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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

> Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer.

Maybe I misunderstand this part, but it sounds like the author feels like it's required to suffer in order to produce something creative in the first place, and other artists that haven't suffered "enough" but produce things anyways, aren't actually creating "genuine" music.

Of course, everyone creates things from their own perspective and context, but it kind of feels like a trap that somehow suffering is essential to the artistic process, which I personally don't feel would be a healthy perspective for myself as a musician at least.

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Put more simply, he's saying art is the product of, and the expression of, human emotion and experience.

Suffering just happens to be a common element of that, but it's not essential. Maybe because it most commonly produces good or great art. People generally don't make art about how their love life is perfectly fine, instead they express their experience of devastating heartbreak.

Nike Cave is just one strand of the artistic experience. Contrast say Kraftwerk, whose expression is about feelings of affinity with machines, technology and even interaction with transport infrastructure.

>People generally don't make art about how their love life is perfectly fine

On that note, Riki Lindhome's recent (slightly NSFW) "Middle Age Love" hit me so hard in the feels. It's so exceedingly rare to just see artists open up about their intimate relationships in such a positive way.

https://youtu.be/F3gUy40Stzg?si=5J6UtLd5x9BC99UX

He is absolutely not saying that his songs are borne out of suffering in everyday life. I am losing my mind reading these comments.

The suffering he is talking about here is the frustrations and compromises of the artistic _process_, which llms short circuit entirely

No matter what the work is _about_, any art made by a human is going to encounter this feeling.

> People generally don't make art about how their love life is perfectly fine, instead they express their experience of devastating heartbreak.

That's a common take, but I don't think it's really that accurate, otherwise we wouldn't have The Beach Boys

>People generally don't make art about how their love life is perfectly fine, instead they express their experience of devastating heartbreak.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aunVlekXjkE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwojZu7aVVg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swYdKF1MpWg

> Of course, everyone creates things from their own perspective and context, but it kind of feels like a trap that somehow suffering is essential to the artistic process, which I personally don't feel would be a healthy perspective for myself as a musician at least.

Suffering may be too strong a word. You have to feel something to make good art. There needs to be at least a kernel of something raw and real.

That’s the difference between art art and hotel lobby art. Art art expresses something the artist wanted to say. Hotel lobby art just fills space. Both can be good, but the goals are different. You can even make art art on commission for a hotel lobby! And most passersby will intuitively see that there’s a difference, it feels not bland somehow.

Or for example last night I did something creative: drawings. It wasn’t art art, I wasn’t expressing anything, I just wanted hand-drawn pictures of a few plants and an hour of relaxing.

I later asked ChatGPT to redraw one of my drawings. The result was far superior in every technical aspect. But somehow bland. You could tell it wasn’t _my_ venus fly trap, it was a generic representation of a cartoon idea of a venus fly trap. More of a pictogram really. A lot of what these AIs create has that same feeling of generic nonspecificity.

I suspect that it wasn’t trained well enough on your art, or even trained to reproduce a generic style.

With enough data and training you might be convinced.

> I suspect that it wasn’t trained well enough on your art

No no, it’s not that the style wasn’t mine, the subject was generic.

ChatGPT did the typical thing that messes people up when they draw: It was drawing a representation of the thing, instead of the shapes it sees. The AI clearly went “AH! That’s a venus flytrap. Here is a drawing of a venus flytrap”. But it wasn’t _that_ venus flytrap :)

I'm sure I am wading into dangerous waters here, but I kind of also think that "good" art, or perhaps I should say a particular kind of art that resonates with ones emotions, does come from the pain and suffering of the artist.

It is because we also have known pain, jealousy, the death of a loved one, etc. that art sprung from that kind of suffering will "ring true".

As I type this, I am looking at a painting on the wall in my hotel room. It's pleasant enough (a palm tree or something made with rough brush strokes — an interesting palette I guess) but it is not Edvard Munch. (Although, we probably don't want Edvard Munch all over the place, ha ha.)

Maybe he's referring to the suffering required to actually put the song together, from inspiration to pieces of structure to full structure to final polish.

Perhaps. I'm with you in your assessment, however.

