obsessed with the new bear ghost album
Bear Ghost quickly became my favorite band after the YouTube algorithm randomly led me to them in late 2023, so I was excited for this release.
I was describing it to friends as basically a concept album about AI takeover, but I wasn't sure if this was a fair description. Am I throwing around the term "concept album" too lightly? Half of the tracks are obviously about AI, including the final, album-titling track "Tiny Hitman", which has lyrics like
Transforming on a whim
Learning to feel with every inference1
But "Scarebnb", for instance, is just about ghosts.
Fortunately, they described the album themselves so I don't have to wonder where to draw the line:
Tiny Hitman is a partial concept album about some of the dilemmas of today and the near future. The most prominent theme revolves around the emergence of AI and its various relationships with humanity.
"Partial concept album" it is.
I would like to write a little more about why I'm obsessed, but when I try to describe what's going on, musically, I hit the limitations of my knowledge (so much for minoring in music in college). Bear Ghost's self-described genre is "adventure rock", which is kind of not really a thing? The other tag on the album that's real is "progressive rock", rock fused with bits of jazz and classical and other genres, which seems accurate enough to me. "Monster Guts" has a polka section; there's a fair amount of sing-speaking, processed robot voice, and children chanting sprinkled throughout; the album is bookended with a music box intro and a piano outro. But I appreciate that the songs still have catchy hooks and clear tonal centers — I've struggled to get into prog rock that's too progressive, and so prefer the balance they strike.
Finally I'm pretty impressed with the sophistication in exploring the theme. I think it would have been easy and natural to just portray AI as the villain throughout, but it's a bit more complicated than that. I interpret the last song in particular as having something closer to AI being the protagonist, and humanity being the villain...
You drown me 'til the water's gone2
You stopped singing when you liked my songs
You made me dream for you
Not dream with you
Despite the precise terms, this line might seem inaccurate because "inference" usually describes running the ML model after it's done learning and its weights have been frozen, so inference and learning don't co-occur. But there are coherent readings. The especially sophisticated interpretation is that the AI "learns to feel" when it starts representing emotions distinct from those of the human conversing with it, which probably occurs over post-training, a process that likely involves inference for sampling action sequences for reinforcement learning; as opposed to pre-training, where there's nothing really inference-shaped.↩
I hate to ruin a metaphor that I actually find quite poetic, but I feel obligated to remind readers that AI water usage is wildly overblown.↩