Nick Cave Releases AI-generated Music Video For “Tupelo” After Criticizing Others For AI Use Previously

Earlier today, Tuesday, July 29th, Australian musician Nick Cave released an AI-generated music video for his song Tupelo – despite previously criticizing others for AI use. To celebrate its 40th anniversary, Cave released a music video for his 1985 song Tupelo. This video featured AI animations of Elvis Presley, despite the fact that Cave has critiqued the use of AI in art in the past.

In the past, Australian post-punk musician Nick Cave has critiqued the general use of AI in media. According to Brooklynvegan.com article, he’s called for ChatGPT to “fuck off and leave songwriting alone,” said that AI “may very well save the world, but it can’t save our souls,” and said that he thinks AI will have a “humiliating effect on the creative industries” in a statement made in Red Hand Files. 

However, after this new AI video, Cave seems to have a different stance on AI. In a long statement about the music video, Cave shared:

“The reason I have such regard for the song ‘Tupelo’, and why we’ve performed it at nearly every Bad Seeds concert since it was first written so many years ago, is that it continues to maintain its volatile urgency. Even now, to perform it feels like a kind of possession. It is a song built on a distinctive Bad Seeds bass line, predatory and relentless, and on this simple structure, an epic story unfolds. The storm of Tupelo that John Lee Hooker sang about in his song of the same name is merged with the birth of Elvis Presley, who was born in Tupelo as a twin, with his firstborn brother dying at birth. In the song, the flood takes on biblical proportions, descending upon the people as an annihilating force, distorting the natural order – ‘where no birds can fly, no fish can swim’ – as Elvis’s tragic nativity unfolds. In a clapboard shack, ‘with a bundle and a box and a cradle of straw,’ the King is born. Elvis is depicted as the saviour, thrown into a turbulent world to rescue it, to ‘carry the burden of Tupelo.’ Elvis embodies the redeeming Christ, saving not just Tupelo, but the entire world from its sins and subsequent destruction.

I mention all this because ‘Tupelo’ was released forty years ago today. It’s its birthday! A strange idea, as the song still feels as fresh, timely, and vital as ever.

Now, my friend, the filmmaker Andrew Dominik – known for Chopper, The Assassination of Jesse James, One More Time With Feeling, and Blonde, among others – rang me to say he had sent me a gift to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of ‘Tupelo’.

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For anyone reading these files, it will be clear that I have serious reservations about AI, particularly regarding writers using ChatGPT and other language models to do their creative work. I also have concerns about song-generating platforms that reduce music to a mere commodity, by eliminating the artistic process and its attendant struggles entirely. (See #214 and #248)

So, I watched Andrew’s film, then watched it again. I showed it to Susie. To our surprise, we found it to be an extraordinarily profound interpretation of the song – a soulful, moving, and entirely original retelling of ‘Tupelo’, rich in mythos and a touching tribute to the great Elvis Presley, as well as to the song itself. The AI-animated photographs of Elvis had an uncanny quality, as if he had been raised from the dead, and the crucifixion-resurrection images at the end were both shocking and deeply affecting. Susie and I were blown away. As I watched Andrew’s surreal little film, I felt my view of AI as an artistic device soften. To some extent, my mind was changed. “It’s a tool, like any other,” said Andrew.”

To Cave, this music video represents change and flexibility, and opens up the possibilities of AI as a tool.