#longform essay

[maebird-melody]

Thoughts on AI

Opening Remarks

I am by no means the first to share my thoughts on AI, nor will I be the last, I am sure. Yet as I’ve watched this discussion grow, I’ve been trying to pin down my own thoughts and feelings on the matter.

Because they aren’t universally positive, but neither are they universally negative. Rather, I am stuck in this dissociative limbo between wonder, anger, and anxiety. How beautiful and terrible, how marvelous and dreadful this synthetic, eldritch mind we’ve birthed into the world! I have struggled in articulating these feelings both to my (mostly non-artist) friends who are very excited about the possibilities of AI art, and to my (mostly artist) friends who feel threatened, disrespected, and undermined by the way AIs were trained and what they are designed to do.

So I hope to put into words both my thoughts and my observations about AI in this post.

(General disclaimer: I am an artist, writer, and composer, but not someone of any notoriety. I do not make a living off of my creations. I have one self-published book, which I wrote and illustrated, and a bandcamp where I finally started sharing my music earlier this year. Everything surrounding AI hits a little differently for someone like me who is just now trying to break into the art economy and feels like the rug’s been pulled out from under them before even getting their foot in the door.)

AI and Ethics

On the one hand, I am awestruck by the possibility of this technology. How strange and wonderful that we can tell a machine what we want to see, and it has the capacity to create it? Or that we can ask for music in a particular mood or style, and it can synthesize the sound in real time? These machines are astounding, and I don’t want to diminish that fact. To get where we are today required decades of work and effort by engineers, coders, and scientists. That effort is not lost on me.

However, AI is fraught with ethical and humanist concerns, many of which I don’t think were taken into account during its inception. Much of AI is trained from datasets made up from privately owned, stored, or copyrighted data, like medical records (1) and watermarked artwork (2). Some AI companies are explicitly marketing their products as a replacement for the people who used to create those things (3, 4, 5, 6). And while an AI music company like Harmonai kept copyrighted music out of their training datasets (7) — a common quote referenced from this article mentions how “diffusion models are prone to memorization and overfitting” — the same cannot be said of most image-based AIs that trawl the internet for data, or music AIs that explicitly generate audio in the styles of known musicians (8, 9). The latter applies to deepfakes of people’s voices, as well.

Existing online is not an invitation for exploitation. Posting an image, sharing a video or song, or publishing your writing should not equal implicit consent for an AI to leverage your creative work for profit.

We live in a world now where AI is capable of synthesizing images, music, video, and writing — creative pursuits that were formerly the sole domain of human capability. I think it is important to ask, for what reason did we create AIs that are capable of taking our place in creative professions? Why turn to AI to generate an image or a song instead of turning to a human artist, or developing the skill yourself?

If we approach AI from the position of creating the best possible world for all people, a world in which human beings can flourish, I do not believe that AI, as it currently stands, brings us closer to that ideal. So long as AI is exploitative, it necessarily worsens the lives of those whom it exploits. Existing online is not an invitation for exploitation. Posting an image, sharing a video or song, or publishing your writing should not equal implicit consent for an AI to leverage your creative work for profit. And disregarding the legitimate concerns artists have about their livelihoods, all for the sake of progress, will only serve to harm us, not help us, as collective humanity.

Common Arguments and Questions

There are certain questions and arguments I’ve seen surface with some regularity surrounding AI. There is an excellent video by Steven Zapata which covers a lot of these same arguments, I recommend giving it a watch (10).

How is an AI learning and synthesizing ideas from what it sees any different from a human doing the same? How is the influence of an artist on an AI any different than that same influence on a human?

The reason behind this common misconception is that the data used to train the AI is viewed as a purely visual influence, much in the same way that humans are influenced by the art they consume. But this neglects two factors:

Humans and AI do not process information the same way. Human brains do not work like machines, and machine learning does not follow the same conventions as human thought.

Humans and AI do not improve skill in the same way. While a human requires practice to grow their understanding of theory, composition, form, etc. with regard to their craft, an AI ‘practices’ by consuming more data points to flesh out specific qualities that it can reference when building an image, such as “roundness” or “apple-ness” or “tree-ness.” It can only copy what is has seen.

When one views an AI’s consumption of data as nothing more than how a human learns from visual references, understanding that the art was stolen becomes harder to accept.

But one must remember, the AI is nothing without the data it was fed (11). Being influenced by an image and building your entire neural network on a foundation of data are entirely different things. The comparison between human and AI is a faulty one, because humans and machines are fundamentally different.

Now everyone can make art, everyone can compose music, everyone can write stories. Why don’t you want that?

As someone who does all three, I would argue back that it was always possible for everyone to make art, compose music, and write stories.

What this statement actually means is that AI levels the playing field when it comes to skill and mastery. Now, everyone can ‘make’ art, music, and stories at a near-professional level. (Well, everyone with access to the internet and a computer-like interface, but that gets into an entirely different issue.)

To create is human. Good or bad, simple or complex, we are all wired to make things — stories, art, music — you name it, we make it. You learn and grow through making things, and the more you create, the greater you develop your aesthetic sense and an understanding of the medium.

