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Tomorrow’s Uproar AI Compilation (MA Glory, 2024)
I’ve spent plenty of time listening to music over the past week, but the sounds that have dominated my brain space are the ones on this AI-generated hardcore compilation my friend Adam sent me. Adam sent me the link to Tomorrow’s Uproar after reading my discussion with Woodstock 99 in a previous Sorry State newsletter, in which the band explained how they used AI on their new album, 99 Ta Life. While Brandon from WS99 warned us that AI was coming for our beloved punk subgenres, I didn’t think I’d hear something like this mere weeks later.
There isn’t much info on the Bandcamp page that hosts Tomorrow’s Uproar, just that “The music, vocals, lyrics, song titles, and album art for this record were all generated using AI” and the credit, “Generated using AI by Trevor Vaughan.” A quick Google search didn’t turn up any coverage of or chatter about the album, and I’m left curious about the tools and methods Vaughan used to put together the release. Based on the limited time I’ve spent playing with AI interfaces, we’re not anywhere near the point where you can type “make a hardcore compilation LP” into an AI interface and have it spit out something as on the money as Tomorrow’s Uproar. I find that AI tends to work best when you get a back-and-forth dialogue going with it, refining its responses through multiple iterations, so while the AI gets top billing, I imagine a lot of human thought still went into Tomorrow’s Uproar.
My first impression when I scanned the track listing for Tomorrow’s Uproar was that it reminded me of hardcore parody projects like Grudge and Crucial Youth. Both those projects parodied hardcore’s tendency toward vapidity and embrace of cliche, and how AI cobbles together punk-sounding words into conflagrations like Edge of Resistance, Concrete Annihilation, and Steel Core Rebellion echoes how pastiche divorces form from content, using words as interchangeable puzzle pieces rather than as symbols standing in for more profound thoughts. You hear the same thing in the lyrics, like how “Concrete Annihilation” starts with the line, “I’m haaaaaard / like these concrete streets.” But while that line and titles like “Fists of Defiance” are ham-handed, others like “Stand As One” are more on the money. In fact, “Stand As One” is the title of a Cause for Alarm song, and has served many times as a band name or album title for hardcore bands whose members are all human. Maybe AI isn’t yet smart enough to figure out that “Stand As One” is acceptably cliche while “Fists of Defiance” is dumb, but it’s only a matter of time. I bet your first band was pretty generic, too.
The relationship to its source material seems in flux throughout Tomorrow’s Uproar. Sometimes you can hear exactly what’s it’s trying to do, like how the vocal on “Tomorrow’s Uproar” is clearly modeled on Rollins, or how “Curb of Broken Dreams” starts with a title lifted from Green Day, gets going with a total Blink 182 riff, then the vocals slide into Fat Mike. The lyrics are spot-on Fat Mike too, perfectly imitating his somewhat clumsy rhymes and metaphors. At other points, I can’t tell what the exact inspiration is, and those parts are more interesting, but perhaps it’s just because I’m not familiar with what the AI is cribbing from. It’s like how sometimes I’ll watch a sketch on Saturday Night Live and think it’s a hilarious piece of absurdity, only to find it’s some pop culture tidbit I hadn’t heard about, barely amplified or altered from its original source. Again, so much on Tomorrow’s Uproar reminds me of the work of a young artist who is too in love with their inspirations and whose radar for cliche isn’t yet sophisticated enough.
There’s also the odd moment on Tomorrow’s Uproar when I think to myself, “that actually wasn’t bad.” “Viper’s Betrayal” works perfectly well as a parody of tough-guy hardcore, but when the singer shouts “just another Judas…” and then the gang vocals respond “BETRAYAL IS YOUR ACT,” I have to admit it’s not the worst take on the time-worn hardcore lyrical trope of backstabbing I’ve ever heard. If that line had appeared in a Ten Yard Fight song when I was a teenager, you can bet I would have been singing along. Even 44-year-old me struggles with the last track, “Streets of Discontent,” though. This song’s tuneful skate rock reminds me of Code of Honor, and the line “chains and spikes we stand, we tower tall” sparks a twinge of feeling that I wouldn’t expect to get from computer-generated gobbledygook. This track is the clearest sign that, quite soon, AI might generate something I’d listen to unironically.
I think the biggest thing keeping Tomorrow’s Uproar in the uncanny valley is the songs’ lack of adherence to conventional structures. From what I understand, Large Language Models like ChatGPT work by generating texts word-by-word, calculating the word that is most likely to follow the previous words in the sequence… I think that’s the reason that, when you chat with an LLM, you see its responses appear on your screen gradually in words or chunks of words rather than all at once. The songs on Tomorrow’s Uproar seem to work the same way. Where you’d expect them to return to a previous riff and iterate an idea through another, similarly structured verse, they just keep plowing forward. The way songs seem to build toward a resolution that never arrives gives me a seasick feeling, like I’ve fallen into a bottomless pit. Again, though, that seems like a problem that shouldn’t be too hard to fix… I bet the technology that created these tracks could produce more conventionally structured songs with more or better prompts.
I’m not really sure what I think about Tomorrow’s Uproar overall. I thoroughly enjoyed that first listen when I was howling with laughter, and if you’re reading this, you’ll probably enjoy your first listen just as much. I’m curious to see what comes next, though. This time next year, will we be jamming AI-generated outtakes from Detestation? Could AI give us a version of Black Flag’s 1982 demo that sounds just as good as Damaged? Could it take a band like America’s Hardcore that only released a few scattered comp tracks and use that material to generate a full-length record that’s just as good as the real one would have been? Could it venture into an alternate universe where Discharge fired Cal in 1984 and replaced him with Jonsson from Anti-Cimex and bring us back an entire album from that dream project? I can’t answer any of these questions right now, but it seems safe to assume we’re going to see some wild shit soon.