Aside from their greatness, what do these two exquisitely crafted pop singles have to do with each other? Maybe nothing at all. Neither is overtly topical. Neither has any grand social motive. But after many weeks of repeated listening, I eventually connected them to two potential extinction threats on the whiteboard of my brain — the rise of artificial intelligence and the collapse of our ecology. You know, summer fun.
Kylie first. She’s one of the most formidable steamrollers that pop music has ever known, as most recently evidenced by her 16th studio album, “Tension,” finally released into the autumn breeze last Friday, (technically, the last day of summer), 127 days after the arrival of its lead single, “Padam Padam,” a mechanically sumptuous dance track in which the singer’s automated pickup lines begin to resemble an echocardiogram. “I can tell that you’re all in, ’cause I can hear your heart beating,” Minogue sings. “Padam, padam.” And here, much like she did back in 2001 with her career-defining hit “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” Minogue sticks a lusty melody onto one of our most vital organs the way teenagers apply chewed bubble gum to the underside of a desk.
From May to June, “Padam Padam” made a quick voyage from TikTok curio to Pride Month anthem, but it also developed a certain background resonance during an early summer debate over AI-generated music — specifically, over a song made to sound like a superstar duet between Drake and the Weeknd. As the anxiety over the future of nonhuman music-making ramped up online, the robotic sheen of “Padam Padam” helped me temporarily organize my feelings.
Those feelings are as follows: Machines trying to sound like humans will never be as interesting as humans trying to sound like machines — because, with music, we care about effort. We want to hear the work. We want blood-sweat-tears, even when the artist (Kylie, Kraftwerk, whoever) is hiding all three fluids and pretending to be a robot. But with AI, the entire point is to eradicate effort. There’s no trying. Which might mean that our fundamental anxiety over AI-generated music isn’t over its soullessness so much as it’s effortlessness. And while this issue will certainly grow gnarlier as AI attempts to obsolesce various fields of human endeavor in the seasons to come, this little credo will have to hold me for now: If it doesn’t involve effort, it isn’t music.
Billie Eilish knows about effort. Tasked with contributing a song to Greta Gerwig’s starry “Barbie” soundtrack, she ended up articulating the inherent dread of being alive in a universe with no clear meaning. (And if you think serious pop stars aren’t capable of sneaking profundity into summer blockbusters aimed at children, please revisit Prince delivering prophecy — “I’ve seen the future and it’s rough” — in service of the Batman franchise back in 1989, 12 years before Eilish was born.)
Eilish says that the whole exercise lifted her out of a songwriting slump and that singing from the perspective of a complicated doll helped her better understand her complicated self. “What Was I Made For?” is arranged sparingly, just piano and strings, evoking either amniotic fluid or the void, with Eilish tiptoeing on the margins of a whisper, threading the titular question through her verses, reaching some kind of conclusion in her refrain: “I don’t know how to feel, but I wanna try.”
So a pop song is a lot like a Barbie doll. You can imagine it as you. You can imagine yourself as it. Either way, it’s something designed to help transform imagination into reality. And this summer, imagination seemed in short supply while reality got hotter — the hottest season ever recorded on this fragile blue marble. Eilish knows all about that, too. Sometimes, she wears a T-shirt that declares “NO MUSIC ON A DEAD PLANET.” And though her Barbie song doesn’t address our climate crisis explicitly, it does capture the struggle of securing one’s sense of purpose in a world that’s spinning the wrong way.
Listen to it again. Next summer might be hotter.