Perhaps what bothers me is that AI art ignores the process. The point of art is not only the end result, the ‘product’ that you end up with after you’ve finished. The process of generating the art, of discovering it, of honing your skill, this is all just as precious as the art itself. It is not to be tossed away, disregarded, considered passé.

There is so much more to art than what you ‘get’ at the end.

AI artists are real artists because you need an aesthetic sense to know which images are good and which ones are bad.

I do not disagree that aesthetic sense is incredibly useful for curating the images that the AI generates, but I do disagree that aesthetic sense alone makes an artist. Nor do I believe that the skills required to generate images from an algorithm are comparable to the skills of an artist.

...we must inevitably come to the question of whether we place AI-based communication in the same skill category as producing a work of art with your own hands from scratch.

Merriam Webster defines an artist as “a person who creates art (such as painting, sculpture, music, or writing) using conscious skill and creative imagination” (12).

The point of contention I have here is over what constitutes “conscious skill” and “creative imagination.”

If we take conscious to mean “done or acting with critical awareness” (13) and skill to mean “a learned power of doing something competently: a developed aptitude or ability” (14), then we must inevitably come to the question of whether we place AI-based communication in the same skill category as producing a work of art with your own hands from scratch.

If we take creative to mean “marked by the ability or power to create” (15) and imagination to mean “the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality” (16), then we must ask if there is the capacity for imagination beyond the prompt itself in the AI image generating process. To call the AI capable of imagination makes the same mistake as in the first argument — an AI is not human. And likewise, the AI cannot generate anything it has not already seen in its training dataset.

To use an AI robs the user of the chance to imagine for themselves how they might represent, say, a cityscape at night, or a chicken wedding. While it is fun to see what the AI generates based on the data it can reference, I believe it is a misstep to then label the user an artist for telling the AI to produce those images.

I am much more comfortable with the term “AI collaborator” than “AI artist,” because, in truth, that more accurately describes what is being done when a user inputs a prompt into an AI and then attempts to guide the AI based on their personal aesthetic sense. This separation of terminology also helps to clarify when an image required years of study and days of work to create vs. when an image required a few words and some careful curation.

As an added note, I think that images generated this way could be useful for artists who want help with ideation. But it is an important step — in my mind at least — for the artist to take what the AI created as inspiration, not as the final product.

AIs aren’t going to replace real artists. It’s just a fun tool that people are using to make silly memes.

AI is already poised to replace artists in many fields, or will likely do so in the near future (17, 18).

...for many artists, it’s the mundane work that pays the bills.

There are AI composers trained on vast libraries of audio that can generate film, video game, or commercial soundtracks (19, 20). There are AI writers that can produce drafts of “SEO-friendly” articles for the web based on article titles (21). There are AI storytellers that are only serviceable as writing assistants at this stage, but at the rate that natural language processing is developing, it isn’t hard to see them creating stories all on their own in the near future (22). The Atlantic has already used Midjourney to provide the illustration for one of their newsletters (23) and an AI art piece has already won first place at an art competition (24).

Now anyone can make music equivalent to that of a professional composer with the click of a button (25). Why pay for the libraries of human-composed soundtracks, or commission a musician to score your indie video game, when an AI could just do it for you for free, and instantaneously (26)?

Now anyone can generate art with a few select key words entered into an image generator (27, 28, 29). You don’t need to pay an artist you like, you can just tell the AI to mimic their work. You don’t even need to ask a more affordable artist to copy their style because the AI can do it for free, and the result is immediate.

When natural language processing catches up with humans, AI will be able to create novels without a human writer, though I don’t see editors ever going away. Publishing houses can keep on their editors, but you don’t need a writer in that equation anymore.

The most optimistic view says that AI will free up artists to do the more fulfilling types of art and avoid the more mundane forms of it. The commercial jingles, the company logos, the ghostwriting for convenience store fiction—those can be done by AI, leaving the art galleries and bestseller lists and symphonies to the human artists. This view neglects that, for many artists, it’s the mundane work that pays the bills. Not every artist can attain an elite position, and the prevalence of AI taking up lower level work makes it even harder to rise to the top for those who do have the requisite skill. (This also neglects that many artists do enjoy that kind of utilitarian work, but that is another issue entirely.)

AI art is the next evolution in art. This is no different than how photography replaced landscape painting, or digital art replaced traditional art, or 3D animation replaced 2D animation, etc.

While this is true to a degree, in that each advancement in technology has shifted the artistic landscape, often relegating old forms of art to a smaller subsection of the art world, I do not think the comparison holds up under scrutiny.

In each of the above instances, the creative force was still with the artist, not with the tool. With AI, you can tell the AI what you want to see, but ultimately you have very little control over what image is produced.

Photographers can stage their shots, alter the lighting, introduce set pieces or props, and so on. They can choose the locations where they shoot, and make use of several different tools both during and after the shoot to alter the images.

3D animators build the models they use and often paint over the digital landscape they’ve built. Lighting, color, sound design, object interaction physics, and so on, all influence the final product. You are still building the images, frame by frame, and you have much more control of the final product.

