Gen Z, your music sucks. And your legacy will be AI. Thanks a lot.

A rant. Yep, uphill, both ways, through six feet of snow, carrying the horse on my back.

MJ zeroing the GL3300 we recently found gathering dust in a warehouse prior to firing it up for the first time after refurbishing it. He helped me swap out a dead channel and resolder some grounds. It’s now ready for a FOH riser and some killer music.

I just watched “Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary." I loved the music and the interviews with Christopher Cross, Michael McDonald, Jay Graydon, and other “yacht rockers," but the rest, not so much. I agree with what Donald Fagan told the producer on a call at the very end of the show—go eff yourself. Steely Dan, Toto, The Doobie Brothers, et al. were the pinnacle of musicianship in pop music—not just in their time, but anytime. They were and are still deserving of much more that to be remembered by way of a YouTube skit from a couple of influencers. Who are those two anyway?

The thing that bothered me the most about this “Dockumentary” wasn’t the tongue-in-cheek sophomoric smarminess of it all as much as a lot of screen time devoted to artists who had nothing to do with the fabulous pop music of the 70's and 80’s, the period covered, other than having sampled it for their own use. I get why the “yacht rockers” agreed to be a part of this show (there isn’t much of a pension fund for most 70’s musicians). But comparing the work of younger artists infused with talent-lite compensators like quantization, Autotune, loops, and samples with the work of artists like Steve Lukather, who walked into studios for over a decade and in just minutes laid down blistering guitar work that’s still famous decades later, is like comparing a naked man to a freight train.

These days, the biggest thing in pop music is probably Taylor Swift. Now I happen to have quite a bit of respect for Ms. Swift on account of both her business acumen and for standing up for herself in an industry that routinely screws artists. How can you not like and respect someone who put forth the effort to re-record four albums to avoid getting shafted on royalties when her recording label was acquired by a private equity raider? Ms. Swift is also, by all accounts, wonderful to her band, her employees, her crew, and her fans. She seems to be someone you’d enjoy being around, and she sure has the Midas touch. Whatever you think about her songs, they aren’t AI.

To be clear, there is, IMO, absolutely nothing wrong with Taylor Swift. But musically, Ms. Swift, despite frequent hyperbole, is just not The Beatles. Beyond revenge pop, at which she’s quite good, Ms. Swift is a monothematic songwriter whose fame comes from writing things about ex-something men that millions of young women wish that they’d written first. If that’s a knock, it’s a gentle one. But if you are waiting for a Sargent Pepper’s album from Taylor Swift, don’t hold your breath.

I guess that last sentence encapsulates my disdain for modern pop music. It’s largely unoriginal, bland, and boring. It lacks creativity, excitement or virtuosity. Please show me the next Beatles, the next Jeff Beck, the next Led Zeppelin, the next Yes, the next King Crimson, the next Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, the next Steely Dan, the next Toto, the next Todd Rundgren, the next Earth, Wind, and Fire, the next Who, hell—even the next Bad Company coming down the road. Then show me who’s going to step in for the recently departed Quincy Jones on the other side of the glass in a recording studio. Is there a Gary Katz or Roger Nichols around anymore? I reckon not. Billie Eilish don’t need no stinking Rubidium clock.

Please show me a song on the Spotify top ten from anytime in the recent past featuring a memorable guitar solo, a grooving bassist, a human drummer playing in the pocket, or, for that matter, most any instrumental virtuosity. If I want to hear great guitar playing anymore, I have to go to YouTube, where there is no dearth of it. But if I want to hear a memorable guitar solo in the context of a great song from a great band on a great record, I’m generally shit out of luck.

I grew up listening to pop music crafted by consumate professionals. An album cover may have said that the music was by The Monkees or the Beach Boys, but the players on almost every record I listened to that wasn’t made by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, or the Who were professional musicians and producers who knew their stuff. Tommy Tedesco, a member in good standing of The Wrecking Crew who played on thousands of popular songs in the 60’s and 70's, was rumored to have sat in a session once and read a complicated chart placed upside down on his music stand as a joke, without missing a lick.

The two-decade heyday of pop in the mid-60’s through the mid-80’s was a wonderful time to have a great-sounding stereo. Whenever a new record came out by an artist that we liked, my friends and I would get a copy, put it on the turntable with the reel-to-reel recorder going (for posterity), sit as close as we could to the center of the stereo image, and listen to both sides. Later, when I came into possession of a quadrophonic system, real estate in the center of the listening image became even more valuable. There may have been occasional fisticuffs—at least a dope slap or two.

