Living Colour onstage in Graz, Austria, 2010: Will Calhoun, Vernon Reid, Corey Glover and Doug Wimbish. Photo by Clemens Stockner/Wikimedia Commons
One of the most important conversations going on in society today-and especially concerning the arts-is the rise, use, and misuse of Artificial Intelligence.
It's a new era where a computer program can spit out a dead-on replicas of Jane Austen novels or produce fake Van Gogh landscapes. And real photographers have won actual awards for works that were later determined to be created with a keyboard stroke instead of a camera button.
Of all the arts, perhaps the one with most cause for concern is music. Already, you can hear the long-dead Queen front man Freddie Mercury doing an eerily accurate A.I. version of Europe's "The Final Countdown." And younger versions of the Beatles and Billy Joel "perform" new material on videos. It's rapidly becoming harder to draw the line between what's real and what's not.
Vernon Reid, the co-founder and incendiary guitarist for Living Colour, has always embraced technology in his work with instruments and recording going back decades. And he has a more nuanced view of how A.I. will impact how we absorb music and what it means for artists: living, dead, and wholly imagined. He's both written about the topic and spoken on it in multiple interviews.
"First, I'm a big science fiction fan. And visions of the future are really about contemporary conditions. And they are subject to extreme revision," he says on his tour bus parked in Dallas via Zoom. "There's the whole 'Where's our jetpacks from the James Bond films?' This is the first technology of science fiction that has been written and filmed. And it's a bit discomforting."
Reid notes how New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose recently reported an unsettling encounter with a Microsoft Bing browser's OpenAI Chatbot, "Sydney," who at one point in their online conversation declared her love for him and urged him to leave his wife. She also expressed some dark fantasies and declared "I want to be alive."
"The most alarming aspect is of different technologies converging, and they're not static. Think what it could to do copyrighted music. And this vocal cloning," he says.
"Look at Stevie Wonder's albums from the 1970s. His voice, the words, the music, that's all a database. You could say into a program 'I would like to hear a song from the Talking Book record that doesn't exist.' Half of it will be crap. Others could be pieces of music that are moving and potential hits! Spotify could create an artificial artist entirely."
Reid admits that younger people who are growing up with this technology likely don't experience the hand-wringing that Baby Boomers, Gen X and even some Millennials do.
"It's going to be utopia or dystopia. Or we maybe need a third word for it," he says. "People with bad intentions are going to misuse it. A hammer can be used to build a house. But it can also be used to swing into somebody's head."
But there will be no worries about A.I. music on Living Colour's current tour, which finds them opening shows for hard-rocking contemporaries Extreme. It will stop at Houston's House of Blues on February 20. Reid says he got to know Extreme's guitarist, Nuno Bettencourt, while both taught at Rage Against the Machine/solo artist Tom Morello's guitar camp.
"A lot of time when [guitarists] meet, you're like two bulls in a china shop. But we have a lot of respect for each other," he recalls. "We did that camp with Tom, John 5, and [MC5 guitarist] Wayne Kramer, who is sadly no longer with us. So, we wanted to put this thing together with both bands. And it works."
Living Colour burst onto the music scene in 1988 with their debut record Vivid and leadoff single, the fiery hit "Cult of Personality." And though its lyrics namechecked historical figures of dictatorial and authoritarian natures, it seems all too contemporary in 2024. The band was celebrated, the video was in heavy rotation on MTV and soon there were conversations about the importance of and paucity of Black musicians making rock music.
Unfortunately, despite continuously producing consistently great music since then with a deep catalog often searing on social and political issues, Living Colour suffers from The Curse of Thin Lizzy. Like that Irish band who many casual listeners associated with (and only with) "The Boys are Back in Town," many simply view or recall Living Colour strictly by "Cult of Personality."
For Reid, the dichotomy is certainly something he thinks about. Even today.
"It weighs on my mind the same amount as America weighs on my mind!" he laughs. "I can't take it personally and I can't have it become annoying. It would affect my work too much to go into that space. The band is out here working, we've been busy, we do our own headline shows in between. And the people that do care about our music-besides that one song-do care a lot."
As for Texas, Reid says he remembers the moment early in the band's touring life when he discovered that cities in the Lone Star State had utterly different personalities from each other.
"They are countries unto themselves in Texas!" he laughs. "At one point, Austin was the home of the oddball. But I found that Houston and Dallas had sections of town that were surprisingly Bohemian. Being from New York, we used to have very narrow perspectives on Texas. But we found some very hip people in Houston!"
Of course, the reality of the music industry and veteran band putting out new music today has been upended by streaming and online distribution. But Reid says he and band mates Corey Glover (vocals), Will Calhoun (drums) and Doug Wimbish (bass) are staying creative and have already started recording new music. What form that will take or how it's released has not yet been determined.
"We got a song out of the first session, and the last session we did was fantastic," he says. "Part of it is 'What are we saying as a band?' And a collective conversation among us has come to that."
Finally, we can't but help notice a pattern of an alphabetical nature in Living Colour's recent H-town shows. A couple of years back, they opened for Everclear. This week it's Extreme. That begs the question: Will their next appearance in Houston be with Faith No More? Or the Foo Fighters?
"Ha! I see where you're going with that!" Reid laughs. "What's been cool is playing for audiences that may only know 'Cult of Personality' and they hear something else by us and like it."
But there is one last thing that Vernon Reid wants to say to me before we sign off.
"There's going to be kind of a special...without going into detail...there's going to be a special edition of the band in Houston," he says cryptically. "But not a change. I'm just going to leave it at that!"
