Sublime

‘Sonic Destroyer’ and ‘The Punisher’

“If you tried to give rock and roll another name,” John Lennon famously said, “you might call it Chuck Berry.”

The next night, my wife and I went to see Keith Urban. When he took the stage, 15,000 screaming fans took pictures and videos to celebrate this magical moment, an explosion of sound and light and video images. Some held signs showing the count of how many concerts they had attended or how far they had traveled. At one point Urban walked through the

Billy Joel is also not cool in the kitschy, campy, “he’s so uncool he’s cool” sense, which also happens to be the most tired designation in popular culture. He has no intrinsic coolness, and he has no extrinsic coolness. If cool was a color, it would be black—and Billy Joel would be sort of burnt orange.

Then an old man would shuffle in, whisper something to the barman and retire with him into the room behind the bar. He was a cocaine-addict. A moment later he reappeared, raised his hat to all of us with a vague courteous gesture, and shuffled out. The old man had a nervous tic and kept shaking his head all the time, as if saying to Life: No. No. N

I managed to keep up my habits performing cut-rate abortions in subway toilets.

It is perfectly conceivable that AI could produce a song as good as Nirvana’s  Smells Like Teen Spirit , for example, and that it ticked all the boxes required to make us feel what a song like that should make us feel – in this case, excited and rebellious, let’s say. It is also feasible that AI could produce a song that makes us feel these sa