image by AI; not my prompt
As a compulsive writer and an incurable overthinker, I have a great love of incongruity. Some of the most important insights I have had in my life came from recognizing and addressing incongruities — things that seemingly contradict or which don’t make sense in the context of something else I thought I understood. And some of my favourite writing (my own and others’) plays with clever incongruities, including but not limited to ironies.
So, just as one example, I love the fact that the best sad songs make me cry, and can make me feel happier than the most cheerful anthems can, and they can pull me out of the deepest feelings of sadness.
I hit upon the title for this post because I was trying to compose a song about learning to accept things we cannot control or change — which is basically everything, at least if, like me, you accept the overwhelming (and, to human brains, utterly incongruous) scientific evidence that we have no free will.
Creative writing is, for me, the hardest to do, and (perhaps as a result) the most satisfying when it works out, or even when I just learn something important from the process.
Most songs are designed to appeal to us emotionally rather than intellectually, and hence the particular subject for my intended song was problematic — it’s just too conceptual and theoretical to appeal to the listener, and even to lend itself to notes and music that convey meaning and feeling. There’s a reason most songs are stories about how people feel. You want to write a song about the injustice of Trump & Co’s ICE Gestapo, you tell an angry and heart-wrenching story, you don’t quote from the constitution and legal precedent.
I tried writing a variety of stories about acceptance, and they came out as terribly bloodless. Not the stuff of a moving song. I looked for some hints and ideas from Suno music AI, and it kept feeding me very personal stories about lost love and heartbreak, not stoicism. And it eviscerated my cold titles, creating clumsy and soulless choruses that just made me wince.
And then I realized how important the title of a song is: not just the denotation of the words, but their rhythm, which can dictate the entire tone of a song. Suno was trying to work the title into the first or last lines of the song’s chorus, and the result was awful.
And hence, the title of this post, and my intended song. Let It Be Just What It Is has a good rhythm to it, one that is both driving and accommodating, a perfect incongruity. And indeed, the music of the resultant Suno song is actually pretty good (in fact, I can’t get the chorus out of my head):
Let it be just what it is
Not a promise, not a wish
We can love, we can miss
Let it be just what it is
Let it be, don’t make it more
Leave your armour at the door
If we lose all of this
Let it be just what it is
Here’s the song:
Let It Be Just What It Is (Suno) (Soundcloud)
OK, the lyrics are pretty bad. All I provided was a short, cold prompt. The Suno lyrics are mostly pretentious and awkward, with a few incongruous ‘clever’ juxtapositions of words. But the music, I think, is great.
How could I rescue the lyrics to make them as good as the music? For all kinds of legal reasons (potential for copyright violations of recorded works etc) Suno won’t let you change the lyrics and keep the music. There are workarounds, but they’re hard. And I’m lazy. And the song is even telling me not to change it.
I did consider an alternative title with a similar rhythm: Let It Be What It Will Be. A title that ends with a hard-to-rhyme syllable is a cardinal sin in songwriting, and lots more rhymes exist for the word be than for the word is. Why did I reject it? For purist reasons: My preferred title refers to the present moment, which is all that really matters, while this alternative refers to a future (which arguably doesn’t exist) and alternate ‘possibilities’ (which don’t exist either).
And then I realized that my preferred title is also incongruous. Since we have no free will, we can’t choose to ‘let it be just what it is’. We have no volition, no agency to accept or not accept. If these bodies of ours appear to accept, or refuse to accept, the way things apparently are, then all ‘we’ can do is rationalize that ‘decision’ after the fact.
But that’s an incongruity I can live with. A little smile, perhaps, to the impossibility of us having the free will to act as if we don’t have free will. Let it be just what it is.
But of course I couldn’t do that. I tried again with my alternative title: Let It Be What It Will Be, and the further prompt that it be a song about acceptance. Here’s what it came up with:
Let It Be What It Will Be (Afro-Caribbean version) (Suno) (Soundcloud)
The music is not quite as catchy as the first song, but I think the lyrics are definitely better. Coherent if not memorable. And lyrics are important:
Let it be what it will be
If you stay, if you leave
If you heal, if you bleed
Every part of you speaks
Let it be what it will be
From your roots to your wings
You’re the song, you’re the beat
You’re already redeemed
Let it be what it will be
Overall I think it’s a better song.
Now, you’d think I might learn at this point to let the song be.
Of course, I couldn’t. So I told Suno to remake the song, with the same prompt, but as a soft rock song. And again I was surprised. Here’s the result it produced this time:
Let It Be What It Will Be (Soft rock version) (Suno) (Soundcloud)
Solid, well-constructed music, I thought, and pretty good lyrics as well:
Let it be what it will be
I’m done rewriting gravity
If it breaks. let it break me clean
I’ll rise up from the fault lines underneath
Let it be what it will be
Open hands, whatever comes to me
If it hurts, let it move me free
I’m done hiding from the life in front of me
Let it be what it will be
New Yorker cartoon by the late Charles Barsotti
After ‘writing’ the songs above, I was inspired by Canadian music superstar Shania Twain’s recent song Boots Don’t, to try ‘writing’ a song in Southern Country Rock style about the idea that we foolishly think we know ourselves, and other people, when in fact “Nobody Knows Anything” (or Anyone). Trying to learn from the previous song, I came up with what I thought was a catchy title with a good rhythm: I Know You Think You Know Me (But You Don’t).
With the Southern Country Rock prompt, here’s what Suno made of that:
I Know You Think You Know Me (But You Don’t) (Suno) (Soundcloud)
Again, the lyrics are meh, but the vibe, I think, is great fun.
Thanks to Paul Heft for the link, above, to Tom Murphy’s post on Ditching Dualism, which title is itself a masterful example of incongruity. Here are links to my six favourite AI-assisted songs:
1. After Us — a song about my feelings about civilization’s collapse, and what might come after (lyrics mine, AI assisted)
2. If It Wasn’t For Words — a song about how human life might have emerged on Earth if we’d never evolved language (lyrics mine, AI assisted)
3. Everything Is Fine — a tongue-in-cheek ‘protest’ song about our denial that everything is falling apart (lyrics mine, AI assisted)
4. Only This — a song about radical non-duality and a ‘glimpse’ of the absence of a separate self (lyrics entirely mine)
5. Rise and Shine — a K-Pop girl group style song on women achieving equality (unedited AI lyrics based on my prompt)
6. She Knows — Celtic-style song based on the maiden-mother-crone triple goddess myth (unedited AI lyrics based on my prompt)
If you’re interested in hearing more of ‘my’ music, you can find it all on my Suno page (slow loading but includes lyrics), or my Soundcloud page (faster loading, no lyrics).
And just to reiterate what I’ve said on my previous AI-inspired posts:
1. I have a love-hate relationship with AI. When it’s used properly and carefully as a tool, as an aid to learning and creativity, I believe it can be very useful, and enormous fun. But most of its large-scale applications (like replacing jobs and facilitating wars and surveillance) are ill-conceived, immoral, incompetently designed and conceived, vastly overreaching the capabilities of AI, ecologically disastrous, socially disruptive, and extremely dangerous.
2. The staggering amount that has been invested in AI has absolutely no viable business case to justify it. It represents possibly the most astounding squandering of money based purely on imagined and improbable future developments and blind faith, in history. Those who have studied this have concluded that this massive bubble will soon burst, and those who’ve invested in it will lose their shirts. At that time, the window to use AI as a learning and creativity tool will quickly close forever. Our playing with these essentially-free tools now is not going to aggravate its abusive uses, nor will it have any impact on the timing or extent of the coming AI crash. So my view is: use it while you can; it will soon be gone.
