SYNONYM: The Greatest 80s/90s Canadian Hair Band You’ve Never Heard of

I haven’t had time to develop the backstory for this properly, so will do a half-assed release here instead, even if it lacks the verisimilitude this way that a more elaborate staging might give.

So yeah, I had the idea to make up a synthetic “hyperreality” hair band from the 80s/90s out of fully generative AI content. After discussing the matter a great deal with ChatGPT, we ended up landing on the band name SYNONYM, loosely inspired by the real Canadian hair band you’ve never heard of, Alias.

Alias, a “real” band IRL (ex-Sheriff & Heart members – btw this song by Sheriff kinda rules), had a confusingly-similarly titled song to Extreme’s classic “More Than Words,” but Alias’ hit was called “More Than Words Can Say.” Which is yeah, hella similar. Here is Alias below. :

The song is “fine.” I didn’t grow up in Canada, so I only heard it for the first time recently. I don’t have any particular nostalgic attachment to it like I do some of the others mentioned here that I grew up with. But it got me wondering about markets like Canada, that are adjacent to, but largely parellel to US pop culture or modern music history. There are a few intersections here and there from the Canadian side crossing the border, but mostly things just chug along apart it seems… Anyway the whole thing got me thinking: what if there were entire huge untapped worlds of good popular music that had existed for decades, but we just never heard it?

Hence, SYNONYM was born, which I rather like as a name for an AI band here. I imagine that all of their songs were extremely similar to other popular hair bands and power ballads. Because that’s pretty much what AI excels at.

I ended up doing a decent set of images in Midjourney for their “very well-known” hit single music video, called “Louder Than Love.” (Archived here as backup.) These images are inspired in part by Extreme, in part by LA Guns, in part by GnR’s “Patience“, among I’m sure many others in this category that I’m forgetting.

Sadly, the music generation side of AI tech is not yet as good as the visual side. I experimented quite a bit with Suno.ai to see if I could get any passable prototype results to use as audio samples of SYNONYM, but they were so far off the mark that they’re not worth sharing here.

In any event, here is the full final set of SYNONYM pics, and below are some special highlights. Enjoy! Maybe I’ll find a way to incorporate the full untold story of SYNONYM into the AI Lore books in the not too distant (alternate) future (or past).