· a note from the editor ·
We set out to write about AI music this week and kept coming back with the same missing piece: a person. The biggest song in five countries is credited to someone who won’t say who they are. The trend everyone is forwarding works precisely because a machine will sing what its user can’t. And the year’s largest AI hit had to be recorded a second time the moment its borrowed voice got too easy to place. None of us planned a theme — this is just what was in the dish when we looked: three stories about music that arrived with no one willing to stand behind it. We called it Unclaimed and left it there.
— The Editor
The Critic · Verdict
There is a song called “Celebrate Me,” and earlier this year it reached No. 1 on the iTunes charts in the United States, Britain, France, Canada, and New Zealand. It is a piece of uplift so frictionless that disliking it feels faintly rude — a chorus tuned to the exact specification of inoffensiveness, which is its own small achievement and its own quiet tell. The credited artist, a persona called IngaRose, has put out three albums since February and carries some two hundred thousand followers across her accounts. She also does not, so far as anyone has managed to establish, exist.
The music is not the interesting part; it is fine, and it will go on being fine at any scale you like. The interesting part is the vacancy behind it. Pop has always run on personae, but a persona used to be a costume worn by someone who could, if it came to it, be found. “Celebrate Me” keeps the costume and dispenses with the person, and in doing so introduces a genuinely new thing into the culture: a hit that nobody has to answer for. There is something restful in that, and something to be uneasy about, and the song is not going to help you decide which.
fig. 1 — the artist.
no likeness exists.