Rant #3,150: Let It Be

Here it is the middle of 2023, and we are still talking about the Beatles.

There will never be another musical act that revolutionizes what we listen to, how we look, how we act, and how we think as much as the Beatles did, and I had to really, really laugh when the media—always grasping for straws and never doing real reporting—compared the recent Taylor Swift concerts in the Meadowlands with the Beatles concerts at Shea Stadium nearly 60 years ago.

Wishful thinking, perhaps, but please, don’t count me in to be as stupid as others who believe this trash reporting.

Now, we have learned that the Fab Four will be taking on Swift and other pretenders in the current music world, by planning to release a new song to the masses—their so-called “final record”-- using artificial intelligence and other tricks to make the song palatable for today’s generally clueless music audience.

This announcement made a trickle of news yesterday, but not that much is known about this project, to be honest, and the announcement really came out of left field.

Paul McCartney, in an interview he did with BBC Radio 4, said that the currently unnamed recording is thought to be based on a rough demo called “Now and Then” that John Lennon made in 1978 as a solo artist.

McCartney said during the interview that the song uses artificial intelligence to isolate Lennon’s vocal. He said, “We had John’s voice and a piano and could separate them with AI. They tell the machine: ‘That’s the voice. This is a guitar. Lose the guitar.’

“When we came to make what will be the last Beatles record—it was a demo that John had that we worked on and we just finished it up, it will be released this year—we were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI. So then we could mix the record as you would normally do.”

Sounds gimmicky, and it is, almost as if McCartney is implying that since we have this new toy to use—artificial intelligence—we might as well use it to get this song out.

The Beatles have used the technology of the time to put out other songs way after the band’s actual demise.

You might remember that in the 1990s, they put out a few songs—“Free As a Bird” and “Real Love”—using Lennon demos and electronically Scotch-taping new musical performances from McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison to make the songs somewhat palatable.

Here, I don’t know what musical involvement McCartney and Starr will have, if any, so technically, it really isn’t a Beatles song—but way back when, “Yesterday” was technically a McCartney solo tune without any other Beatles involvement, but it was put out under the “Beatles” banner by Capitol Records, so it is not like something like this hasn’t been done before.

And how will it ultimately be released?

You can bet it will be a digital download first, because that is how music is disseminated today.

But I will bet to appease music fans like me, it will also be released somewhere down the line on a CD and on vinyl.

Will it be a hit?

Who knows, but it will be something of a novelty, just like “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love” were, so it is something that I, at least, will have to have in my collection, preferably on vinyl.

It should be, at the very least, something fun to listen to, but I hope it doesn’t start a trend.

Even though artificial intelligence is a relatively new concept, we have already been warned about its potential, both good and not just bad, but very, very bad.

I think we might be putting the cart before the horse, applying it to just about everything without being able to put in safeguards to it so it does not run rampant.

It all sounds like a science fiction movie, but if we don’t have these safeguards, we will be part of that “movie,” but the movie will be real.

Honestly, it all sounds pretty freaky to me, and while I understand McCartney’s direction on this, I think it might be time to … well … let it be.

You can read the entire story at https://bestclassicbands.com/new-beatles-song-paul-mccartney-john-lennon-now-and-then-6-13-23/