I think there is an argument to be made for using image manipulation with AI-generated images. Transformative works are an important part of the art ecosystem. But, in the same way that a photograph of a painting is not considered a replacement or an evolution of the art form, I do not believe that an AI-generated image built on the works of un-credited, unpaid artists can be called an evolution of art. It is a tool, not an art form unto itself.

Blue Sky Thinking

I am hopeful that there can be a place for AI in the art world. Not as a replacement for the artists (30), but as a tool which enables people to expand their imaginations and develop their skill.

However, I do not think there is any way forward without first making sure that:

Artists have the power to choose whether an AI gets trained on their images.

Those who do choose to include their art in the dataset are fairly compensated for their contributions.

We have legislation in place which protects artists from frauds who would pass off AI forgeries as belonging to those artists.

Companies must use a specific ratio of human-made art to AI art, one which favors the human artists, to protect the livelihoods of those artists and keeps open the paths to career advancement.

The above list is likely not exhaustive, and I imagine even more needs will arise the longer that AIs exist.

But there are many applications of AI that I could imagine benefiting artists. In this section, I am imagining how a fully developed AI that is not plagued by the problems of its infancy could be used.

Imagine using AI to determine where the anatomy is off on your figure drawing. An AI that has been trained exclusively on how multiple types of bodies look in 3D space could potentially compare your drawing against thousands of examples and highlight where the elbow might be in the wrong position, or the foreshortening on the foot isn’t quite right. The AI could help train the artist’s eye to better see where they need to grow.

Or in an animation studio, where uniformity of style is important for a consistent-looking film or series, an AI that has been trained on character models and short animation reels, along with all previous episodes of the show, could help identify where artists are running into specific problems with replicating the characters. This could help animators grow in their understanding of how to identify where they tend to go off-model.

Or for an illustrator stuck in a rut on how to design a character. Putting in a few  descriptors from the book they are illustrating could help with the ideation process before they set down the final character designs. Many illustrators already use reference material to help spark their imaginations. With an AI, finding the examples you need becomes that much quicker.

For a digital artist who is very prolific and in high demand, having an AI collaborator that helps them with the more tedious parts of the drawing, parts which require very little skill, such as laying down flat colors or copying a repeating pattern across a canvas, could be done by the AI to speed up their production time.

For a video game designer, having an AI that can turn hand-drawn assets into usable objects for a game could be very useful. Imagine an AI that can bridge the gap between human-made images and the integrated video game world, knowing already how to apply real-world physics to the objects because it understands “bowl-ness” and “weight.”

And for hobbyists who just like to play around with an AI image generator, it could be another source of income for artists who choose to design art for those image generators. Just like artists build the character options for a character building engine in a video game. AI image generators as they function now, I think, are best if considered as video games.

And if I think about music, it does seem as though AI models for music may already be trending in a hopeful direction. Imagine using AI to generate sound samples for electronic or experimental music. Or letting AI help you come up with that missing lyric that you just can’t think of. Maybe you want to create a your own set of unique midi instruments. You could use an AI to create the sound you’re looking for and then turn it into an instrument by adjusting the tone. You could use this new instrument in your DAW, or integrate it with notation software. Maybe even turn that sound into a synth that you can pull up on a keyboard and play at a concert.

There are many possibilities, and not all roads lead to exploitation.

Closing Remarks

I want to believe that this technology does not mean that work which would otherwise have been given to writers, musicians, and artists will instead be given to AI. I want to believe that rather, this technology will enable people who otherwise would never have been able to afford writers, artists, and musicians to have access to good writing, beautiful music, and astounding art. I want to believe that when those people come to a place where they can afford to hire creative people, they would choose that over AI. That AI would be a stepping stone. Much like with composers using virtual instruments for their music, or novelists using royalty-free images for their self-published novels, the specificity of human performance and creation is preferred, but out of reach. 

Ultimately, I think the feeling I have is one of futility rather than hope. What was it all for? Why spend years of my life honing my skills as a pianist, a composer, an illustrator, and a writer? What was the point of sinking thousands of dollars into a degree in music composition? Or the years of lessons on music theory? The hours spent researching storytelling models? The closet full of sketchbooks and classes in figure drawing, painting, art history, and design? What purpose does all that training serve now?

But then, who am I to complain? I can’t afford to hire musicians to play my music, so I use virtual instruments instead or record in my bedroom on the few instruments I know how to play. I can’t afford to hire cover artists for my albums, so I do my best to design them myself. Is it not the same for any small content creator? How is leveraging the royalty free stock images available online any different from clicking a button to generate an image from an AI?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, and I think it will take time for us all to work them out, together.

AI has potential for good, but it also has a lot of potential for harm. And I don’t see us avoiding the harm (to not even speak of the harm that has already been done) without serious intervention. The future is up to us.

I am still learning about this topic, and will probably continue to learn as the situation changes. I’ve linked throughout this post the resources that I referenced during my research. I hope that this post will also help others process their thoughts and feelings on AI, and maybe even find some of the resources useful, too.