I will never forget those days. There were a few moments, like the first time I heard Starship Trooper on The Yes Album, that I involutarily uttered aloud, WTF did I just hear? I raised and lowered turntable needles thousands of times and manually slowed down many LPs to figure out what the hell was going on. Figuring out songs of that era often involved considerable sweat equity.

But these days, the pop music industry is a shadow of those halcyon days. Ted Gioia, Rick Beato, James Barber, and Jim Trageser have all recently written about the journey of the industry from it’s former glory to it’s current beat and evil days. A YouTube interview between Rick Beato and Steve Lukather, which I highly recommend for your amusement and edification, is one of the best things I've heard in a long while about music. It’s well worth an hour of your life. Towards the end, Lukather, one of the great guitarists and musicians of my generation, addresses this head-on: “There are a lot of great players out there these days. You know what there’s not a lot of? Great songs.”

He’s right. These days, I just don’t hear a lot of great songs either. I still occasionally hear great singers, but not great songs—at least not as often as I used to. And when I do hear a great singer performing a great song, I don’t hear Larry Carlton playing in the background or Michael McDonald singing harmonies or all around high production values by Quincy Jones.

I don’t know if we’ll ever see another epic album like Steely Dan’s Aja, or Toto IV, or Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Their’s neither the money nor the musicianship for projects like this anymore—at least not in pop (there are still some great jazz and classical artists making records). But I think that great pop music, at least for the foreseeable future, is probably dead.

And it had such auspicious beginnings.

Pop music had major roots in the blues (among other things). The thing that made the blues, in particular, attractive to burgeoning musicians of my day was accessibility. Even the most iron-fingered guitarist could figure out and play at least a pedestrian 12-bar blues. Clapton, Page, Beck, and others took Blues-influenced music to the stratosphere, but most anyone could wrap their mind around at least the basics and then go out and play. Jamming to the blues was a relatively easy and quick way to bootstrap yourself to a stage in front of an audience somewhere.

Then came the more sophisticated classical and jazz influences of the progressive rock and jazz rock 1970's (along with a lot of WTF moments). Starting then, you had to be really good to be in even a cover band. If you were going to cover Reelin in the Years, you’d better be able to play Elliot Randal’s iconic solo. Nevermind the chops and imagination you had to have to originate the stuff in the studio. Learning to play the solo in Kid Charlemagne is one thing; inventing it on the fly in the studio like Larry Carlton is quite another.

These days, chops are not so much of a thing. Virtuosity has been replaced by processing. You can sample, loop, and Autotune your way to fame and fortune. You’d get laughed out of a studio for being meticulous like Fagan and Becker. Pro Tools has a bag of skill hacks that’s nearly bottomless (and cheap). In all fairness, the results are sometimes pleasant enough. But it’s just not the same as when cats laid down bodacious tracks live in the studio without any gimmicks.

Do you know what came before Pro Tools? Pros. That drift you hear in the tempo? Those dynamics in the drum kit? That push and pull between the bass and kick? It’s called the groove. It’s what makes music joyful. Finding it is why you practice instead of going out with your friends. All of the pros knew where the groove was and how to push it clear to outer space. I pity younger cats for not understanding that groove is what makes iconic music. Polish is fine; sophistication is better, but the groove is where the soul in music resides.

The worst pop musical hell hasn’t probably hasn’t even arrived just yet. Given the fact that it’s far cheaper to have AI generate the type of pablum that pedestrian musicians create with computers these days, it simply won’t be long before the musicians are cut out of the loop. On that, I’ll bet the ranch.

When mediocre pop songs have 10 songwriters sharing royalties, as is common these days (Andy Summers didn’t get writing credits on some Police songs defined by his iconic riffs), the end is nigh. Convince me that the same generation of future music executives who use AI to write college essays and do their homework is going to think that humans are better or even necessary to turn a buck in the music industry. And if you are hanging on as a niche musician using Autotune for your voice and looped samples for your solos, how much of a reach is it to get AI just to do the work for you?

Right now, I can get AI to adopt just about any tone of voice or accent that I want in a content reader. How much longer can it be until you just get the Yacht Rock plugin for your DAW? I’m not looking forward to finding out.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com