Le Journal

Worth a staggering $2.45bn, Suno is an AI music company that can create a track with just a few prompts. Why is its CEO happy to see it called ‘the Ozempic of the music industry’?‘The format of the future,” says Mikey Shulman, “is music you play with, not just play.” As the CEO and co-founder of the generative AI music company Suno, Shulman currently finds himself in the exhilarating if perhaps unenviable position of being simultaneously regarded as the architect of music’s future – and its executioner.Suno, which was founded just over two years ago, allows users to create entire songs with just a few text prompts. At the moment, you can’t prompt it with the name of a specific pop star, but asking for “stadium-level confessional pop-country” that “references past relationships” or “public rivalries” might get you a Taylor Swift-style song or thereabouts. Continue reading...

‘I wanted Kid ’n Play but the studio said, “Who are these guys?” I replied, “They’ve got platinum records.” I had no idea if they did’Black music videos weren’t played on MTV in the late 80s. So while I was still at Harvard, I’d make music videos in my head. One day, while listening to Bad Boy/Having a Party by Luther Vandross, I thought: “This could be a great music video or movie.” And I sat down that night and wrote a script for a short film that ended up not only being made but shown at festivals and becoming a big hit in the world of student films. Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It had piqued interest in up-and-coming black film-makers. New Line Cinema saw my short and brought me in for a meeting. I pitched an expanded version of my idea and they said: “Let’s do it.” Continue reading...

Fear, abuse and eroding rights for trans people have created a hostile environment in the US – can they claim asylum in the Netherlands?The transgender refugees fleeing the US – podcastTer Apel, a small, unassuming Dutch town near the German border, is a place tourists rarely have on their itinerary. There are no lovely old windmills, no cannabis-filled coffee shops and on a recent visit it was far too early for tulip season.When foreigners end up there, it is for one reason: to claim asylum at the Netherlands’ biggest refugee camp, home to 2,000 desperate people from all around the world. Continue reading...

This shocking moment is the outcome of a political, institutional and media environment that is not far off Britain’sThere is not much that can still shock about Donald Trump’s second administration. But the killing of Renee Good earlier this month by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer, as well as the regular, often violent confrontations that ICE stages on US streets, show so much that is unravelling in plain sight. The rule of law, the freedom to protest, and even the right to walk or drive in the streets safely without being assaulted by the state, seems to exist no longer in the towns and cities where ICE has made its presence felt. The most disturbing aspect of all this is how quickly it has happened. But for a government agency such as ICE to become the powerful paramilitary force that it is, several factors need to be in play first. Only one of them is Donald Trump.ICE may look as if it came out of nowhere, but the sort of authoritarianism that results in these crackdowns never does. It takes shape slowly, in plain sight, in a way that is clearly traceable over time. First, there needs to be a merging of immigration and security concerns, both institutionally and in the political culture. Established in the wake of 9/11, ICE was part of a government restructuring under President George W Bush. It was granted a large budget, wide investigative powers and a partnership with the FBI’s joint terrorism taskforce. The work of enforcing immigration law became inextricably linked to the business of keeping Americans safe after the largest attack on US soil. That then extended into a wider emphasis, under Barack Obama, beyond those who posed national security threats, and on to immigrants apprehended at the border, gang members and non-citizens convicted of felonies or misdemeanours.Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...