Sources:

1 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/artist-finds-private-medical-record-photos-in-popular-ai-training-data-set/

2 https://kotaku.com/ai-art-dall-e-midjourney-stable-diffusion-copyright-1849388060

3 https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-announcement

4 https://soundraw.io/

5 https://boomy.com/

6 https://www.ampermusic.com/

7 https://wandb.ai/wandb_gen/audio/reports/Harmonai-s-Dance-Diffusion-Open-Source-AI-Audio-Generation-Tool-For-Music-Producers--VmlldzoyNjkwOTM1

8 https://sensoriumxr.com/articles/what-is-ai-music

9 https://www.inverse.com/input/tech/open-ais-jukebox-generates-music-that-sounds-like-dead-artists

10 https://youtu.be/tjSxFAGP9Ss

11 https://www.aimeecozza.com/ai-art-what-is-it/

12 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/artist?src=search-dict-box

13 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conscious

14 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/skill

15 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/creative

16 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/imagination

17 https://www.cartoonbrew.com/comics/dall-e-midjourney-ai-illustrated-comics-220166.html

18 https://www.dacs.org.uk/latest-news/dacs-warns-that-new-text-and-data-mining-exception?category=For+Artists&title=N

19 https://www.unite.ai/best-ai-music-generators/

20 https://filmora.wondershare.com/audio-editing/best-ai-music-composer.html

21 https://ai-writer.com/

22 https://www.codingem.com/best-ai-story-generators/

23 https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/galaxy-brain/62f28a6bbcbd490021af2db4/where-does-alex-jones-go-from-here/

24 https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvmvqm/an-ai-generated-artwork-won-first-place-at-a-state-fair-fine-arts-competition-and-artists-are-pissed

25 https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-music-examples

26 https://medium.com/@1jonathankao/how-anyone-can-create-music-with-ai-725821f2f25c

27 https://creator.nightcafe.studio/

28 https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-use-midjourney-create-ai-art/

29 https://openai.com/dall-e-2/

30 https://ebenschumacherart.com/will-ai-replace-artists/

Other Resources:

Society of Illustrators: https://societyillustrators.org/

Concept Art Association: https://www.conceptartassociation.com/

Equity (UK-based Creative Union): https://www.equity.org.uk/

Proko on AI Ethics, Artists, and What You Can Do About It: https://youtu.be/Nn_w3MnCyDY

The Met on AI Art: https://mymodernmet.com/ai-art-2022/

CNN on AI Art: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/21/tech/artists-ai-images/index.html

ArtStation Protest:

1 https://kotaku.com/artstation-ai-art-generated-images-epic-games-protest-1849891085

2 https://www.vice.com/en/article/ake9me/artists-are-revolt-against-ai-art-on-artstation

Check for your art in databases used to train AI: https://haveibeentrained.com/

[longreads]

In a new Longreads essay, Arkansas writer Jordan P. Hickey writes about a Palestinian American chef who honors her family's roots and culinary traditions through her pop-up bakery and cooking classes

And while these aren’t the most complex dishes to grace the text thread, they are the most remarkable, the most joyful, because they are the most improbable. They’re celebrated not because they’re beautiful, but because it means the family ate well that day—because they made something out of nothing.

Read Jordan’s essay, “The Expanding Table: Honoring Palestinian Culinary Tradition in Arkansas,” on Longreads.

[redbeanbag]

I think the primary takeaway from all these new family anime’s (Buddy Daddies, Spy x Family, Yakuza’s Guide to Babysitting etc.) isn’t that people should be having more children but that child rearing is a communal effort meant to be shared within robust networks of support. That found family is as meaningful as biological family and atypical familial structures can enrich a child’s development in ways the nuclear family cannot.

[wordswhisperinthedark]

I think the biggest reason why the long forms are my favourite sfth thing is that as someone who spends ages writing because the words won't go the way I want immediately, it's amazing to see a group conjure up such wonderful and well-written stories with beautiful arcs and conclusions (plus the healthy doses of chaos), and well fleshed-out characters in the space of like, 30 minutes or less?? On the spot?? And with other people all throwing their ideas in at the same time?? *mind blown*

[giantkillerjack]

PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS

PUSSY.

BIG FLAPPY WET JESUS PUSSY.

JESUS' SOPPING WET PUSS-PUSS

[Edited months after posting to discourage catholics from replying to this post after finding that both the nice and much funnier not-nice responses to this were equally bad for my mental health. I didn't wanna delete it bc I was quite proud of some of my responses and it helps to have a visual reminder of why I left an abusive organization. Also, this means that any catholic who has reblogged this in an attempt to convert me, has now reblogged a post that, if clicked, links back to this. Use MY post for propaganda, will you!]

Thinking about how it was never made clear to me in Catholic school exactly WHY Jesus died for our sins. I just remembered that I was literally never clear on who the dying helped??

I've heard theories as an adult, but basically what I'm saying is pointless martyrdom seems a little pointless, and also with enough propaganda the big logical gaps in a belief system get really hard to see. Especially if questioning anything is blasphemy.

