100 Greatest Songs of the 20’s So Far #89 Headache – Truisms 4 Dummies

Released: 2023

AI is the thing that artists love to hate, and for good reason in some cases. But Headache’s 2023 album The Head Hurts but the Heart Knows the Truth offered a different way of looking at technology, one that wasn’t just about theft, plagiarism and commoditisation.

Conceptualised by Frank Ocean collaborator Vegyn (Joe Thornalley to his friends), it featured stream of conciousness, head-soup lyrics written by one Francis Hornsby Clark – of whom there is little public profile – but the words were spoken with a sort of librarian tilt in a voice generated artifically.

The results were odd – not just odd because the juxtaposition of software having a mid-life crisis to beautiful, understated music worked so incredibly well, but because it didn’t take long for the listener to start identifying with this thing that had never been born as a person, a sort of HAL if he imagined he was heartbroken, out of ecstacy and had lost his trousers.

Truisms 4 Dummies sounds like a title bad AI would come up with, but it’s gently trundling synths and lo-est fi hip hop find the anonymous hero expounding on subjects like Arctic Terns, love and saying sorry. As if unplugged from the matrix and sentient, a rebirth is taking place “At this point I feel like I’m almost 100% pure angel” he says, a realisation that from that point all things are possible. That’s the blank slate of humanity the second we leave the womb; suddenly everyone matters, whether you came from an egg, or a line of code.