Red vs. Blue: Is Modern Music Production Driving Our Political Divide?
How the Early 2000s Adoption of DAWs and AI Tools Coincides with America’s Growing Political Divide
“This is my natural rhythm. It’s how I bob my head.” — J Dilla
J Dilla, a revolutionary hip-hop producer and beatmaker, transformed the art of beat-making in the 90s. His creative process was deeply embodied — he used machines not as tools to dictate rhythm but to express his own sense of time. Through this approach, his beats resonated globally
Dilla’s creative process was an extension of his environment. When he sat with the Akai MPC, he used the machine to fit his embodied experiences. He did not let the machine use him. A common refrain upon first encountering a J Dilla beat is, ‘That seems off… wait, that feels great’
I don’t know about you, but lately, not only do things seem off — they don’t feel great either. Maybe that’s because, unlike J Dilla, we’ve started letting the machines use us.
Since 1999, DAWs and AI tools have come to dominate music production; we’ve surrendered our symbolic, embodied processes of creation to the idealized perfection of the machinic grid. The flattening of music into mere signs — devoid of the symbolic, multi-layered complexity that J Dilla embodied — mirrors how we’ve flattened our social and political discourse into a Red vs. Blue divide, erasing the nuanced conversations and embodied understanding that once connected us across differences. As we dig deeper, we’ll see how this technological shift, starting with music, has shaped the way we engage with each other in politics and beyond — dividing us in ways that are harder to reconcile.
Bending the Grid: The Evolution of Dilla Time
The way J Dilla used the Akai MPC is important. In the book Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm, Dan Charnas goes to great lengths to illustrate both visually, as well as narratively, how Dilla approached sampling and beat making that set him apart from the rest.
A poingoint observation sums up this distinction:
Everyone in hip-hop had heretofore been trying to cut, splice, and jam samples to accommodate the machine’s time grid, because producers were focused on mining samples for their sounds. But Jay Dee did the opposite: he bent the machine grid to accommodate his sample sources, because he was focused on using those samples for their rhythmic and harmonic feel. (Charnas, p. 182; emphasis in original)
It’s crucial to acknowledge the distinction of “the machine’s time grid” here. What J Dilla did — preserving and manipulating the groove he was building — gave birth to what we now call Dilla Time. The Akai MPC sampler’s time grid was different from other samplers of the era. While many samplers allowed producers to set the grid in either straight time or swung time, Dilla’s use of the MPC allowed him to push those boundaries further.
For example, Tom Petty’s song “You Don’t Know How It Feels” is a classic example of straight time with a solid backbeat on 2 and 4. The rhythm here stays largely straight, with any swing being subtly implied by the Steve Ferrone, the drummer.
Now, contrast that with a track like “Fall In Love” by Slum Village. In this instrumental version, you can hear an exaggerated swung time, where the beat feels kind of off — but your head just starts moving. This kind of intentional rhythmic manipulation is what defines Dilla Time.
Now that we’ve defined straight and swung timing, it’s important to understand what set the Akai MPC apart from other drum machines of its time, like the E-mu SP-1200. Both machines allowed producers to adjust the swing on a scale or range, shifting a beat from straight to swung. However, in the SP-1200, when you applied swing, it affected all tracks uniformly — meaning every sound followed the same degree of swing. However, the Akai MPC allowed each individual track to have its own unique swing setting. So, in theory, the hi-hat could stay in straight time while the snare and kick swung, each with different degrees of swing. This flexibility created a plurality of inner tensions that, when combined, formed a groove that felt both “off” and yet undeniably great.
Isolating any specific element of the groove against the accompanying music resulted in unexpected, often discordant juxtapositions. Yet, this is precisely how J Dilla’s beats transformed the sum of their parts into something far greater than the individual elements. While other producers of the era were primarily focused on mining sounds, Dilla’s genius lay in how he combined those sounds rhythmically and harmonically to evoke a special, almost numinous expression.