These jazz folks didn't look they were suffering in doing this, but that doesn't mean their lives didn't have suffering before they gained acclaim and such incredible chops, or maybe they draw inspiration from the many people and cultures that have suffered:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pYHCGYJbw0

I'm also reminded of Stevie Ray Vaughan's dedication before he performed "Riviera Paradise" on Austin City Limits: "This one goes out to everyone who's still suffering in any way."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3c_8VUL5jks

The beauty that was born from his suffering is certainly extraordinary, IMO, as is his song "Tick Tock", that he did with his brother Jimmy, in a message that should inspire us all on this day and going forward.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8uUTW9zPbM

I'm deeply sceptical of the "tortured artist" trope. A huge proportion of the greatest songs in the American canon were written by professionals, in what amounted to a factory system. They came into work, sat at a piano and just wrote, day in and day out. We are for whatever reason drawn to the romantic notion of the artist as divinely inspired genius, but I think that profoundly diminishes their skill and work ethic and the importance of professional communities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brill_Building

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_Pan_Alley

I'm reminded of something said by a famous author (I can't remember the author's name or the exact wording, and am having a hell of a time searching for it).

Paraphrased from shoddy memory, the author was asked about how inspiration comes to him, and he said something like:

"My ideas come to me while I'm sitting at the desk in my office every morning between 7 and 11 AM."

I think he addresses your question immediately following the comma. He's not saying you must have been, e.g., persecuted or downtrodden to create art, he's talking about the struggle of creation itself. He's saying art is hard to make, that if you're not overreaching you aren't making art, and he may be saying that what makes ChatGPT's output not art is that it's created automatically, within the scope of its limitations. All ChatGPT poetry made by the same model will be of a similar quality, because it's not ever going to transcend, and that's why it won't ever be art, regardless of quality. Or so he seems to be saying.

I'm amazed at all this discussion upon a misinterpretation when, exactly as you say, he clarified what he meant by struggle in the same sentence and it is not life struggle, it is creative struggle (to create music, poetry, etc).

(Of course, pretty much everyone experiences hardship in life and some artists have experienced very harsh hardships and drawn upon that in their later art but he is very clearly not saying that that is an essential part of creating art.)

To be fair, I think he wants to have it both ways. He seems to oscillate between the two ways of struggling, even in that one paragraph. I'm just trying to offer a very generous reading. Nick Cave is a great lyricist, but I've never really been impressed with his other writing; he becomes Romantic and fuzzy like this when it's convenient.

Agree with you about him being a great lyricist (I find 'the loom of the land', to give one very brief example, a masterful configuration) but I also have mixed feelings about the man. I find him intellectually pretentious, politically distasteful (to put it mildly) and suspect him to be very lacking in his personal relationships. An exemplary case, for me, of liking the art while not necessarily liking the artist.

There's the suffering one experiences from a lived life which one uses as the material for a work of art, and then there's the "suffering" that one experiences in the process of artistic creation. I think Nick Cave leaves it open as to which one he's referring to, maybe both. But I'm understanding that you are specifically referring to the former. Perhaps you are right, but I do agree with Cave that the creation of art is a constant struggle. A perfect portrayal of this artistic struggle is depicted in Victor Erice's film Quince Tree Sun.

I think the underlying assumption is that we all suffer i.e. challenges and struggles in life.

Say first time heart-broken, some people really lean into it, and some of those people decide to do a deep dive into their chaotic feelings in order to retrieve a meaningful and personal perspective on a otherwise supposedly trivial thing, which they can finally articulate in an art form.

Put it differently: One can go through the motions and mostly copy paste the cultural wealth on a given topic or one can choose a very idiosyncratic route, depending on your craftsmanship the former will most certainly "resonate" with more people the latter only really resonates with you at first, normally it stays that way. But you can refine the process further going through a lot of cycles and with some luck get noticed for your individual/novel/fresh approach, an arduous process and the perseverance mostly comes from the art created being a very personal thing i.e. self-exploring. I think the hardest part is not getting lost when suddenly you manage to garner a lot of attention.

> Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer.

