Is This What We Want? Album Review
1,000 UK artists including Cat Stevens, Kate Bush and Sam Fender have contributed to a silent album, in protest of the UK’s new AI copyright laws. But is it any good?
In December last year, the government published their Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Consultation. It’s 9672 words long, and reads like it was pumped out last minute by a panicked student using Gemini, so I didn’t read it. Instead, I did the honourable thing and got ChatGPT to summarise it for me: “Music is fucked”, it said.
Me: “Please expand.”
ChatGPT: “The UK government is consulting on a copyright and AI framework to balance the rights of creative industries and the needs of AI developers, ensuring fair remuneration, legal clarity, and innovation while promoting transparency and trust between both sectors.”
Me: “Is this bad?”
Chat GPT: “Not at all! It's a solid summary—concise and to the point.”
I’m not quite sure it understood.
As an arts and culture magazine, we at Blimey love an album review. So, we thought we’d have a stab at reviewing our first silent album, considering it seems to be the future of UK music.
Thankfully, there are 1000 forward thinking, and innovative British musicians, who are ahead of the curb on this one, and have already released a collaborative silent album: Is This What We Want?. Here’s the cohort of songs it features: The, British, Government, Must, Not, Legalise, Music, Theft, To, Benefit, AI, Companies.
The opening track, The, features a great mix of white noise and random background thuds, which really bring this new genre to light. Although it’s subtle, it’s already more entertaining than reading the government document.
The following track, British, features more white noise, on a similar level of exhilaration to The, but this time there’s a fly buzzing around somewhere.
Government offers an interesting shake up to the flow of the album, in feeling like someone accidently left a microphone on. The sound of someone clearing their throat after sipping a cup of tea really gives this song its defining character.
Skipping a few tracks ahead to Theft, which offers a subtler cooldown in the bombastic mix of tracks we’ve had so far. Behind the white noise, the sound of someone clicking a mouse reminds the listener of a time when we controlled computers, and not the other way around.
The closing song, Companies, really is the magnum opus: a true oasis in the track list. A cat purring, and birds chirping in the distance, reminds us of the sounds of nature which inspired the creation of music. It acts as a sad goodbye to what was once a great artform.