by John Bảo
I love listening to music. I listen every chance I can get, even if I’m working and require a deeper focus. There’s a genre and mood for whatever I need. I’m also someone who loves to explore genres deeply, to read about their histories and the artists who shaped them. City pop is one of those genres that I take pleasure in researching. For those who don’t know, it’s a genre of pop that emerged from East Asia in the 80s and 90s that took inspiration from American pop of the 70s. It’s been experiencing a revival over the past decade on platforms like YouTube and SoundCloud.
As I was listening to one mix during a work session, a new song graced my ears. This sounds pretty good, I thought. How come I hadn’t heard this song before? I scrolled down to see who the song was by. “Best City Pop Tunes”. What kind of artist is that? I clicked on the channel to look for further details. It only had a hundred subscribers. But a couple of albums? Had I stumbled upon a forgotten artist? I searched online for the song title for any more information; for a Wikipedia page, some Reddit threads, but nothing. Then, the realisation slowly dawned on me. I closed the tab immediately, never to revisit, erasing the song from my memory. I didn’t even want to share this experience with anybody, feeling ashamed for even remotely liking something I was staunchly against.
Then, a few days later, a friend of mine had the exact same experience. And he felt the same rush of embarrassment upon learning the song’s origins. And songs like these are everywhere on streaming platforms now. How many other people are encountering them and feeling this way? My friend felt that because he had enjoyed the song when he first listened to it, it was just as valid as any other song. There was no giveaway that it was a generated song besides looking further into its background. But I then asked, with your newfound knowledge, will you keep listening to it? He replied with a no.
So what’s important in interpreting art in the contemporary sense, the creator or the audience?
It’s not a groundbreaking idea to think that the author’s intentions shouldn’t take precedence when interpreting their work. The media landscape is constantly shifting, forcing us to reexamine the relationship between a creator and their oeuvre. Memes on social media get reposted, often without permission. Ghostwriters are hired to assist musicians in producing songs. And now, some say that art has now been truly democratised, with AI “lowering all barriers of entry” to help anyone “create” poems, videos, and music, all with a couple of prompts.
Let us consider three cases in art where the author’s relationship to their work needs to be examined. Of course, this is not comprehensive, but for the sake of brevity, I have chosen what I think are some culturally relevant examples. There are ghostwriters, who are writers for hire who write for others, and less so for personal expression. Then, there are anonymous writers, who are writers who work under a pseudonym or alias to avoid the public eye peering into their private lives. And finally, we have LLMs, or A.I., the buzzword of the past couple of years.
Ghostwriters are employed to distill, polish, and streamline the thoughts of those who may not have the time to write an entire manuscript. Typically, they write biographies, or self-help books, “non-fiction” books designed to be beneficial for the reader. If you read a book that was completely ghostwritten, how would you feel towards the content? Would you feel that you were lied to? Because if the author isn’t credible and claims someone else’s work as their own, then how can you trust anything the book says? Would you take the information with a grain of salt? Or would it not affect you at all? In the case of fiction, the credibility of the facts isn’t as important. It’s how the prose affects you. However, there can still be some embezzling to make the narrative more compelling and more marketable. Knowing that it’s been constructed by a larger team rather than a single writer and editor to hit just the right spots in your brain to keep you reading or enjoy the book, would you still read it?
How about those who create under a pseudonym? Maintaining anonymity, but usually in order to make their art more marketable. Maybe their name made them seem contrary to the image they wanted to put out. Creators like Stephen King, Daft Punk, and Banksy wanted to separate their art from the artist. They wanted their audiences to perceive and feel their art first, without trying to interpret their art based on the author’s personal life, making the reader’s experience of the utmost importance. Would you, as a reader, want an anonymous creator? How would you feel about their work? If you can understand their work and extract your own kind of meaning from it sufficiently, perhaps you never needed the author’s intention in the first place.
And lastly, A.I. creations. The internet is saturated with plenty of AI content now, so much so that you’ve likely stumbled across a few A.I. creations, either within commercials, branding, or viral content. There are even A.I. exhibits in art museums, where artists “play” with hallucinations. How do you feel when you find out that a video is A.I.-generated? Have you come across an A.I.-generated song? How did you feel when you found out what it was? Were you impressed, seeing how far technology has come? Or did you feel resentment for having fallen for a cheap imitation? Whatever the case, it has changed how important the creator is in relation to their work.
Audiences usually appreciate art knowing who created it, the artist’s story, their process, and desire as much transparency as possible. Especially in art that examines life from a personal lens, like those who examine their violent upbringing or share their formative experiences as a chance to connect with the world around them. In that sense, knowing the author is just as essential as the work itself. But there are those who can separate art from the artist. Either because they do not care about the artist’s personal life, or because they simply don’t know. What matters to them is how they connect with the art and what it’s contributed to their own lives or to society. If their music sounds good, then it is good.
There are many layers to this conversation that simply can not be explored in a blog post, but I invite readers to continue thinking about this topic where everything is being reinterpreted constantly according to our social context. It’s what determines which art is popular. The author may have died, but do we see signs of life?
John Bảo, originally from Toronto, is an emerging writer and filmmaker drawn to character-driven storytelling, no matter the genre, ranging from the surreal to borderline autobiographical. Most recently, he was a fellow of the Justice For My Sister BIPOC Sci-Fi Screenwriting Lab, developing an all-ages TV animated pilot script under mentorship from established screenwriters and alongside a cohort. He was also part of the Youth Critics Initiative, hosted by The Asian Canadian Living Archive (TACLA), having written an evaluative critique on short films that played at the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, under a mentor. You can catch him watching films, struggling in music, or exploring the world in his never-ending search for inspiration.
The views and opinions expressed in blog posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of all WiT members.
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