What AI doesn't know about Madrid

I live and work in Madrid. This is where I write the lyrics for PLANETA GAYFOLK, and where I decide which versions stay and which go. I produce the music with artificial intelligence, which I direct. And the more I work with it, the more I notice something that amuses me: the machine has read an enormous amount about Madrid and hasn't the faintest idea about Madrid.

Let me explain what I mean.

Brochure Madrid

If you ask a tool like this for something about Madrid, it'll give you brochure Madrid. The Puerta del Sol, the bear and the strawberry tree, the blue sky, tapas, the Movida. All true, all very familiar. It's the Madrid in the guidebooks and the airline adverts, and the machine has soaked it up because it's the one repeated most.

The Madrid I live in is different. Or it's the same one, seen from the inside, which changes a great deal.

It's the person who tells you their entire life story in the lift in the time it takes to go up four floors. It's the August heat, which isn't a reading on a thermometer but a way of being in the world, and which only makes sense to someone who's slept with their feet sticking out from under the sheet looking for a millimetre of air. It's the terrace table that stretches on until the waiter starts stacking chairs around you as a hint. It's the metro first thing in the morning, everyone staring at their phones so as not to look at each other. It's the bars where nobody asks you anything and the bars where they ask you everything.

None of that is in the brochures. It's in life.

The neighbour

I think of «La vecina cotilla» (The nosy neighbour). I won't tell you what the song is about beyond what the title says, but the title is enough. Anyone who's lived in a Madrid building, with its inner courtyard and windows facing each other, knows the nosy neighbour isn't a fictional character. She's an institution. She knows what time you come in, who with and in what state.

A machine can write about a generic nosy neighbour. A curious lady, in curlers, at a window. What it can't do is have one. It can't have run into her in the doorway and felt that look sweeping you up and down while she says "afternoon" with impeccable politeness. That look is the song. The rest is scenery.

I don't want to be unfair. The tool does certain Madrid-related things very well. The copla flavour of my songs, for example. Copla, the old Spanish torch song, has a lot of the city about it, of theatre, of the summer street fair, of the chotis too, even if that's not the same thing. The machine has heard a lot of music from that tradition and knows what it's about. When I ask it for something in that vein, it sometimes surprises me.

It can also hit a certain cheekiness, the tone of someone who plants themselves in the middle of the square and belts out their own thing without asking permission, which is so very castizo, so old-Madrid. It's given me more than one happy moment there. I admit it because it would be ugly to dwell only on what it can't do, like the Madrileño who only mentions the city to moan about the traffic.

But that's where the difference lies. It knows how a tradition sounds. It doesn't know how life is lived in the place where that tradition was born. That's why the music can come from it, guided by me, and the lyric has to come from someone who walks these streets.

Madrid as a queer place

There's another layer that matters to me especially. Madrid is a very important city for queer people, in Spain and beyond. Lots of people have come here from villages and small towns, or from across the ocean, looking for somewhere they can be who they are. That movement, arriving in a place where you can finally breathe, is at the heart of the GAYFOLK trilogy. The three albums tell of discovering a planet where you can be free, the longing to get there and the day of liberation.

I'm not saying GAYFOLK is Madrid. It's an invented planet, and I'd rather everyone put whichever city they need into it. But writing it from here is no accident. A machine can know that Madrid has a huge Pride and a famous neighbourhood. It doesn't know what it's like to watch someone who's just arrived walk hand in hand with another lad for the first time without looking over his shoulder. That scene, in all its variations, is what I have in my head when I think of GAYFOLK.

The local travels better

There's a paradox I like. I suspect the more specific I am, the better my songs are understood abroad. I write for Spain and the Americas, and you might think the sensible thing is to strip out local references so nobody gets lost. I do the opposite. «Mitad Venezuela, mitad Pakistán» (Half Venezuela, half Pakistan) isn't about Madrid, but it follows the same logic: two countries with proper names say more than "someone from two places". Someone reading it in Buenos Aires or Mexico City may not know either country, and still understands straight away what it is to carry two places with you at once.

The generic doesn't travel. It stays nowhere. The specific, on the other hand, is recognised everywhere.

The machine tends towards the generic because it has learnt from everything at once. My job is to pull it towards the specific. Towards this city, this heat, this neighbour.

The songs, written from Madrid, are at mikesaintlouis.com.