Just in time for the Super Bowl, Coach Belichick gets his anthem
I moderate the RealClearPolitics radio show on SiriusXM. Tom Bevan, Carl Cannon, and I – along with assorted guests – are on the air for an hour every weekday and we cover a lot of topics. On Thursday the talk turned to Bruce Springsteen’s new protest song, “Streets of Minneapolis.” We were all underwhelmed.
I grew up playing the piano and am still at it – I play keyboards in a band – and have, with limited success, written and produced original music all my life. So I like to think I appreciate the songwriter’s craft.
Springsteen says he wrote the song this past Sunday and recorded it in time to put it out on Wednesday. That’s a fast turnaround, but it made me wonder if we can do better.
In a rather harsh review, Matt Reigle of Outkick asked whether The Boss had used Google Maps or ChatGPT to find a relevant street address to give the song some specificity. Maybe even the Bard of New Jersey needs a little help when facing a tight deadline.
Reigle was being puckish, but I thought, maybe he’s onto something. Why not use AI to create an entire protest song – not just lyrics, but the melody, the production, and the vocals? And since Springsteen had cornered the market on this season’s biggest social justice issue, I chose for this experiment another unmistakable injustice of the week: the National Football League Hall of Fame refusing to induct legendary New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick on the first ballot.
I asked ChatGPT to write me lyrics for “an anthemic protest song” on the topic. The only specific thing I asked was that it include a reference to “Deflategate” and “Spygate,” the two pseudo-scandals of the Belichick era.
The title the bot came up with is “With The Sleeves Cut Short,” a reference to Coach Belichick’s most iconic sideline outfit.
Here’s the final verse as it came up:
So raise a fist for the coach they keep waitin’ on,
Let the bust be carved in patience, let the echoes carry on,
When the noise fades out and the numbers finally speak,
There’s a legend in the film room, there’s a standard we still seek.
Hey!
Let history tell it smooth—
Hall of Fame doors, hear us knockin’,
With the sleeves cut short …
Yeah, the sleeves cut short …
And the truth.
Not once does ChatGPT namecheck the subject of the song, and it resists the temptation to rhyme anything with Belichick (“Make it quick?” “Just won’t stick?” – you see the problem.)
I took what ChatGPT gave me on the first try, and pasted the text into MakeSong, a free AI song generator that set the words to music, provided all the vocals, and arranged the instruments. You can listen to the finished product here on the RCP YouTube channel.
Like the best protest songs, it is clearly about this injustice, but it is also about all injustice. It’s about the present, but it is also timeless. The song sounds new and yet entirely familiar, paying homage to a pantheon that have come before. And, it has hooks galore.
And since you’re wondering, the answer is no. I did not use ChatGPT to write this article.
So Belichick-backers, give it a listen, share it, and maybe if we sing it loud enough, the NFL Hall of Fame walls will come a-tumblin’ down.
Go Pats.