These multiple competing times, grid-against-grid, on paper, resemble the overlapping grids of the streets where Dilla grew up. They also reveal a kind of harmonization between machine and individual. The machine didn’t control Dilla, and he refused to let its limitations force shortcuts or rely on quantization. Instead, he preserved the organic complexity of his rhythms within the machine’s framework.
Livin’ la Vida Loca and the Tyranny of The Grid
In 1999, most recording studios in the Western world still relied on 24-inch reel-to-reel tape for recording. However, some studios were beginning to adopt a new way of recording and editing sessions: Pro Tools.
Pro Tools, along with other emerging digital tools like Ableton, Logic Pro, and Cubase, are known as DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations). At the time, DAWs were still relatively new and had yet to gain universal acceptance in the recording industry. My first professional session was in Miami in 1997, at a studio that had just installed its first Pro Tools system. The band I was hired to record drums for was the studio’s first client to use Pro Tools for a session.
To situate this in time: while we were tracking the session in Studio A, next door in Studio B, Dokken guitarist George Lynch was mixing a record. During a break, we ran into him in the break room, where he excitedly introduced us to a new drink he had just discovered — Red Bull. (According to Wikipedia, Red Bull was introduced in the U.S. in 1997, so at least my memory is still intact.)
Just two years later, in the same city of Miami, Ricky Martin’s Livin’ La Vida Loca was recorded at producer Desmond Child’s newly designed studio, The Gentlemen’s Club, a space built specifically to work entirely in Pro Tools. At a time when most studios were still using reel-to-reel tape, this was a radical shift. Child, who had fully embraced Pro Tools despite initial skepticism from the industry, made Livin’ La Vida Loca the first №1 hit to be recorded, mixed, and mastered entirely “in the box.” As Child told Billboard, “We’ve crossed the threshold in recording history.” The success of this track not only ushered in a new era for digital recording but also led studios across the world to ditch their analog setups in favor of the Pro Tools revolution. (Billboard Magazine, 2019).
This was a seismic moment in the professional recording industry. Livin’ La Vida Loca demonstrated that music could be produced entirely digitally and still become a number one hit. Studios quickly outfitted themselves with Pro Tools. Practically overnight, recording shifted from focusing on how music sounded and felt in the room to how it appeared on a screen: how drums lined up with the grid, how transients aligned in waveforms. What was once intuited through countless hours spent with instruments and fellow musicians could now be manipulated with a click of a mouse and adjusted with algorithms to fit the grid, both rhythmically and harmonically.
This switch from embodied, intuitive expression to visual and algorithmic precision not only stripped music of its ability to fully capture the artist’s lived human experience, but also reflects the broader “griddification” of culture — a colonization of human feeling by quantifiable statistical spreads. As Pro Tools and its visual grid flattened music into rigid, predictable patterns, Western, particularly American society became locked into the binary structures of Red vs. Blue. This reduction of complexity mirrors our deepening political divides, leaving us unable to communicate or express across them, and diminishing both our creative and political possibilities.
Susan Langer and the Disappearance of Time in Music
In the previous section, I argued that the widespread adoption of Pro Tools and its grid-based structure parallels the growing societal divide in Red vs. Blue America. Through the flattening of music’s vital, organic, and multi-temporal forms, we’ve experienced a traumatic loss of symbolic depth and the associative epistemological import, replaced by mere signs — an aestheticization of reductionist elements devoid of their original, embodied meaning.
Susanne K. Langer, whose work on art, symbolism, and time provides a critical lens for this argument, highlights the distinction between art as a symbol and mere signification. In Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Langer states:
All the failings of musical hermeneutics rest on one cardinal error, the treatment of the art symbol as a symbolism. A work of art is a single symbol, not a system of significant elements which may be variously compounded. Its elements have no symbolic values in isolation. They take their expressive character from their functions in the perceptual whole. (Langer, Mind, pg. 84. Emphasis added)
This perfectly aligns with the “griddification” of music and the broader cultural shift it reflects. Just as J Dilla’s grooves lose their expressive depth when reduced to isolated parts, symbols must be understood as unified representations of experience. When music is chopped into samples and quantized onto grids, we no longer engage with the lived, embodied experiences of the artist — only with fragments of sound, mere signifiers of a lost totality, pure aestheticized signs.
