hour of your life to deciding if you liked it or not. In fact, as kids we were so aurally philanthropic that we would spend hours waiting at the mall for our turn to listen to the latest cool album to see if it was worth the R120 we'd have to pay for it.
spending an hour listening to our dad’s music was a way to connect with him...Going through his music was your way of sticking an ear through that haze and hearing what his life sounded like
For a lot of us, spending an hour listening to our dad’s music was a way to connect with him. It may shock some of our younger listeners, but for many of us, there was a time when our fathers weren't our friends. They weren't meant to be. That didn’t necessarily mean you hated him or even had any ill will toward him; it just meant that there was a strictly enforced emotional distance between the two of you — a thick haze that smelt strongly of apartheid and its after-effects.
Going through his music was your way of sticking an ear through that haze and hearing what his life sounded like. It was your way of listening to the sounds he thought would impress girls and his friends. The sounds that made him want to fight and the songs that helped him study. Most of all, it was a way of listening to the sounds that made him sad.
Even when we got to the era of burning songs onto a disc, tactile discovery was a way to connect with people. With only 700MB of disc space, you only had so many songs to tell a girl that you thought stars danced in her eyes, and that you'd have a heart attack if she held your hand in a dark cinema.
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