Don’t Blame the Guitar
Power Chords
C-C-C-C
C-C-C-C
C-C-C-C
F
E
C-C-C-C
C-C-C-C
C-C-C-C
F
E
That’s “Anarchy in the U.K.” by the Sex Pistols.
C-F-E. C-F-E.
Pretty basic. Pretty simple.
Sounds like shit when I play it, but I’m an artist, not a musician.
Rick Rubin was talking about this, about punk and vibe coding. The idea that you didn’t have to go to a conservatory for years before you were allowed to make music. You could learn three chords in a day, pick up a guitar, scream into a microphone, and if you had something to say, that was enough to find a crack in the formality of how it’s supposed to be done.
Not because it was perfect.
Not because it was polished.
Because it was yours.
C-F-E. C-F-E.
That’s the part people keep missing with AI. They want to argue about whether the tool can make something new by itself. Of course it can’t. Who cares? Neither can a guitar.
The question is not whether AI is creative. The question is whether a person can use AI creatively.
Batman said something in that CNBC conversation about AI that sticks with me: craft is knowing how to work, and art is knowing when to stop. That’s taste. That’s judgment. That’s the human part. The machine can generate forever. The person decides what matters.
And yeah, some people are going to use this stuff to make their own weird janky episode of Succession where Kendall gets the company and runs off with Stewy. Some people are going to make themselves look like Iron Man. Some people are going to shop in the Home Goods aisles of AI culture.
Fine.
And I mean that. Fine.
I don’t want to shame those people. Not everybody has to be the person finding the crack. Some people want the thing that is easy, available, familiar, and fun. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Not everybody is punk.
If everybody was, it wouldn’t be punk.
That doesn’t mean the whole thing is empty. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Making an Iron Man TikTok and making Pink Flamingos are both acts of using what culture gives you. But they’re not the same. They are not equal.
One is playing on the surface of culture.
The other found the crack and had Divine stomp through it.
John Waters’ bad taste is still taste. It is still human. It is still intention.
C-F-E, C-F-E.
The same tool can make mass-produced culture, or it can make something weird enough to crack the system open. That’s not new. That’s always how this works.
Somebody invents a thing. Somebody else copies it. Then more people copy it. Then a shared language forms. Democratization. Then it gets mass produced; everyone can do the thing. That’s when it gets boring. But somebody takes the boring thing and does something weird with it. They take three chords and add a reggae beat. Harmonies. Jazz. Poetry. Crack; A new thing.
That’s the cycle.
The ’70s film school kids broke open Hollywood. Then Hollywood learned the language and turned it into product. Four-Quadrant marketing. Mini-Malls. Megaplexes. Then Kevin Smith, Tarantino, Soderbergh, all these people come along with cheaper tools and different taste and say, fuck it, pick up a camera and make a movie.
Every creative revolution eventually becomes a production pipeline.
Then somebody finds the crack.
C-F-E, C-F-E.
That’s punk. Not the thing. The doing.
And this is why the “AI slop” argument feels wrong to me. Slop is not really about quality. Quality is slippery. Authenticity is subjective. Olive Garden might be trash to me and the best Italian food somebody else has ever had. Both things can be true.
The problem is volume.
The problem is speed.
Slow copying feels like influence. Fast copying feels like theft. Artists are not just watching their work become part of culture over time. They are watching the scattered pieces of themselves show up everywhere all at once.
That feels violent. I get that.
But copying has always been part of making. Every artist steals. Every artist absorbs. Every artist hides their influences. We like to pretend copying is some moral crisis, clutching the pearls of divine originality, but even the Constitution doesn’t say art is sacred. The crack is right there. Limited time. Limited control. All in service of progress.
The difference now is that the cycle is on fast-forward. Art is not slowly turning to sand by the drip of remix culture. It is getting hit with a jackhammer.
C-F-E, C-F-E.
But don’t be mad at the jackhammer. Be mad at the people selling the jackhammer. Be mad at the companies firing workers and pretending the tool made them do it. AI is not taking people’s jobs. Executives are taking people’s jobs and blaming the tool.
Be mad at the systems. Be mad at the consolidation of power. Be mad at deregulation. Be mad at the data centers and the energy use and the copyright mess and the people making decisions that hurt workers.
But stop blaming the guitar. That’s just noise.
Keep the good noise, though. The noise that might become something noise. Punk noise. Amateur noise. I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing-yet noise.
But the gatekeeping noise? The this-doesn’t-count noise? This-is-slop noise? You-didn’t-earn-it, you’re-killing-art, you’re-not-a-real-maker noise?
Drown that shit out.
Play louder.
Because there is a difference between a corporation using AI to replace labor and a person using AI to finally make the noise they were never going to be allowed to make.
There is a difference between covering “Anarchy in the U.K.” because punk sells and playing those same three chords because you have something to scream.
C-F-E, C-F-E.
A guitar isn’t punk.
A pencil isn’t writing.
A camera isn’t cinema.
A large language model isn’t art.
A tool is a tool until somebody picks it up and does something with it.
Three chords plus intention is a song.
And maybe that’s the whole thing. Maybe AI doesn’t make anyone an artist. Maybe it just hands more people a guitar. Some of them will make noise. Some of them will copy. Some of them will make crap. Some of them will blame the guitar for not living up to the hype.
And some of them are going to find the crack. And scream into it.
Stop blaming the guitar.
Pick it up.
Do something with it.
C-F-E, C-F-E.
\m/