Our Jealous Antagonist

Way back in the mid 90s, I partnered with Sleep-Ins guitarist Chad Corley and thermal romantic producer Michael Lee Thomas to create Bathsheva’s Minefield Dream (with lots of play on mind/filled). It actually even did pretty well on the then nascent MP3.com! My favorite from the project was this song, “Our Jealous Antagonist.”‘ It was the one that Chad and I wrote together which is cool, but I love it mostly because it really embodies that odd mix of electronica and soundscape rock that the whole project was about. ok, and the keyboard solo… 🙂

Well… 28 years later, I’ve been DEEP in the Midjourney art realm and used some key phrases from the Minefield Dream story (a real rarity of rarities for those that have a cassette copy…!) to make some mind blowing art and then edit them into a video. I think it just might be the best still image video I’ve ever done!! (Gotta keep them skills up!! 🙂 )

For those thinking deeply about this type of art, I suggest an exercise. All of the art in this video was created using Midjourney. I did the music and the editing. What % of the copyright am I entitled to? (legally, currently 100% btw per Midjourney’s TOS) So, is this video an original work or a derivative work? If derivative, of what specifically? How and who will judge this?? How will uses be identified, payments be collected and paid globally when copyright provisions change from nation to nation? It sounds great, but as a musician who gets paid .000012 cents or some such for every Spotify play, I can tell you that unless the artist is already making millions, small artists (we’ll say with 98% certainty) won’t get anything. As always, we will make MUCH more money selling art at a farmers market or live shows than we’ll ever get from a.i. royalties…

That said, I think the interesting questions revolve around what these models tell us about ourselves. They reflect our biases, our eccentricity, our darkness and our light… This video used Bathsheva song titles to prompt the art – such as “Our Jealous Antagonist” (which almost 100% gave demons) and “Perfect Gods” (which almost 100% gave women). The play on Mind/Mine Field/Filled Dreams also created a wonderful array of things that often featured fish and mushrooms…. Who knew? There’s a very good research paper here for a graduate student comparing the cultural biases of the various model iterations…

Anyway – Bathsheva’s Minefield Dream is a great out of print rarity if you can find one!