Langer further emphasizes the importance of time, which is critical before we examine the connection between the gridification of music and political polarization. In Feeling and Form, Langer explores time not merely as a sequence of moments, but as something far more complex:
The experience of time is anything but simple. It involves more properties than ‘length’… Life is always a dense fabric of concurrent tensions, and as each of them is a measure of time, the measurements themselves do not coincide. (Langer, Feeling and Form, pg. 112. Emphasis added.)
This idea of time as a ‘dense fabric of concurrent tensions’ speaks directly to the temporal complexity in J Dilla’s work. His use of competing grids — multiple rhythmic layers moving against each other — embodies this multi-dimensional sense of time. Dilla’s beats, rather than adhering to a strict clock, create a lived, embodied temporal experience within the framework of a machine. It’s important to emphasize here: the machine as a tool is not inherently the problem. The issue arises when the machine becomes a system of control.
As Langer notes:
The clock — metaphysically a very problematical instrument — makes a special abstraction from temporal experience…conceived under this scheme, time is a one-dimensional continuum. (Feeling and Form, pg. 111)
Langer’s critique of mechanical clock time focuses on how it abstracts time into a single, one-dimensional sequence, stripping away the rich, layered, voluminous experiences that define how we live and perceive ‘thick’ time. In the modern studio, with the ubiquitous use of Pro Tools and associated algorithmic, AI, and time-manipulating tools, time becomes something to be sliced, measured, and controlled, rather than lived and felt. The machine’s ‘clock’ becomes the absolute framework within which human expression is forced to operate, flattening the thick, multi-temporal nature of our lived experience.
This is no small quibble.
The French philosopher Henri Bergson saw the dangers of adopting this temporal framing over 100 years ago. Bergson’s theory of durée, or lived time, is a direct challenge to the reduction of time to mere sequences. In a famous debate with Albert Einstein on April 6, 1922, Bergson critiqued Einstein’s view of time as measurable and quantifiable. Einstein’s theory of relativity, while showing time as flexible and relative, still treated it as a dimension that could be measured, which Bergson argued missed the richness of time as a lived, qualitative experience. As Jimena Canales recounts in The Physicist & The Philosopher (highly recommend read!!!), this debate highlighted a deeper rift between the positivist ethos that dominated scientific thought, represented by Einstein’s reliance on scientific abstraction, and Bergson’s view of time as it is phenomenologically experienced — lived rather than merely measured.
But what does Pro Tools and DAW’s have to do with this debate, and our political divide, and hip hop grooves?
Everything.
The triumph of Einstein’s reconceptualization of time didn’t just transform physics; it reshaped our entire cultural framework. Time, now seen as discrete and quantifiable, has come to be viewed as ontologically real, driving a shift in how we approach art and expression. With the advent of modern technology, music production was now able to fully embrace this ontological position in the production of music. Now a performance is treated not as a symbolic representation of lived, embodied experience, but as mere sounds, signifiers, to be mined, reconfigured, quantized, and sterilized of all temporal, contextual, and embodied significance, for the strict purpose of pure aestheticization to hitch a ride on the capital carousel.
I also want to touch on one more analytical lens that Langer’s theory of secondary illusions in art in order to appreciate the point I am trying to make here.
The Role of Secondary Illusions in Art
Susanne Langer’s theory of art emphasizes the central role of ‘secondary illusions,’ which arise from the primary illusion of a work of art. A primary illusion is the immediate, embodied experience we have of the form — whether the perception of melodic movement in music, the spatial arrangement in architecture, or the narrative arc in a drama. It is what makes the artwork coherent and complete as a perceptual whole. The secondary illusion, however, is a more abstract and disembodied aspect of the artwork that transcends its somatic origins, offering additional layers of meaning, depth, and epistemological significance.