I would have gotten in so much trouble for insisting the teacher explain how Jesus helped us by being tortured to death by Romans even when God could have prevented it! God sent his only Son, they would have said! Be grateful, they'd say! Be guilty! Stop asking why he did that!!!

[i-hear-a-sound]

they never saw her when she was alive and they never saw her when she was dead

[doodlepede]

Pebbles complains to Suns that he is angry with the Benefactors for having "left us here", and that that anger makes him less inclined to keep trying to solve their Problem. It isn't fair, he says. Suns tells him that there are only two options: keep trying or do nothing. Pebbles reminds him that they do die of old age. Pebbles struggles to accept being a bug in the Benefactors' maze.

In a closed Sliverist group, an anonymous user decries Sliver of Straw for breaking the self-destruction taboo, making her a "traitor to the cause". The anonymous user is kicked from the group for being a troll, but Pebbles questions why the self-destruction taboo is held in such high regard when Sliver of Straw is dead, he questions why they "leave this path untrod".

When Chasing Wind confronts the local group that someone is trying to cross himself out, they say "he's not looking for the same thing as we are anymore; he's changed his task"

"What if there is no universal solution? What if perception is, in fact, existence, and when Sliver of Straw sent the triple affirmative, it wasn't a mistake? What if crossing oneself out, or even just death is the way? We need to consider the possibility"

Moon distracted Pebbles at the worst possible moment, when he was so close to successfully producing the genome he needed to circumvent the self-destruction taboo (to do what? immediately kill himself? continue research into global ascension?)

-

So... Self-destruction is traitorous behavior, it betrays the Benefactors by deliberately circumventing the limits they placed. Pebbles resents the Benefactors for giving him a task he doesn't believe can be solved and then leaving them all to just figure it out on their own while they slowly die. he describes himself as an "unwilling gift".

in my opinion, his goal was to offer up the option of suicide to other iterators, just present the option to exit existence on their own terms, rather than whenever was convenient for the Benefactors. He cares a lot about other iterators, their plight in general. If his goal were just suicide, I don't think he would have attempted to rid himself of his rot. It's clearly an agonizing way to die. Anyone who has been suicidal to the point of researching methods will tell you they avoid methods which are drawn out and painful, but, in Moon's words, "we don't die easy". Rot is clearly not a brand new concept either, since Chasing Wind tells Suns that "[Five Pebbles] got the rot, badly". Rot and insufficient water may be some of the only reliable ways to kill an iterator, and surely if all he wanted was death, he could have simply accepted that it was this way or no way, but instead he tried to flush it out, he took the difficult route, to find a method that is, if you'll excuse me, possible, portable, and generally applicable (for iterators).

The Downpour authors seem to be more or less on my same wavelength.... Pebbles says to Artificer, "It was clear to me, and few others what this meant. Sliver of Straw had opened the door for us, we only needed to reject the restrictions of our creators to follow her. If only they could see that!" ... 'To prove her signal wasn't just coincidence'. Dont feel like reading the wiki anymore though its been two hours

[glitteratti]

idc if wend*goon is actually problematic i just need him to fall off in any way because he is soooo annoying. that is NOT a video essayist he just does RECAPS

[landgraabbed]

oh man a 1h+ long video talking about the evolution of crpgs from pillars of eternity to bg3?! don't mind if i do

[wolvesbaned]

the brainrot is coming back !!!!! oh no!!! oh god .

[chronicles-of-oz]

A 6-hour Lies of P Analysis

Heya!

I’m Fairdy and for the past couple of months I’ve been working on a longform Lies of P analysis and critique video. If you’re interested in retrospectives or video essays like this and are interested in Lies of P, it’s mechanics and story, then I invite you to watch my first project!!

[longreads]

In this new Longreads essay, Megan Marz asks: why does the literary world still hold online writing at arm’s length? 

While it’s become banal to observe that online life is fully enmeshed with the rest of the world, an imaginary curtain separates online writing from the rest of U.S. literature. It’s time to take that curtain down.

People like to say the internet speeds reading up, but a personal blog, read in real time, can slow a story’s pace down to the timescale of life; the thickest book in existence can be read in less calendar time. Not even the author knew when a blog would end, which is what made it feel so alive.

Read Megan Marz’s “Poets in the Machine” on Longreads.

[sunburnacoustic]

Muse - Absolution (2003)

After years of waiting, loaded with trials and experimentation, apocalypse finally has a soundtrack. No, it’s not the angsty, heady crooning of yet another musician in love, it’s not the introspective Beatle having seen the Truth, it is not Johnny Rotten tearing down the Establishment (again), and it isn’t the self-destruction a James Hetfield would growl about.

Apocalypse as a genre has been claimed and made a natural home in, and by a seemingly unassuming young band hailing from the idyllic seaside Middle Of Nowhere, Teignmouth, Devonshire in England: alt-prog rockers Muse.