This sounds like confessional poetry of the mid-twentieth century. The 1960s and 1970s saw a lot of gatekeeping, especially in US and UK academia (like MFA programs), by which formal aspects of poetry were vilified and a foundation in lived experience became a requirement for something to be called a "poem." Needless to say those are entirely artificial takes on poetry, as all ancient poetry has strict metrical rules and presents an imitation of experience rather than lived experience. But, those were very convenient positions for their times, because they let certain people gatekeep others out of art.

When I listen first to an AI song and then Britney Spears or any other product of a culture industry, I don't hear much difference, except that I know the AI song will be inconvenient to the producers and bankrollers who profit from the culture industry.

I think you're misunderstanding. He doesn't mean suffering in the sense that "bad things must happen to me before I have something to write about". He means that the act of creating something from nothing is in itself a difficult process in which the creator 'suffers'. You can rarely just create something easily out of thin air. Most of the time you have to put in a significant amount of effort and feel repeated frustrations before you write something good. This seems clear from the second and third parts of the sentence (after the first and second commas).

He’s sharing his perspective, you don’t have to agree and he isn’t establishing some eternal truth. His statement aligns well with the art he produces. Feel free to continue being a musician as you have in the past in whatever healthy, suffering-free way you prefer.

The narrow emphasis on autobiographical content we see today in art is really quite strange. You'll go on Reddit or Twitter and you'll see people insisting that poetry exists only to convey autobiographical content, and so good AI poetry is definitionally impossible. And yet, nothing could be more ahistorical: almost all of the most beloved art throughout history, especially fictional, and especially poetry, lyrics, and novels, is not eyewitness, nor did people find that a flaw or even worth remarking on. How many of Shakespeare's plays are autobiographical? (Is _Romeo and Juliet_ a bad play because Shakespeare did not in fact know anyone in a lover's suicide pact, and simply stole the plot wholesale from a poem? A translated one, at that!) Did Homer ever visit Troy? Did Murasaki Shikibu know a Prince Genji? Did Vince Gilligan have a sideline as a meth cook somewhere in New York during film school before going to Hollywood? (How many Christians are upset that it is, say, the 'Gospel according to Mark', instead of the 'Gospel by Mark'?)

It's amusing how people demand that their fiction be nonfiction. Here's an example I saw the other day, looking up that song which is everywhere, even at the end of random Japanese TV series, because it's so beloved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_(Earth,_Wind_%26_Fir...

> Although several theories about the significance of the date have been suggested, the songwriter Maurice White claimed he simply chose the 21st due to how it sounded when sung.[10] Allee Willis adding : "We went through all the dates: 'Do you remember the first, the second, the third, the fourth ... ' and the one that just felt the best was the 21st," Willis explains. "I constantly have people coming up to me and they get so excited to know what the significance was. And there is no significance beyond it just sang better than any of the other dates. So ... sorry!".[11]

Imagine that: writing a fictional song lyric because it... sounded good, rather than because something happened. (Apparently people can't imagine that, and imagine it had to have not been imagined.)

I’d say it’s required that you experience or feel something powerful. Suffering counts. Joy, love (no songs about that!), awe, anger, patriotic fervor, whatever.

I agree with him about the poetry produced by LLMs. I’ve tried it too. What comes out just feels like what it is: a mathematical average of other peoples poetry. It’s devoid of feeling.

The same thing happens when I try those music making LLMs. They’re great for doing meme level funny stuff. Like a friend of mine had one make a pouty country song about panels falling off someone’s cybertruck “like tears in my beer.”

Art requires life experience, and a lot of people are under the unfortunate impression that the only "real" life an artist can have is that of suffering, that if they are not suffering then they aren't having "real" experiences.

As far as I can tell, they seem to see the fact that our society does not value artists and specifically extorts them, and takes this as reality instead of a collective choice

Maybe the fundamental understanding of suffering, and therefore empathy also, are important? Trying to be devil's advocate

Does any artist exist that hasn't suffered, at the very least, from the various limits—technical, physical, psychological, or otherwise—standing in the way of the perfect materialisation of their artistic vision?

I believe this is undoubtedly a part of the human struggle of creation that Nick wrote about.

McCartney is a great example of 'naming a genius that ain't crazy', plus doesn't seem to have suffered that much in his life. His work doesn't communicate that at all.

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