Like fantasies, secondary illusions seem to have no somatic being; they are disembodied, yet they come out of the created form and heighten its livingness, even to a degree where the form in its entirety seems to be changed. It has been said that the high moment in any work which achieves such a sublimation is “an unreality between two realities.” It is the element in which the transition from somatic feeling, which is our ordinary reality, to imagination, the autonomous act of envisagement, comes to formal expression. Here is the dynamic pattern of the conceptual act, the strangeness and “otherness” and bodilessness of symbolic imagery, projected in the structure of great art. (Langer, Mind, pg 240–41. Emphasis added.)
This is an important argument. Secondary illusions are intangible, deriving from a different order of existence than the primary, somatic experience. They intersect with the primary illusion and enhance the “livingness” of the artwork, creating an epistemological depth that transcends the immediate sensory experience. In a sense, secondary illusions are essential for art’s capacity to symbolize the many-dimensional nature of human experience, allowing it to communicate not just emotionally or physically, but intellectually, spiritually, and culturally.
Importantly, Langer points out that these secondary illusions depend on the coherence of the primary illusion. When the primary illusion is disrupted or flattened — as happens in modern music production — the secondary illusion cannot fully manifest. This is significant because the secondary illusion is what enables art to express something beyond its own materiality: it allows music, architecture, drama, and other forms to symbolize not only emotional and sensory experiences, but intellectual, cultural, and existential dimensions of human life.
The inability of secondary illusions to manifest can be seen in the narrowing of our political imagination. Just as the flattening of secondary illusions in art strips away its symbolic richness, so too does this flattening extend to our collective ability to imagine new political and cultural possibilities. As the 21st century has progressed, our capacity to envision and enact policies that foster open communication, human connection, and cultural flourishing has been severely diminished. The flattening of symbolic richness in art mirrors the flattening of our collective capacity to imagine and enact new possibilities for the future.
The infamous phrase, ‘I can imagine the end of the world more easily than the end of capitalism,’ speaks directly to this flattening of imagination and culture. This phrase, attributed to both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, captures the sense that our capacity to envision alternative futures has been severely compromised, if not entirely subverted. This is the secret sauce of Neoliberalism — it thrives on limiting our capacity to imagine alternatives, thus reinforcing its own dominance.
Now, in the double bind of our era, the rise of algorithms that mediate the music we are served ensures that our siloed, griddified lives remain unthreatened by artistic expressions that could manifest secondary illusions — those deeper layers of meaning that arise from the primary embodied experiences. Instead, we are either fed content that perfectly aligns with our established views or content that directly conflicts with them, fostering division. What is missing is the tangential — the art that bends the grid, reshapes it, and offers a more accurate reflection of our lived reality — Dilla Time.
These artistic expressions, which could offer new ways of seeing, feeling, or thinking, are marginalized because they threaten the aestheticized, commodified, polarized world we inhabit. Anything that might inspire pause, reflection, or wonder — anything that could break the cycle — is intentionally bypassed by the algorithm, ensuring that we remain locked within the confines of a grid that dictates not just our music but our very perceptions of the world. This algorithmic filtering not only limits what we consume but also shapes what is produced, narrowing the possibilities for art to push beyond the grid and challenge our worldview.
The rise of AI-generated music (and all AI-generated content) is the inevitable outcome of changes in the recording process that began with the release of Livin’ La Vida Loca. It follows the trajectory set in motion by the widespread use of DAWs like Pro Tools. The griddification of music — not only the breaking of music into isolated, perfectly aligned fragments, but also the disconnection of musicians, who often record separately and never meet — has atomized, detemporalized, and decontextualized the creative process. Music production has shifted from being a dynamic, organic interaction — where musicians fed off each other’s energy and spontaneity — to a mechanical assembly of isolated parts, perfectly instrumentalized and optimized for efficiency. In this sense, AI-generated music is merely the culmination of a process that has long been eroding the complexity, nuance, and embodied experience that once defined music. In this context, secondary illusions — the symbolic depth that transcends the primary, embodied experience and offers the most radical potential for transformation and understanding — no longer stand a chance.
