When Scarlett Johansson marked the revival of The Jesus and Mary Chain: “Let’s do some more”
Perhaps the most crass example of AI slop is deepfaking a celebrity’s face onto any given scenario. The very worst of that exists in pornography, but the more subliminal examples are slowly seeping their way into artistic consciousness.
Think Idles’ video for their single ‘Grace’, which reinterpreted the original video for Coldplay’s ‘Yellow’, but instead, Martin was mouthing along to Joe Talbot’s vocals. Or what about Jamiroquai, who recently implemented AI-generated artwork into their stage design? Failing to provoke any abhorrence towards those two examples, what about the general and continued use of AI to just create music and storm the streaming charts altogether, elbowing genuinely human musicians out of the way? The end feels nigh, and AI is at the very heart of it.
So I wouldn’t blame you if you approached the title of this article with an appropriate level of cynicism and believed that this story was just another depressing example of AI slop. But no, like all things hopeful at the moment, this story comes from a much simpler past.
Seeing as we’re digging deeper into the past, it’s only right that this story starts with a brotherly fallout. When Jim and William Reid fell out in 1998, it looked like The Jesus and Mary Chain would simply never perform together again. A drunken altercation sparked a much wider feud, which, unfortunately for paying fans, culminated on stage at the House of Blues in Los Angeles, where William eventually stormed off. One year later, the band officially announced their break-up, and fans all over accepted the fact that that might be it.
But then, nine years after that fateful night, rumours began circulating that the fractious brothers might just be considered a reunion at Coachella.
Jim recalled the speculation that swirled around them, saying, “Various people had tried to get the band together for several years before we played the Coachella show… Coachella had offered to get the band on the bill several years before it actually happened, I suppose the time just had to be right, there were a couple of things, really. I always assumed William wouldn’t want to do it and he had always assumed that I wouldn’t want to do. The break-up was so fucking messy; at that time, I could never have imagined playing with The Mary Chain again, but time really does heal, as they say.”
He continued: “One night we were just talking on the phone, and he was surprised to hear I would do it if he would. We just thought, ‘Fuck it, let’s get on trying it.’ At the time it was a one-off, so I thought we will do it, if it works, then we’ll see what’s what; we play, we may hate each other, it just might not work. It was kind of dip our toe in the water and see what happens kind of deal. We didn’t try and kill each other, so we thought, ‘Let’s do some more.’”
But clearly, there needed to be some sort of conduit. A glue that would bind these two warring egos together, and in true Coachella fashion, it was a Hollywood A-lister. Despite Coachella’s history of holograms and Los Angeles’ love for CGI, Scarlett Johansson providing vocals on ‘Just Like Honey’ was a very real moment for the band, and one that seemingly helped heal the familial wounds.
While the contribution didn’t help launch Johansson’s indie-folk career quite as she hoped, it did create a moment of festival history that adds to the general idea that the good times are fully behind us.
