Let the Beatles Be

‘H ave you heard about the new Beatles record?” a friend texted me yesterday. I had. And despite my unparalleled enthusiasm for the group, I felt obliged to record without hesitation that I hate it already.

Per the Wall Street Journal, the “new” song “features AI-assisted vocals from the late Beatle John Lennon.” To achieve this, the film director Peter Jackson and his team digitized a demo tape that was recorded by Lennon in 1978, and then used artificial intelligence to extricate — and improve upon — the parts that the producers wanted to keep. From there, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr took over, adding the instruments and vocal harmonies that the original sketch lacked. Conceptually, the process was similar to what McCartney, Starr, and George Harrison did back in 1995, when they converted two forgotten Lennon demos into two fleshed-out songs (“Real Love” and “Free as a Bird”) and released them under the band’s name as part of the Anthology project. Apparently, “Let It Be” remains a suggestion.

Paul McCartney has described the project as “the last Beatles record.” It is no such thing. Whatever McCartney did or did not do during the recording process, the result cannot possibly be “the last Beatles record,” because the result is not a record by the Beatles. The Beatles existed as a recording group between 1962 and 1970, after which they broke up and stayed broken up. In 1980, one of the band’s members, Lennon, was murdered in New York City. In 2001, another member, Harrison, died of cancer. As of today, only two of the Beatles — that’s just half of the group — are still alive. As was true in 1995, and as will be true in 2045, too, there can be no “more” Beatles records because there is no more Beatles. It is an impossibility.

I do not offer this objection out of pretentious hyper-literalism; I offer it because, in my view, this behavior violates the core of what the Beatles were. In explaining himself, McCartney proposed that AI technology had permitted his team “to mix the record as you would normally do.” This is nonsense. I defer to nobody in my admiration for Paul McCartney’s genius: As I’ve noted before, the man could, indeed, be somewhat overbearing in the studio, but he usually had the advantage of being correct. Nevertheless, there is a profound difference between Paul McCartney and the Beatles, and that difference is simply not being respected in this case. The Beatles’ records were not arranged, recorded, and mixed by one member of the band; they were arranged, recorded, and mixed by the whole band. Occasionally, the four Beatles would split up into smaller groups to work on their own songs, as was sometimes the case during the production of The Beatles, Abbey Road, and Let It Be. But never — never — did a member of the band step out completely during the recording of his own song. For one member of the band to take another’s unreleased demo, make all the artistic decisions involved in producing it into a proper song, and then release it in the name of the quartet is about as far away from “normal” Beatles operations as it is possible to get.

Worse yet, it robs John Lennon of the agency that he so cherished. Lennon and McCartney were great friends. They were also passionate enemies. And, like many creative duos, they fought like hell with one another over their work. We have no idea whether Lennon even wanted to release this demo recording, let alone in what manner he would have wanted it prepared for public consumption. Throughout his life, Lennon exhibited strong opinions on structure, production, instrumentation, harmony, and — in his later years — the sound of his own voice (that ethereal, delay-heavy “Lennon sound” you hear throughout his solo work was the product of a profound post-1967 distaste for his own singing). Of all the people in the world, Paul McCartney probably has the best idea of how John would think. And yet, as the cornucopia of information we have about the Beatles’ canon amply demonstrates, McCartney’s tastes were often radically different from John’s. That despite this tension the two men managed to make it work for eight years does not accord to McCartney an open warrant to harvest “John’s voice from a ropy little bit of cassette,” to carve the extracted raw materials into his own image, to simulate with computers what was not there, and then to “print” the results under someone else’s byline.

Describing his use of artificial intelligence, McCartney boasts that he was “able to take John’s voice and make it pure through AI.” This idea makes me shiver. As an application of artificial intelligence, making a badly recorded vocal performance “pure” is fairly benign — equivalent in some sense to cleaning dirty tapes, remixing a recording for stereo, or remastering it for new media. But AI does not — and it will not — end there. For both audio and video, AI can be used as a simulation tool, which an operator can use to sample a given voice or physical appearance and then create something entirely novel from the results. If we are not there already, we are getting close to the point at which a director could make a movie with a deceased actor in the lead role and at which a record producer could generate a full album’s worth of material “by” an artist who is now unable to record a note. (One suspects that, in the future, artists will have prohibitions on this written into their estates and their wills.) When, as is all but guaranteed, this happens for the first time, we will be told by many that because the source material was genuine, the synthesized output must be, too. Those people will be wrong. They will be confusing a facsimile for authenticity. There are, in our history, such things as Lennon-McCartney songs and Beatles records, and what will soon be released purporting to be both will, in fact, be little more than a last-gasp nostalgia-driven forgery.