(Image by ChatGPT).
Dolly isn’t dead much more than a week and the tribute songs are pouring in. Some of these are lofted by earthly voices that hymn the departed, now safely in heaven. Others are ethereal, not haunting the Great Smoky Mountains where Dolly Parton was born, raised and got her music, but piped into the endlessly echoing cathedral of the internet from artificially intelligent ghouls headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The cauldron at this virtual witches’ sabbath is called Suno. The brew has been steaming away since the platform’s release in 2023, its fumes haunting music and musicians, the warlocks of this AI music creation corporation robbing the dead and seducing the living with their dark arts.
Masses of money are at stake. In 2024 the Recording Industry Association of America filed a copyright infringement suit against Suno, Inc. The dispute has not yet been settled, though the plaintiffs did come to an agreement with Warner Music Group, one of the three massive conglomerates ruling the music world.
Then a few days ago the singer-songwriter Jason Isbell and three musician colleagues filed suit against Suno in Federal District Court in Massachusetts, seeking redress not just for copyright infringement but pursuing a novel strategy that alleges illegal imitation of their voices and style.
Before the advent of copyright, musicians rummaged unabashedly in the vast musical lost-and-found, helping themselves to the goods not just for reasons of expediency but as a vital form of their training and often as a sincere and accepted expression of respect through emulation. At the top of the long list of canny opportunists stands Handel. He stole countless themes from long-dead predecessors and successful—and occasionally aggrieved—contemporaries. He may not have been the best at coming up with melodies, but no one was better at elaborating them. In musical terms, he paid back his debts with interest. The world was and is better for it. Handel was too. He died a rich man.
Handel emigrated from the continent to London in 1710, the same year that the British Parliament passed the Statute of Anne establishing copyright for printed texts. But it was more than a half-century before the King’s Bench (now the High Court) extended the concept to music in the landmark case of Bach v. Longman of 1777, also the basis of American jurisprudence on copyright. Thus Handel, among many others, could skirt the issue.
The irony of Bach v. Longman is that, although the publisher Richard Longman was indeed pirating prints of Johann Christian Bach’s music (like Handel, this youngest son of Johann Sebastian transplanted himself to England ), the so-called London Bach’s compositions are full of off-the-shelf figures and motives also found in the music of others.
The word “composing” meant putting things together: this standard bit (perhaps slightly altered) goes here and that bit (also used by countless other musicians) goes there, the structure of a piece of music built up according to rules of musical syntax and prevailing fashion. To be sure, there are unexpected turns of phrase and other often ineffable qualities that give J. C. Bach’s music a personal touch—i.e., originality. It was long and rigorous training built largely on imitation that enabled classical musicians of yore like the Bachs to compose in such quantity and with such quality. The same goes for Dolly Parton’s musical education in the rich vernacular traditions of her native Tennessee. She went on to write more than 3,000 songs.
The CEO of Suno, Mikey Shulman, claims that he and his cronies are on an enlightened mission of democratization of the artistic process. Now everyone can be a composer. Shulman styles himself a revolutionary, a stormer of the aesthetic Bastille, arming the uprising with the latest technology. His propaganda, like that recently put up on a blog on his company’s website, attempts to rebut the claims of Isbell’s suit. “AI should enable originality, not imitation,” Shulman writes. The prose quickly becomes as maudlin as many of the songs Suno spits out: “We believe that when more people experience the joy of creating music, music itself becomes a bigger part of their lives. They feel more connected to the songs they create, and the artist and music that inspires them. Most of the music people make on Suno is deeply meaningful: a lullaby for a child, a song for a partner, or something made to preserve a memory.” One suspects a good deal of ghostwriting from AI in this manifesto.
Buttressing Shulman’s spurious, self-serving arguments, however, is the old adage that, as in the pre-copyright epoch, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. There would be no art without it. Originality and imitation are not opponents but collaborators, their relationship often vexed, but always necessary, and in the best results, inscrutable. Many seek refuge in the word “inspiration,” which conjures a metaphysical, indeed mystical relation to models. But long and close attention to cherished models—i.e., some sort of imitation—is required if one is to be “inspired.” Shulman has a super-simplistic response to this truth: “When a prompt [from a Suno customer] references a specific artist, we remove the artist’s name and redirect the request toward descriptive musical characteristics.”
Before the advent of sound recording technology, copyright could be exercised only on music that had been written down, and notation remains crucial in establishing ownership. The notes are the notes, but can the peculiarities of performance, style, and the grain of the voice be quantified, as Isbell’s suit hopes, by a court of law?
“Creating” your own music on Suno can be as simple as typing in a few words or a phrase about what you want your song to be about, plus asking AI to set the mood, genre, and other features. Seconds later you’ve got “your” song.
To assuage your shame at ceding your imagination and with it your humanity to a machine, you can chuck a few scraps of your own doggerel or upload a knuckly strip of melody into the brew, then claim—at least to yourself—that you wrote the song. You can sing to Suno and have your own voice added to, and transformed by, the mix. The AI lyrics creator can construct verse and chorus, punch things up, cinch down syllable count and rhymes.
The Suno “ecosystem” suddenly teems with dashed-off paeans to Parton. These come to singing life with comforting Country clichés, just as many natural, real-peopled songs out of Nashville do. Parton herself made ample use of the everyday. The results were authentic.
One of the new AI tributes to her sets lyrics by a Welshman. His opening verse, like much of the one-minute song with a tacked-on thirty-second outro, is stitched together from titles of some of Parton’s biggest hits.
Of Good Old Country Music Dolly Parton she was queen.
The verse is both ingenious and unwittingly hilarious. The last two lines can be read as simply a list of titles, but their syntactic sense, when ardently performed by Grand Ole Opry AI, suggests that the narrator’s (the “I’s”) affection for Jolene will only be delivered in eternity between working hours—a brilliantly ironic take on the themes of the 1980 movie 9 to 5, in which Parton starred and also wrote and performed the title song, for which she won an Oscar.
The Suno song also flirts with blasphemy: after her arrival in heaven, Dolly the “queen … will rule supreme.” There is even a witty rhyme that is delayed a few beats in order to make up for a missing syllable in the scansion. The pay-off makes a warmly personal connection to the lyricist: “Dolly with her Stetson and her flamboyant cowboy boots / Dolly once confirmed that she actually had … Welsh roots.” One can’t be so cynical as again to suspect that Suno’s Lyrics Creator came to the Welshman’s aid and did more than a little of the poetic lifting on this one. Or can one?
The jaunty guitar strumming, the soft-focus drumming, the familiar chord progressions, the relaxed but eager tempo: the easy familiarity of it all disarms and even—dare I say it?—delights. The voices—one artificially and intelligently male, the other artificially and intelligently female—simulate emotion and texture, both pitch-pure like that of the dedicatee. Somewhere in the sonic strata are the elements of Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, referred to by name in the song in conjunction with one of their famous collaborations, “Islands in the Stream.”
It’s all so endearingly obvious, goofy and heartfelt that one can begin to feel the glow from Shulman’s utopian campfire sing-along.
But then the artificial edge begins to grate, pulling you back to reality. Buy, borrow or steal a cheap guitar, learn two chords and sing it yourself, whether you can carry a tune or not!
Parton sold more than 100 million records during her life. Downloads and other sales have spiked since her death. She is in the earth and in the ether. She has already sung for Suno and, in intentionally mystified ways, through it.
A sentimentalist will insist that although Shulman can cover up Parton’s name engraved on her tombstone (that is, keep it out of the input box) and then pry back the crypt and pick over her musical bones, he’ll never steal her voice.
I think he already has.
