pondering obsolescence via Hot Chip's "Huarache Lights"

Last week I got an email from a freelance client who told me they needed some help from me. They'd asked ChatGPT to do a job that I normally did, and now they weren't sure whether the work was accurate. I was asked to read over what it had spat out, see if it was correct, and then proceed with my usual tasks accordingly.

This really hurt my feelings. I was cranky for the rest of the day. It's not the first time generative AI has come into my work—I work "in video" which is both a creative field and a field where companies are required to create content at great scale, so the round peg of AI has been shoved into various, ah, square holes of my job responsibilities before. But this was the first time where it felt like someone was explicitly trying to save money by asking a robot to do my job for me. I felt like I was a worker at the horse and buggy factory the day the first Model Ts rolled off the lot. Horse Factory would be a good 2025 band name.

I was bummed, but I was also annoyed. I hadn't actually been replaced. I still had work to do, it was just more irritating than usual. ChatGPT was like a terrible colleague who'd fucked up their job and now it was my job to clean up their mess. And they weren't even a real person, just a wall of made-up text. When I read fiction, I prefer for it to have an entertaining plot! It can even be a novel about an unhappy family that is unhappy in their own way, written by someone named Jonathan. Better that than a large language model chatbot claiming people in a video said stuff that they didn't say. At the end of the day, I just hate liars.

Have you heard the band Hot Chip? They are great. My first experience of Hot Chip was "Ready For The Floor," probably written about on an online music magazine. My admiration for them plateaued for years, and then we caught a little bit of their performance at Coachella 2022.

Now, Hot Chip are a dance band. They use electronic instruments to create and perform their music, but they are also an ensemble who play live together. This creates a nice "best of both worlds" situation, a little bit DJ and a little bit rock band. They were all set up in the Gobi tent, playing "Over and Over," which opens with a neat threat: Laid back? We'll give you laid back. Hours later, deprogramming from the day, my husband Chris said that the detail he locked in on from "Over And Over" was the teeny two-note guitar part that repeats throughout the intro. It was really tickling him, that needly snippet of a riff. How do I spell it for the blog? Da-dum. Ba-dah. Nee-nee. Here, listen, it's at nine seconds,.

That's Hot Chip to me. The teeny lick of guitar in the mix—a little hand-rolled gnocchi of Human-Made Music that gives the Computer-Enhanced Music meaning. Funny enough, they have a whole other song about how humans give computers meaning (and not the other way around). That's my interpretation of "Huarache Lights," anyway.

"Huarache Lights" came out ten years ago, right around when the main members of the band were all turning 35 or so. There are lyrics in it about getting left behind by trends and technology: There's nothing to touch and / There's nothing to hold / Am I so truthful or in truth / Is the youth just getting old? And as a 35-year-old who recently learned about a 'podcast' hosted by four teenage boys from Maryland (Chub Perm, Nonchalant Kid, No Name and McLovin) that exists almost entirely in the form of social video clips, I relate to that interpretation of the song for sure. Call me old-fashioned but I think a podcast should be distributed by an RSS feed. Am I really going to go to war with Chub Perm and Nonchalant Kid about it? No.

At this time of unchecked slop, I want to think about "Huarache Lights" less as a "Losing My Edge"-style aging anxiety bop, and more as a simple celebration of people. After all, a dance song is nothing without people to dance to it. A modular synthesizer doesn't work without a person to turn it on and play it. And a chatbot won't chat unless you talk first. Machines are great but / Best when they come to life.

There is an ineffable rightness about the music of "Huarache Lights." It feels a little formal and imperious, but also warm and lush. It swells and wanders around but always comes back to the comfort and truth of its home chord. Alexis Taylor vocalizes, sweetly, the fear of a future with computers but no people, the fear of a robot doing your job for you—Replace us with the things that do the job better—and then a robot voice takes over. The worst has come to pass! That fear of obsolescence was not unfounded.

But none of this is even happening without the express permission of Hot Chip. It's all in their universe. They're calling the shots, they're bringing the machines to life. Taylor's original voice even returns to finish the refrain.

People! People wrote the song, people made the song, people made the song incredible. Like: a girl group from Philly named First Choice recorded a song called "Let No Man Put Asunder" in 1977, which got a 12" mix from a producer named Shep Pettibone in 1983, and then over the years, a lot of people sampled vocals from that mix...including Hot Chip on "Huarache Lights" in 2015. It's a human voice engaging with human desire: I got something for your mind, your body, and your soul...every day of my life.

I heard Hot Chip trigger that sample when they played it live at Knockdown Center in 2023, and then I heard Alexis Taylor sing the same vocals through a talkbox, robot-style, and it was so special. And it meant so much to me that I had to tell you about it on my blog. Computers might handle the distribution and delivery, but it's people who've got something for your mind, your body and your soul every day of your life. Maybe they'll figure out how to give ChatGPT my job someday, but that day is not today. I wrote all this myself, I swear. I'm looking at my fingers right now, tapping on the keyboard at least a while longer.

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