“Chapstick” by COIN, Thursday, October 5, 2023

COIN has been hard at work even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Releasing the album their third studio record Dreamland in late February of 2020, the band had plans for a world tour that was quickly canceled as live music came to a halt. During this pause, the band recorded and released a three EP series based on the color spectrum, starting in September of 2020. Combined, the EPs formed the Rainbow Mixtape, released in April of 2021. But the band wasn’t finished in 2021. In September, they released the lead single to their 2022 album Uncanny Valley, “Chapstick," which had been called the band's most experimental track up to the release of its parent album.

HEY CHERRY BLOSSOM, WHAT’S YOUR PROBLEM? In 1970, Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori came up with the hypothesis of The Uncanny Valley. He proposed that as robotics developed to create more and more humanlike robots, even to the point of constructing humanlike imperfections on the robot, the more likely that people would perceive the robots as eerie. He even created a formula for calculating the point for calculating the creepiness of the uncanny valley. Since 1970, robotic technology has only increased the number of robots. But today, we’re not so concerned with a Twilight Zone episode of an automaton impersonating or even replacing our physical bodies. Instead, the “robots” we fear today are body-less, for the most part.  These days, it’s eerie to see what artificial intelligence can write. It’s eerie to hear A.I. impersonating celebrities or even hearing music created in the likeness of a famous artist. Sometimes these impersonations are so realistic, we are fooled by the delivery. But mostly, we’re left with a sinking feeling about the likelihood that we may all be replaced by computers that can create content. 

I DON’T WANT YOUR LEATHER JACKET.  COIN creates a concept album about a robot learning how to love on their latest record, Uncanny Valley. The lead single, “Chapstick,” the band talked about being inspired by a 2017 documentary called AlphaGo about Google’s successful attempt to create Artificial Intelligence to dominate the game of Go--a game similar to chess, only most popular in East Asia. The music and the lyrics of the song feel like they have been developed by A.I. Not in the way that anyone can type into ChatGPT with a prompt: “Write a song about … .” Instead, it feels like earlier iterations of the program. The lines make analogies and create metaphors that don’t land. “I wanna taste your chapstick” feels creepy, but it also seems like it’s almost a line from a pop song--it probably is. But when the surrounding words make little sense, the line is especially uncanny. Today’s song is actually not creepy at all. The robot voice in music has been around since the ‘80s. Nonsense lyrics have been around since a two-year-old started babbling along to his dad’s record collection, singing what he thought he heard. But the implication of what’s to come in art should give us all an uncanny feeling.

 

Read “Chapstick” by COIN on Genius.