In that context, the “Now and Then” movie’s upfront billing of the track as the last Beatles song feels like a two-pronged rhetorical move. As a promotional matter, it maximizes our sense of the release as an event. But it simultaneously functions as a reassuring promise. Look, it seems to say, we won’t be doing this left and right. We’re too classy for that; we’re the Beatles. This is about the realization of a longstanding and deeply emotional artistic goal, not about cravenly generating a new product.
Well, maybe. But the truth, ultimately, will lie not with any facts inherent to the universe of existing Beatles recordings. It will come down to choices made by whoever owns the rights. If you can make a Beatles single using ideas from two dead Beatles, then you can make one with ideas from three dead Beatles — or even, perhaps, from four. And even if this really is the end for Beatles output, it would be foolish to think that no one will follow in their footsteps. Somewhere, right now, people in suits are drawing up profit projections for similar projects from other beloved acts.
Whether this fact fills you with dread, indifference or excitement might depend on what you think of the music that results. Thus far, many applications of artificial intelligence to music have been meme-y novelties: people mocking up (surprisingly good) impressions of Drake songs or Johnny Cash covering Taylor Swift or Hank Williams singing rap lyrics. The next step — the one the “Now and Then” promotional film is so eager to reassure us “the Beatles” have not yet taken — is the use of A.I. to produce songs we’re meant to respond to not as neat proofs of what’s technically possible, but as vectors for emotion.
I’ve seen numerous people describe how genuinely moved they were by listening to “Now and Then.” I believe them. And the experience of communing with lost friends and collaborators was obviously an especially meaningful one for McCartney. For me, though, the song is eerily inert. Lennon’s original shoddy demo, long available online, is, by contrast, movingly alive, not despite but because of its incompleteness. The recording generates an aura of possibility that fits with the song’s themes: all that might have been, the power of what endures over time, even as so much else erodes. It reminds me of the Beatles without sounding like the Beatles — and why should it, when Lennon didn’t write it for them? The new “Now and Then,” for which some of Lennon’s original lyrics were cut and others rearranged, doesn’t entirely sound like the Beatles either, no matter how much it wants to. The image that formed in my mind as I listened and relistened was that of a spotless, echoey mausoleum, built from shiny gray marble and haunted by garbled digital cries that sound like people I once knew, trying to connect across impossible distances.
My suspicion is that I’ll be having this uncanny feeling more often in the years to come. This will be, in part, because of what A.I. will make possible and how widely it will be deployed as a tool for duplicating human sounds. It will also be a result of our ongoing collective failure to create conditions that make the production and widespread dissemination of novel art possible. What’s worrisome is not the technology itself, which has the potential to be deployed in all sorts of artistically interesting ways. Neither is it a matter of what is or isn’t “natural,” or of policing the boundaries between “real” and “fake” Beatles. The worry is that, for the companies that shape so much of our cultural life, A.I. will function first and foremost as a way to keep pushing out recycled goods rather than investing in innovations and experiments from people who don’t yet have a well-known back catalog to capitalize on. I hope I am wrong. Maybe “Now and Then” is just a blip, a one-off — less a harbinger of things to come than the marking of a limit. But I suspect that, in this late project, the always-innovative Beatles are once again ahead of their time.