In February of 1978, the sad young man went away. The algorithm that replaced him could pass for human, when it wanted to. It gave occasional interviews and was the subject of a documentary; by all accounts, it had a family and lived in suburban west London. Last year, it even managed to contract cancer and die. But then, the uncanniest valley of all is the one that hides in plain sight.
Scott Walker’s later music unsettles, not because it’s alien, but because it alienates. It’s perversely fitting, then, that the young Walker—let’s call him Sleep Walker—should have been such an exponent of seduction. You can hear it readily enough in those lush Walker Brothers numbers that gave snaggle-tooth England the flutters. “Love Her”, “Make it Easy on Yourself”, “My Ship is Coming in”: each has the neotenous prettiness of pop before Andy Warhol took it behind the bike shed and gave it something to think about. But even in the solo records of the later 1960s, Walker just swapped the high school for the Students’ Union. “Loneliness,” he revealingly crooned, “is a cloak you wear”, and if he went on to thicken up the mix with some Jacques Brel and Albert Camus, they were just props to make the boomer girls feel deep. And why not? Tuition fees had gone forever, and the existential angst had to be sourced somewhere.
It’s to Walker’s credit that he hated it. Most of us, when we have a skill, prescribe it like penicillin: Jeffrey Dahmer, probably, felt serial killing to be a public good. And Walker knew the moves of seduction better than the inside of his own mouth. So, when he chose to become the mirror instead of the reflection, the idol he was killing was himself.
In the strength of the crime
You sing like a stranger
And your failure fulfils
Your most secret defeat.
Sleep Walker’s death wasn’t quick. We can still hear his murderer at work, 28 years later, on The Drift:
Jesse are you listening?
. . .
I lower my head
Press my ear to the prairie.
‘Alive, I'm the only one
Left alive
I'm the only one
Left alive
I'm the only one
Left alive
Alive.’
Thus does Jesse, the unborn brother, the six feet of foetus, answer Elvis, the teen idol, from his grave beneath the American grasslands. Go listen to it, if you haven’t already; it’s the most harrowing vocal in all of music. It’s the sound of truth murdering beauty.
But anyone will tell you that the second murder is easier than the first. Having killed himself, Walker set about killing the rest of us, too. You can’t be convicted of homicide if there’s no such thing as a human.
KURTZ: What did they tell you?
WILLARD: They told me that you had gone totally insane
and that your methods were unsound.
KURTZ: Are my methods unsound?
WILLARD: I don’t see any method at all, sir.
But there was a method, all the same. From 1978’s Nite Flights onwards, Walker diced our culture into a slurry and fed it back to us. As is so often the case, the first step comprehends the whole journey. Nite Flights. Ingest Filth. (Shitting Elf works too, if you’re reading this to your kids.) And, like the prisoners in Salo, Pasolini’s torture-porn, we ate the shit we were served. David Bowie, famously, could never get the taste out of his mouth. Brian Eno maintained the shit was so good that we’ve never had better since. In Bish Bosch, Walker himself allowed that if shit were music, he’d be a brass band.
When AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol in 2016, it made headline news; in 2019, when Gwern taught GPT-2 to write like Shelley, Reuters reckoned that this one could sit on the spike. Fair enough: only nerds dig boardgames and Shelley was mean to his wife. Still, poetry pays in prestige—it’s not like there’s a Dante of checkers—so you’d think the belletrists would at least have broken a sweat when the central bank started printing money:
My heart, why come you here alone?
The wild thing of my heart is grown
To be a thing,
Fairy, and wild, and fair, and whole.
(Yes, I know: there is precisely no one alive today whose inner life is captured by these lines. Do you think that would have been different in 1818?)
In 2007, Walker made his second release on the 4AD label (the first being The Drift). Who Shall go to the Ball? And What Shall go to the Ball? is an instrumental piece commissioned for the Candoco Dance Company, who perform with a mixed cohort of able-bodied and disabled dancers. Unusually, the release was prefaced with a question:
How much of a body does an intelligence need to be potentially socialised in an age of ever-developing AI? This is but one of many questions that informed the approach to the project.
There’s a whiff of intern prose about this; besides, looking for smoking guns is conspiracy-theory try-hard. Still, you have to ask yourself: how much of a body does six feet of foetus need to be potentially socialised in an age of ever-developing AI? Shelley’s wife might have hazarded a guess. It’s such a shame that GPT-2 cloned the monkey instead of the organ-grinder.
Algorithms, we’re told, encode our biases. This is great news. At the time of writing, it’s still illegal to hack the human cortex, which means we’re stuck with the racist assholes. But you can change whatever you like about the distribution of weights in a neural network; it’s brainwashing without tears. Fair warning: this may take you further than you wish to go. Being human is itself a bias, a statistical pattern, a set of expected values in the long-term frequency of genes, behaviours, and symbols. Shuffle these up and the smart money is always on the result being cancer.
When Walker shuffled the deck, something else came up. Sure, it still looks like cancer; see it standing there, its face pressed up against the glass!
As the grossness of spring rose
A tumour balloon to squeak against the window
With the grossness of spring staining into the walls
But this isn’t cancer as a disease of proteins; it’s cancer as a pathology of information. It’s the cancer of a system trying to reproduce itself and gestating something else instead. This cancer is entropy’s answer to narcissism. Walker didn’t need telling that it’s terminal—after all, it’s how he disappeared.
But we do, because we’re still stuck in the nouveau Palaeolithic and it’s getting dark. What Walker began as an aesthetic now manipulates your vote and manages your pension fund (as if you have a pension!). The difference is that Walker starts with the narcissistic image and spirals out into the darkness; the other algorithm starts with the darkness and spirals into the image. The imposture is just about visible, for now. Give it a little and it won’t be; give it a bit more, and you won’t even care. Look how prettiness mutilated Leonard Cohen—and you think you can survive it?
We won’t survive it; no one does. That’s why SETI only ever detects silence. But if we want to at least try, Walker points the way. The arc of compositions from Nite Flights through to Bish Bosch shows us what we look like when the primate isn’t being flattered. If you think it’s ugly or incoherent, then draw the inference before it hangs you. Because the noose is growing tighter and there isn’t much time.
“The Electrician” is a song about a CIA torturer. In the Vietnam era, the innovation was to attach the batteries from field radios to the testicles of informants. These days, Psy Ops finds that approach to be a little roundabout and goes straight for the music instead. The principle, however, is the same:
If I jerk the handle
You'll die in your dreams
If I jerk the handle, jerk the handle
You'll thrill me and thrill me and thrill me
In February of 1978, Scott Walker jerked the handle and we died in our dreams. We’ll stay dead, if we know what’s good for us.