Muse’s 3rd studio album Absolution (released in 2003) picks up on the big sounds and potential the band had been showing throughout their second album and takes it twenty notches higher. The instrumentation is solid, the rhythms are tight, the guitars loud, the sound, bombastic in moments and delicate, vulnerable and beautiful in the next, the lyrical themes are exploratory, and the band themselves seem to find their feet and lay down the foundations of what even today makes up their signature ‘Musey’ sound.

Yet that little summary couldn’t begin to do justice to the grandiose and power this album packs. At it’s finest, Muse take you on a fifty-two minute trip out of the world (quite literally, as the titular track ‘Sing For Absolution’s music video features the band jetting off into outer space to escape the planet only to have their spaceship crash down into a burning, post-apocalyptical London), charming and haunting you with dark, sustained Rachmaninoff-esque piano breakdowns and blowing you away with larger-than-life drums, distorted guitar and bass working in perfect synch to build up a rising tide-wall of sound that may make it hard at times to remember that there are but three musicians in the recording rooms shaking up your world, as singer Matt Bellamy wails, sings and warbles on about facing death (‘Thoughts of a Dying Atheist’), running out of time (‘Time Is Running Out’), meeting up with the Devil himself (‘The Small Print’), and changing the world (‘Butterflies and Hurricanes’), amongst other things, with each song bearing as Muse-like a name as there comes.

And Matt Bellamy, contrasting this album with their previous efforts, said in an interview that Absolution “is more about us being personable, about us being normal people at home”. 

Well, normal Matt Bellamy at home, that is.

The album is introduced with a stomping, twenty second intro, the sound of boots getting closer and heavier, culminating in a single phrase: “Siege heil… marsche!��� Twenty seconds in, the apocalyptical themes have already begun kicking in.

But before you have the time to breathe, the first song of the album, ‘Apocalypse Please’ begins, coming right at you with all of Bellamy’s pensiveness and despair, heavy ‘apocalyptical’ piano chords and drums crashing down on you as Matt declares that Earth needs a miracle and that “this is the end of the world”, layering the chorus as multiple Bellamy’s seal humanity’s fate.

The song’s mid/low tempo (around 80bpm) and loud vocals—almost cries of despair, really—and the closing bars with amplified, sustained single bass notes under forceful piano run-up chords, work quite well in conjuring up quite the image the band is looking to build and set the scene for the rest of the album to come.

Following this is one of the singles off the album, ‘Time Is Running Out’, starting with a low, almost choking yet flowing bassline with Bellamy almost breathing out lines like ‘I think I’m drowning/Asphyxiated/I want to break this spell that you created’, a song that starts out soft, restrained, then building up to the chorus as a tormented Bellamy tries to break free and realises that their time is running out, again employing the signature Muse technique of layering multiple guitars and vocals to build up a wall of sound, amplifying Matt’s thoughts, as does its twin later on the album, ‘Hysteria’.

On the titular track, ‘Sing for Absolution’, Bellamy seems to find a Muse of his own, turning inwards to a much more relaxed tempo. The band makes effective use of bassist Chris Wolstenholme’s staccato bass, offset and complemented by the almost dreamlike delayed, echoing guitars and pianos, to cook up an image of a lonely, reflective singer up alone in a room on the top floor of a house, sitting in the faint blue gleam of starlight, gazing out the window into space, thinking about his own life (‘Tiptoe to your room/A starlight in the gloom/I only dream of you/And you never knew’).

On ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, Matthew Bellamy takes the tried and tested ‘captor-and-captive-fall-in-love’ narrative, a darling of writers and musicians everywhere, and breathes new life into it by adding a new dimension of emotions to it, playing on the presumed captor-narrator’s guilt, confusion and sense of hopelessness (‘And she’ll scream and she’ll shout, and she’ll pray/And she had a name’; ‘We’ll love and we’ll hate and we’ll die/All to no avail…’; ‘This is the last time I’ll forget you… I wish I could’)

Muse use drummer Dominic Howard’s drums; pounding, loud and noticeable as a heartbeat in a quiet room; and Bellamy’s trembling vibratos to effectively paint the brutality and vulnerability; indeed, in the last chorus, behind the brute forces crashing on the guitars, bass and drums, one can hear the almost fragile, delicate piano arpeggios in the background, swallowed up by the guitars, almost hidden, protected, in a story that extends beyond the words.

Muse’s ability to switch from a light-hearted, fast-paced tone to a brooding, dark, haunting wail with effortless ease and grace stands out throughout the album and particularly on the sixth track on the album, ‘Falling Away With You’. The song, almost a hidden gem tucked away snugly in the middle of the album, is one of the few times the man who would go on to sing about conspiracy theories, the second law of thermodynamics and uprisings, turns inward and reflects on the people in his life and his relationships with them.

The song’s opening is slightly similar to Blackbird by the Beatles, with a quiet, reverberating guitar over a near-silent backdrop as Bellamy sings about his fears of forgetting a loved one and how relationships change, slowly building up and letting his bandmates catch up in a sort of relay-race, to a chorus that bursts to life with a screaming Matt falsetto-ing to a climax as the band fades to make space for Bellamy to calm down again, and the cycle continues.