For modern AI music firms, this is their dream world: a world completely aestheticized, wholly bereft of symbolism, and entrenched in a political order that values utility and consumption over depth and meaning. In this landscape, art is no longer a vehicle for exploring the complexities of human experience but has instead become a mechanical, commodified product, tailored to pre-existing taste profiles and optimized for engagement metrics that fuel algorithmic control. In this world, art’s capacity to symbolize something larger, to connect us with existential or metaphysical truths, and to reflect the depth of human experience is completly annihilated.
It is within this carefully constructed milieu that we find ourselves in Red vs. Blue America — a landscape born from the very cultural artifacts colonized by griddification, and now more than ever, by AI. This is a system of perfect control, where the diametrically opposed political identities of red and blue are not just predictable but entirely manageable, and therefore completely knowable. It’s a delta-hedged system, designed to eliminate any genuine risk of disruption. The algorithms and AI that mediate every facet of our daily lives ensure a risk-neutral environment, perpetuating this captured division and maintaining absolute control. In this fully monetized system, friction, struggle, the tragic, the weird, the awful, and the heart-stopping beauty of life — all those vital elements that make us human — are systematically eradicated. We have entered a society of control, where the possibility of genuine risk, the kind that sparks creation and drives human expression and knowledge, has been neutralized by the all-seeing algorithms, leaving us trapped in a hall of mirrors, endlessly reflecting back on ourselves, with no way out.
The Necessity of Mystery in an Aestheticized World
But we
who need great mysteries, we, whose grieving is so often
the source of imaginative gains — : could we truly live without
them?
Is that legend no help, telling how once during the lament for
Linos
a daring primal music cut through thickened apathy;
and a youth near to being a god suddenly and forever
stepped away from bewildered space, an absence turning
into that humming that sweeps us on, comforts, and supports.Rainer Maria Rilke — The First Elegy (Alfred Corn translation, 2021)
We, who need great mysteries — We, the capital ‘W’ We — who thrive on the tragic and transformative beauty that arises from the depths of our human experience, could we truly live without them?
Are we really living?
Rilke’s words at the close of the First Duino Elegy strike at the core of our present condition. The griddification of music and the atomization of its creation process, alongside the complete mediation of our daily lives by algorithms and AI systems, have been informed by data that is wholly decontextualized, detemporalized, and disembodied. These systems are not on the verge of becoming gods, like the daring Linos; rather, they are actively engaged in the suppression and erasure of the very bewilderment and mystery that fuel human becoming.
In this age of relentless explication, we have traded the underlying assets of our existence — mystery, spontaneity, and depth — for a perfectly knowable, wholly aestheticized system of signifiers. Gone is the bewildered space, the humming vibrations that once swept us forward, comforting and supporting us in our unfolding. Those very vibrations, essential to our imaginative and creative becoming, have become kryptonite to the algorithms and AI systems that now dominate our reality. For these systems, novelty, unpredictability, and the beauty and the horror of the unknown are mortal threats to their logic.
What matters now is not where you came from, nor the community that shaped you, but your ability to latch onto pre-packaged signs and symbols, hitching a ride on the capital carousel of bite-sized, monetizable content — the spoils of which are reaped by the architects of algorithms and AI.
No longer do we come together and say: ‘That seems off… wait, that feels great!’ The spaces for those resonant engagements have been consumed by the vacuum of a perfectly knowable, riskless reality. In this world, if you screamed in terror at the sudden realization of this predicament, your cry would already have been captured, catalogued, and erased.
Epilogue
As I wrap up these thoughts, I’m reminded of Tom Waits’ Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis. The song’s performance and lyrics capture the unpredictability, deceit, absurdity, beauty, terror, humor, and all-encompassing bewilderment of the human condition — slightly off, yet intimately relatable. The comments on the YouTube video offer a glimpse into a resonant sphere of shared experience, a space that is rapidly flattening in the algorithmically curated world we now inhabit.
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