Sunday Music: "Choke Enough" By Oklou

Here's the big artists vs. artificial intelligences problem in a nutshell:

Artists think they have something to say and on average they can't say it all that well.

AND

AI can't be creative without artistic inputs but on average it can put something together better than the average artist.

It's a weird problem. It's an urgent (feeling) problem. And I'm way on team artist here, but also on team "use the AI for sources of creative good where it doesn't interfere with the artistic creation, but can help with the messaging and delivery."

The inevitable average outcome, however, is not the one I'm aiming for.

What's coming - what Ted Gioia and others are calling "slop" - is this strange feedback loop where artists start imitating what AI is doing, which itself was trained on what artists were doing, creating this spiral of derivation. It's art made strictly for the sake of being noticed, and content designed primarily to be consumed by way of making it stand out from the other muck, mostly fed to us via algorithms.

And slop is just so damn boring.

Then there's Oklou (pronounced OK, Lou), a new-to-me French artist whose song "Choke Enough" landed in my cultural awareness last week approximately.

No AI. To my knowledge. But I'll admit, at first listen, it felt dangerously close to slop territory.

I immediately felt a sense of these elements: that dreamscape-soft-but-not-technically capable-of-Billie-Eilish-talent voice, layered with 100 Gecs/Charli XCX vocal manipulation to artfully mask it, all swimming in what sounds like a 90s new age tape is playing from someone's open window three houses down.

Nothing here breaks new ground in any precise way. Yet somehow, the song presents these familiar elements to me in a configuration that makes me tilt my head and listen closer.

I realized I haven't questioned what I was hearing like this in a while. Maybe A.G. Cook is to blame for priming my ears (had to check the credits, of course he’s there). But there are timbres, dynamics, and tensions in "Choke Enough" that resolve only to twist again in ways that keep pulling me back to see what happens next.

THAT is going to make me notice. Slop doesn’t do that. Not more than once like Oklou is doing.

We're living in strange times where we're drowning in content but starving for meaning. As artists and creators of all types, our job isn't to make more stuff, it's to find something interesting to say that rises above the slop. There's no shortage of things to be curious about - the challenge is pushing until you find yours.

I'm finding myself returning to this Oklou song and album, hearing new details with each listen. It's making me question how we distinguish between familiar elements arranged in interesting ways versus pure derivation. Where's that line? Why is this so close to it? Not to mention, the blurring between real and synthetic instruments - why is this so cool to me?

An algorithm didn’t put me onto this. Not exactly at least. I caught a mention and a snip on Popcast, which made me feel like Nadig told me to check them out (of course he did), then saw Fantano did a review, and maybe even NPR music while I was scrolling my podcast feed (yeah, them too).

The water-in-which-we-swim awareness of “hey, people I respect are talking about this” is what caught my curiosity. From there, I know from experience that it’s a 50/50 shot if I’ll like it, but had I just seen this on an algorithmically served playlist, especially with the album cover (I am officially too old, or, maybe I’m conservative now? friends, so confusing), I never would have heard it. And I’m glad I did. Sort of, via what felt like an old-fashioned way.

Take a listen. Is it breaking new ground? Is it interesting to you, or boring, and why? In a world increasingly filled with slop, how do you find the signal?