It would be fair to say that the bass line drives the next track off the album, ‘Hysteria’. The song opens with a booming bass riff and all the straight faced extravagance that is both the band’s signature and legacy. A three-way harmonic melody solo rages on in the upper octaves that run in the background of the last chorus as a tormented Matthew tries to break free of his inner demons and Muse bring the song to a close in a manner worthy of a stadium closure.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Muse album without experimentation, and while Muse aren’t recording in zero gravity (for now), the band takes to string arrangements in search of new sounds and avenues on ‘Blackout’, dishing up a slow lament, complemented by fuzzy single note tremolos, and it only gets better on the next track, ‘Butterflies and Hurricanes’, as Bellamy sounds off a call to arms to get up and change the world, and “use this chance to be heard”. The strings create a dystopian air, with a terse, fuzzy bass running underground and Wolstenholme’s backing vocals playing in the open skies as Bellamy commands his summoned army to action. His emotions seem to spill out of his fingers onto the piano in sudden gushes in a beautiful, flying, sustained solo that stands even today as a testament to Bellamy’s superior skills on the keys.

Absolution marks a sonic departure from Origin of Symmetry (2001) in that the production seems a lot more refined and cleaner. The band favours richer, fuller sounds: more gain-heavy guitars and bigger drums that would feel home in arena, as opposed to the “dirtier”, more grungey, piercing sounds used on their previous endeavours.

 However, there is tons for fans of the band to savour (in addition to a very musically accomplished record) on the track ‘The Small Print’. Bellamy returns to one of his pet themes as he takes on the role of the apathetic Devil (‘I’m a priest God never paid’), watching the world and its happenings with an omniscient eye (‘I hope you’ve seen the light/because no one really cares/They’re just pretending’), a nod back to Origin-era songs like ‘Hyper Music’. The band’s commendable execution, both with the lyrics as well as the rough, almost lo-fi edge in the production on this piece make it astonishingly powerful for a song with a niche theme and a simple guitar riff repeating over shifting root bass notes.

There really is never an uneventful moment on the fifty-two minute, thirteen-second record. The band throw familiarity to the winds on their next track, ‘Endlessly’, a song both very predictably Muse-like, yet something quite unlike anything the band had done before. Trading in the guitar for dampened, “muddy” synths, Muse give you the feeling of sitting underwater, drowned in the waterfalls of sound. Synth chords fall silently around you and ripple under the layers of arpeggiated synths that build up the wall of—excuse the pun—endless sound and lock you into Bellamy’s greyness as he promises a loved one the he’ll do anything for them but won’t leave them– until finally deciding that that moment never comes and calming down to a finish, internal turmoil now at rest.

Bellamy, mind wandering like a child, turns to more existential ideas soon after on ‘Thoughts Of A Dying Atheist’, a fast-paced, energetic and curiously happy-sounding piece, musically, for a song that is about an atheist at the end of their life, knowing that what lies ahead of them is nothingness (‘It scares the hell out of me/And the end is all I can see’) and seems to create an ironic contrast between the energy of the song and the narrator’s nervousness that works to the band’s credit.

Muse continue to shock and awe, haunt and bewitch you right up to the very last song on the album, ‘Ruled By Secrecy’. Lyrically perhaps the most quotidian song on the album, this track deals with the pressures in life and realising that you’ll never be on top. Lyrically and musically, it’s one of the darkest pieces in the band’s repertoire, beginning with low, quiet pianos. A ghostly, whispering Matt, sings with sustain and echo, recreating an almost surprisingly gothic, medieval church-like sound reminiscent of the Middle Ages, bringing to mind fear, uncertainty and mistrust (‘they’ll hide everywhere/no one knows who’s in control’), gathering force and building up to the signature piano crashing chord work that defines this album throughout. 

The song, and consequently the album, ends with a final touch to the cymbals, a subtle finish to an album with so much grandiose, its power and assertion leaving the listener reeling and the band flying high on yet another tasteful record successfully polished off.

Watch out Martians, Muse are coming.

------------------------------

A review for Absolution I wrote back in first year in 2018. Happy 20 years of Absolution! I'm happy to note that this time around, with the reissue, Fury will not be left off the album anymore, and my review will (happily) be out of date come November.

[wisteriagoesvroom]

🏎️💨 THE FORMULA 1 TAG GAME! 🏎️💨:

stealing this from the timeline...

+ zero pressure tags (but i love reading these!) - @lecrep @souvenir116 @fueledbyremembering @thinkingaboutfilm11 @supercollide @fireopaal @callsign-shortstack @thatguywasvaping @linewire @buryawoman and whoever else wants to do it.

1. Who or what got you into F1?

charles edits on tiktok + drive to survive, lmao. i'm one of those bitches. sorry not sorry!

but! i will say! what greg james said about f1 resonated with me because i have never ever really cared about physics or engineering in any deep or substantial way. and now, i am avidly reading people like supermak's incredible posts talking about downforce or apexes or deltas and car configs, looking at the charts and the data, and i just think that is a really fun place to be.

f1blr and f1 fandom so far has been a nice confirmation that multiple things can be true - yes we want to make the vroom vroom boys kiss, but we also care deeply about the ethics of the sport, the growth, about driver + team stories, driver pipelines and equity and race excitement and engineering. i think it's really cool these things can coexist.

the sport never should be one thing to one group of people, you know? (wow that ended up longer than i thought.)

