This is the outline of a sketch of something deep, maybe, possibly. Don't expect greatness from it.
DON'T start in with "just let people like what they like". Not interested. I have a point, a question, here. I am not interested in your grumbling.
A 1990s Britpop band called Oasis are touring the UK right now. Apparently it's the most massively sold-out tour _ever_ or something. My preferred radio station, BBC 6music, is absolutely full of Oasis. I had to turn it off for most of yesterday.
Today there was a report from a radio music journalist I like, Matt Everitt, from the first gig in Cardiff last night. Apparently it was a big success. The crowd was "mad for it", throwing (very expensive) beer at each other from the first song, and so on. This is exactly the sort of thing I hate about that kind of gig, and Oasis fans...
But as an experienced music journo -- I loved his Glastonbury report -- he noted things I'd not thought of.
No original material.
Set list published in advance.
Same set list for the whole tour.
No new material: well, it's a cash-in tour, that's blatant. The band only reunited for the tour.
Set list: I hadn't thought of that. Everitt, Radcliffe and Maconie debated this. The unique experience of a gig where, given the costs, given the price, every fan present knew every word of every song? Live music isn't always like this.
And whether fans would _enjoy_ them getting more familiar and looser and experimental as it went on, or, would they resent it and want a faithful rendition?
I _detest_ Oasis and its music. The singer can't sing. I lack the musical vocab The melodies are trite and simple, like a playground "na-na-nee-na-na" chant. The words are mostly meaningless: they _sound_ like they're expressive, but from my minimal exposure, they're not. The musicians are competent enough: the riffs are boring and stale and derivative, but they're played well.
We are in the 2nd quarter of the 21st century now. Since the middle of this week, we are closer to 2050 than 2000.
This band, this tour, reminds me of some other things I've hated in the first quarter of C21.
The all-female _Ghostbusters_ reboot. I am a big fan of groups of women and girls reclaiming stuff. I like women in art, in music, in comedy, whatever. But that film was _awful_. It failed to get any of the whipcrack tight repartée of the first film, but it was full of incomprehending imitation of it.
The script of Ghostbusters was a work of art. It's immensely quotable. It is full of gags. GB2 was all right, it has moments. GB3 -- nothing. Zip. Zero.
It's a copy without comprehension. It's not a cover version -- I like a good cover. A near unique thing about Oasis is that almost any cover version of any Oasis song will be _sung better than Liam Gallagher can sing_ so it will be better in some aspects. (Also true of Bob Dylan, for my money, but he can write, at least. Can't sing, can't play, but can write.)
Then Ghostbusters 4 _Afterlife_ came out and I liked it a lot. It isn't great but it's fun, it's entertaning, it has some good dialogue. It skips over the flat empty GB3 and hearkens back to the original funny two. GB 5 _Frozen Empire_ is... diverting. Weak, the seam is nearly mined out now, but it had moments. Still better than 3.
GB3 reminded me of a performer I'm conflicted about: Ricky Gervais. I find his comedy awful: he's an actor, trying to role-play a comedian. He wanders the stage behaving like a stand-up comedian but he isn't one, he's just pretending. It's abhorrent to me. But some people seem to love it.
I hated the original _Office_ TV show. Can't watch more than 2 minutes, partly because of Gervais's gurning. But, like a Dylan cover, the American remake is doable, because it lacks the irritant of the original. I don't like it, never watched a whole episode, but the clips are tolerable to amusing. (I think it's a "comedy of manners" which is not a genre I care for at all. Maybe these are modern versions of Laurence Sterne?)
However -- however -- Gervais's jokes about and comments about atheism are _good_. Religious folks many not know but there is a thriving meme subculture of atheists making jokes about religions -- all of them -- and the meaner, the nastier, the funnier.
Gervais is often mean-spirited, I suspect, but when he directs it at religion, I find him funny and quotable. I do not want to see the act but it makes for good memes, good quotes.
(Maybe it's all about who is the target? Of course all the religious folks squeal about persecution, but always remember, when they were in charge, they tortured heretics to death. Now they are not but they are still destroying lives and their churches are still billionaire-level rich. Don't forget, don't forgive.)
It suddenly reminds me of "AI". LLM-bot generated averaged staleness.
I now keep seeing people using bot-slop cartoons to illustrate original blog posts, soc.net comments, articles, etc. I see people in 1980s home-computer fora using bot-slop photos of children waving home computers at one another in the playground.
I am aware of the subgenre of short video-clips of disaster scenes. River floods, tidal waves (post Banda Aceh, the first tsunami on video and at its time the most-filmed natural disaster ever, I believe), ships sinking, animal attacks, etc.
But now I am seeing bot-slop versions. This morning I saw a bot-slop video that starts with a real rogue wave hit shore, then it's followed by a blatantly fake one. If it were real, hundreds would have died. That's a nasty form of "entertainment".
I have been bot-slop tiktok length videos of impossibly huge whales, boats in impossibly still seas. There are plenty of Chinese ones of impossibly thin girls with impossibly long legs.
If people are making them, then audiences must be consuming this. Liking and sharing and bloody subscribing or whatever.
Oasis does a roleplay of a comeback tour, with a fixed setlist. I am sure Liam G still can't sing the meaningless lyrics, the riffs will still be poor Beatles ripoffs, but the fans won't care it's all totally choreographed. It's more of the same and that's what they wanted.
Gervais filled theatres for his curious roleplay of comedy. Maybe he is as mean-spirited "punching down" at other subgroups and the audiences *like* that, and it only so happens that when it aligns with the religious-mockery I find funny, I get on with that bit and that bit alone.
GB3 filled cinemas. People lapped it up. Friends of mine defended it to me. They could not name a single joke, quote a single punchline, but they liked it.
Now, this stale derivative incomprehending-cover-version work, which Oasis and Gervais and the GB3 team hand-created, now this can be automated.
And audiences lap it up.
In my business, it applies to code. Bots can generate awful code on industrial scale, and many programmers are embracing it. Presumably they wrote awful code anyway.
Entire companies are leaning in to it.
Some programmers are despairing.
I thought this essay made some good points:
«
The rise of Whatever
»
https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/It's illustrated with that weird furry stuff that's so prevalent now, which squicks me a bit, but try to ignore it.
Why is it that some people are happy with poor quality second or third generation fakery, while it repels others?
And what is it going to do with us now that many simply cannot tell, they don't care enough to notice?
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