It popped up on my YouTube home page a few days ago. “Led Zeppelin — if it was recorded in the 50s,” the caption read. Above, there was a picture of a fake album cover for “The Led Zeppelins” — four greasers sporting natty suits and ties, along with the superimposed young faces of Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Bonham and John Paul Jones.
Did I click? Of course I clicked. You would have clicked too. If you’ve spend much time on YouTube since they started popping up a month ago , maybe you already have. If so, you probably ended up right where I did — down the latest AI-music rabbit hole, in a place where classic-rock nostalgia meets anachronistic cheeseballery.
The concept in a nutshell: Combine a vintage song or album (Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon, Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, David Bowie’s Rebel Rebel, Metallica’s Fade To Black and so on) with a vintage era and genre (’40s jazz, ’50s rock ’n’ roll, ’60s surf-rock, ’70s disco, ’80s funk, ’90s Eurodance, etc.), hit the button and voila! You’ve got a moden musical Frankenstein of Deep Purple disco, Bob Dylan death metal, Rolling Stones reggae, new romantic Nirvana, operatic Slayer, salsa-spiced Iggy Pop — or pretty much anything else you can think of. They’re all just a click away.
And if I’m being honest, some of them aren’t half bad. That version of Led Zeppelin II that initially caught my eye is surpsingly listenable — full of bouncy rockabilly, twangy guitars and upbeat vocals. If you didn’t know better, you might think it was some dusty tape from the back of the Sun Studio vault. Or maybe a long-lost LP by one of those generic ’60s British pop stars named Billy, Tommy or Vince.
Granted, the music bears no resemblance to Led Zeppelin in any way, shape or form. It’s all just generic, computer-generated fare, with the original lyrics pasted over the top, much like that Photoshopped cover art. But it still kinda works — maybe because those early Zep songs are fairly simple and blues-based, so they hold up no matter how you rejig them. Plus, it’s a hoot to hear lyrics like “Squeeze me, baby, until the juice runs down my leg,” voiced by a ’50s-style crooner.
Similarly, I laughed out loud at all the jovial F-bombs and merrily voiced sleaze sprinkled throughout the remake of Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite For Destruction. The jazzy revamp of Dark Side Of The Moon also has its moments, especially if you’ve ever wondered what it would sound like if Frank Sinatra covered Money with a ’40s big band. The country-rock version of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit is also tolerable. Ditto the zippy swing version of Deep Purple’s Burn. Or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, the blazing metal version of Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison album.
Of course, a lot of things fall flat, like the remake of Iron Maiden’s The Number Of The Beast. I suspect it’s because all those epic songs are too complex and wordy; the AI can’t find a discernable pattern in the lyrics, so it just sandwiches the words in anywhere it can. That seems to be the case with anything that doesn’t fit easily into a box. It’s one of the chief drawbacks of these songs on the whole; they’re often weirdly constructed, because they’re being put together on the fly. The program isn’t really composing anything; it’s just working out a math equation.
The biggest problem: The novelty wears off really fast. After you’ve heard half a dozen of these soundalike offerings, you’ve pretty much got the gist. Even the ones that are half-decent don’t really hold up to repeated listening. Like any joke — or like all those bluegrass-rock cover albums that cropped up back in the early ’00s — they’re only good for a laugh in the short term. So enjoy them now before we all get sick of them, and they go the way of Hayseed Dixie.
To that end, here are some of the ones I’ve sampled. Happy listening.