2. Who was the very first F1 driver you supported? Do you support them now? Have your opinions on them differed or stayed the same since then?

charles, and still charles lmao. unfortunately.

i am an oscar piastri enthusiast also. i think there's a bit of recency bias at work here but he's come swimming like a fledgling shark into the shallows with his deadpan personality and i'm just very intrigued by His Whole Thing.

i want good things for yuki! and lewis! my GOAT!! give the man his 8th :( (it probably isn't happening but lets' not manifest that.......)

TL;DR it's been a joy getting to "know" the grid (or at least as much of their public persona will tell us) and getting into the lore. *shaky hands* the LORE!

also nobody asked, but, schumacher was an omnipresent name when i was growing up - which might give away my age - but he always felt like an old school driver. in the sense of his mythos, his mystery, his dominance of the track. that era of f1 is over and the sport only moves on and evolves, but in the same way his presence felt a lot more removed and unrelatable to me, and far away. the speed of technology now and broadcasting and social content makes f1 feel more fun and accessible. it feels a lot nicer to find fandom spaces like f1blr where there are different audiences (female, queer, a variety of ages and backgrounds etc) yelling about the same things.

it's just a different time, not a value judgment. but i am enjoying it.

3. Who’s your current favourite F1 driver?

see above, but i'm 100% here for lestappen having a track battle next year only for oscar to pip them to the podium in one of the races lmao. i think it'd be amazing.

4. Is there a driver pairing or pairings you support? What made you attracted to that pairing in the first place?

*long sigh* once again lestappen baybee... the lore... the parallels... the sun-moonism.... the enemies-to-rivals-to-friends-and-gay-rival-soulmates-something

i like other pairings too like in my about me post - landoscar, galex, blabla. my dark horses are riccussell (george/daniel) and groto (george/toto).

something about that greyhound, very wound-up, very upper-middle-class, highly-strung, born-to-want-but-not-to-always-win english george:

5. Do your parents, siblings or relatives have a favourite team and/or favourite driver(s)?

i got my sister into f1 at around the same time but she's not indicated any preference on drivers yet tbh. she's a casual fan. must be nice being normal.

6. Do you have any favourite races? Are there any that stand out to you the most?

haven't seen enough of them to say, 'cus i only started following like two months ago as the season was winding down. i looooved Vegas '23 though and the legendary charles overtake. he's just so fucking smart and cunning when he's given the conditions and the car to be. watching Abu Dhabi '21 on replay was also a TRIP.

7. Do you have a favourite circuit? Can be from the past or from the current calendar.

i'm still learning them. but i'm mildly curious about the old tracks like nürburgring - it was from a totally different era of the sport and it'd be nice to rebalance the long tracks with the current spectacle of street races even though that doesn't seem to be where the sport's moving towards.

8. Have you ever been to an F1 race in real life? Feel free to tell us your experience going to one if you like.

i actually live in a place with a track... i had a free ticket for general access once many years ago but that was pre-f1 hyperfixation, and at that point i didn't understand the appeal at all. idk.

i feel like f1 is actually a better experience for me to watch on tv as a fan.... probably blasphemy i know.

9. Have you ever met an F1 driver in real life?

no and idk that i would because i've seen celebrities in person in the past and it's usually so quick and transactional because they're surrounded by hordes of handlers and/or they're usually running somewhere even if it's a fan-focused interaction.

THAT SAID! i would love to attend a talk by Lewis or just generally hear what he has to say, because what he's done is so beyond f1 at this point and he always shows up in terms of advocacy and speaking up, in recent years, where it really matters. he's a fascinating figure, sometimes contradictory, sometimes controversial, but i definitely would love to hear what he has to say.

10. Do you have a favourite F1 car? If so, what is it?

i am partial to that black and gold lotus from the 80s, ngl:

and this 7up car (jordan 191?) which with the fujifilm sponsorship is just peak 90s:

11. Do you have a favourite one win wonder?

does charles count as a one win wonder............ fight me in the comments

12. Do you have any favourite quotes from the F1 world? This can either be inspirational or hilarious.

"don't waste it" from seb vettel to charles on seb's last day

[triblu]

you see we all know the gay culture

but y'all aint even ready for bi culture

(its, longform horror video essays, and hawaiian shirts)

[legionofpotatoes]

about your last reblog... I actually wrote up some information about Zur / DAO's music and would appreciate if you could reblog it - it's my pinned post

Sure, will do you a solid, but truthfully you're preaching to the choir here. I am well aware that he's a raging zionist who learned all the wrong lessons and perpetuated it in every fiber of his output. I'm generally not interested in juxtaposing that against culture war issues around who is allowed to work on dragon age and such, it just isn't a priority for me in any sense. But I digress, I know it's important around here