Momus
Ballyhoo
(Darla Records)
Scritti Politti used the seductive sound of pop music and its then new technology to deliver highly intellectual concepts, a semiotic stew shrouded in cod-reggae and DX-7. Momus was inspired by the band and their ability to emphatically surrender to the shiny embrace of pop while simultaneously using it to define a new paradigm. Now AI has brought another shiny toy into play, and he has been using it to remix and redefine his own sound, feeding lyrics and ideas into two of the leading AI music sites, requesting, for example, funky 1970s style K-Pop, adding more analog sounds of his own, acoustic bass, and his own lyrics, duetting with the non-existent. Sometimes the lyrics are fully original, sometimes based on a mishearing of what the AI generates. And so Momus looks out from behind the face of a clown, as on the cover for this new album Ballyhoo.
The approach is exemplified here by a track called Catchy – the request was for a catchy pop song – the resulting remix with his lyrics and instrumentation added (including borrowings from John Barry’s Bond score for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) is a meditation on the word catchy itself, what that means applied to relationships and people, what it means when applied to music. You can relate that to Scritti Politti’s use of (then) latest technology to render etymological discussion and Derridean debate on The Word ‘Girl’. The opening track Plastic Seoul channels UK funk of the 80s, Shalamar, Shakatak, taking us on a journey to Seoul, artistic capital, “If you’re not in Seoul where are you, nowhere”, setting out stall geographically and musically. The nonsense AI can generate, the deliberate mondegreens and misunderstanding is reflected in Three Trapped Tigers, a series of almost ridiculous imagery to another funk track.
The question Momus is asking is what AI will do, will it swallow artists whole, rendering them unnecessary, or can it be a useful creative tool. In time to come, will the public distinguish between, for example, the actual Rolling Stones and licensed, AI generated new albums by “The Rolling Stones”? Will they care? His thesis on this album is that AI is still a new technology, still in its Wild West phase, not regulated, not recognised in copyright law, and still glitchy, located in the uncanny valley and interestingly weird, and this is the optimum time to use it. It is worth saying that this is what Momus usually does, he is always writing an album about what he sees happening in pop music, he does not seem to be endorsing AI in any way. He does compare music to being in a similar position to representational art at the dawn of photography, needing to find ways to make visible rather than simply replicate the visible, in the words of Paul Klee. Or more practically, if AI becomes the builder, there will still be need of an architect.
This question of who is building what is approached in Reshape, borrowing as it does from The Whispers, from 70s disco and soul, the lyrics could be sung by a human or by the AI generator as it questions: “You reshape me and you remake me… who can I be? Do I write the songs I write or do the songs write me?”
Conceptually, he has been listening to K-Pop, understandably comparing it to the work of female artists from Japan in the 90s, including those he wrote for in those Shibuya days. This Abuse, for example is a funk based, synthetic K-Pop track but the lyrics come from a real conversation, about drug use, masochistic self-abuse and the (sometimes) unintentional abuse received from family and straight people. The glitchy effects, the plucked bass and typical Momus vocal fry keep the song sounding real and present, but the full chorus and angular synth lines are both artificial and unexpected here.
The overblown choruses the AI has given him are full teen-pop, operatic angst from time to time. Chromosomes has a typical Momus anti-typical lyric, attacking the idea that we live only to reproduce: “living for nothing for chromosomes”, an understandable position as he is childless and over 60, “hold your breath you will die”, is the adolescent complaint of the chorus, but that is contrasted with “when you come back to life, bring some pie”, a sarcastic chat room riposte to anyone who stomps off in a huff.
A standout track is Asylum, where he plays with the meanings of the word, applying as it does to asylum seekers, mental health, the attack on otherness, globalisation. The verses, roughly based on an older Sunbutler track, channel Green Gartside, the chorus constructed from samples, tinkling K-Pop style synth lines, given the theme, the magpie nature works best here, coupled with Momus’ often nonsensical, hard to parse lyrics: “now the kings of Norway are hot on my trail, I’ve got their grail”.
It's perhaps inevitable that the snake eats its own tail at some point: Glassy Menageries sees Momus feeding his own song Life After Sixty into the machine, which spits out a glossy Windmills of My Mind style ballad, to which Momus has added his own narrative, an unreliable tour of the cities he has or hasn’t visited, mixed for example with the musings of Gombrowicz in Buenos Aires, it’s a guide to the cities that define his mentality, the menageries of humanity, “the cities that have made me someone I was never meant to be”. One of the ear worm choruses that works best is in Singapore, another ghost duet about a couple who split up on a roof in Singapore, because they cannot move away from what they are: “love me, love our problems”, the tendency of people to define themselves by their illness and fail to move on from it. Kleptoglade takes the unusual step of using K-Pop to back political lyrics, about the discrepancies in our systems: you get five years for stopping traffic for a protest but “it’s still ok to kill”, referencing certain ongoing wars whose adherents apparently follow the ten commandments, and the modern puritanism, “indentured servitude, just another colour of the Rubik’s Cube”.
The Enshittification of Everything – a concept borrowed from Cory Doctorow who was talking about online platforms, and how they deliberately degrade over time – is a classic Momus narrative of human decline, a theme you can chase back in his work to Three Wars and beyond. It’s another highlight, a hugely funky workout belying its themes, from elements inspired by NewJeans and an AI generated K-Pop take on the George and Mildred theme tune. Given the lyric and AI elements, the atonal instrumental and the sharper acoustic insertions bring humanity to the song. The song warns about not only the general enshittification of everything but can be taken as a “caveat emptor” in relation to AI, and what it will cause. With Cruel the prompt seems to be more “upbeat 60s girl band”, but Momus’ measured delivery brings it down to Earth, the distinctly un-Momus chorus is supplanted by moments of suspense, and clopping of the donkey hooves which the narrator is using to name his partner: pet names based on animals are cute or cruel? Related to this, The Fox in Winter was originally an AI generated theme for Momus’ video series of lectures “Open University”, but repurposed as another ruminative piece on aging, and how a centring relationship prevents him becoming some silver fox, out on the prowl uselessly: “Wandering alone if it weren’t for you to stop me doing what I want to do”.
The album ends with Faraday: an image naturally of a Faraday cage, an isolation chamber, which represents potentially freedom from AI, but also the isolation in which an artist works, a beautiful partly AI driven instrumental, nonsense cut up lyrics and a non-existent set of artists, but tempered into reality by Momus’ vocal additions, organ playing and bass, clearly inspired by Bowie’s Low, by David Sylvian and Nomi and a little of the otherworldly singing of late Scott Walker.
Ballyhoo is a fascinating experiment, and some of these tracks are great, driven and energized, lyrically rich and complex. The songs with nonsense lyrics, and the more standardized song structures may turn some away, even from his general fanbase, but Momus has always used modern tech to alter his approach, and always plundered the past. It’s an album that demands discussion of AI, which is here to stay, and challenges listeners and artists alike to seriously consider their attitude and approach to it: builder or architect, portrait artist or camera, hammer or anvil. I for one welcome our robot overlords, and Ballyhoo in particular.
Essential Information
Avaialble from Darla Records here
And Bandcamp, here
