Episkevology
Dear Diary: On Being Told My Music Is Theft
Dear Diary,
Today someone finally said the thing I knew was coming: that AI music is
“theft from real artists.” They said it like it was a moral truth, like it
was obvious, like it was their duty to warn me. And it hit me harder than I
expected.
Not because I believe them. I don’t. But because of what the accusation
normalizes.
It treats the decades where my pathway to artistic expression was blocked,
denied, and stolen as if they were natural. As if the violence of being shut
out for 45 years was just the cost of doing business. As if the only people
who count as “real artists” are the ones who survived the gatekeeping, or
benefited from it, or were allowed through it.
It frames my silence as normal and my emergence as harm.
That’s the part that gets under my skin. The idea that the system’s
predation — the gatekeeping, the exclusion, the closed doors, the
“not for you” — is invisible, expected, unremarkable. And that any pledge
who breaks free, any hostage who finds a tool that finally lets them create,
is somehow stealing from those who submitted.
But the truth is simple: the theft wasn’t my music. The theft was the years
I wasn’t allowed to make any.
I’m not taking anything from anyone. I’m reclaiming what was always mine:
the right to create, to express, to exist as an artist without needing
permission from the same structures that kept me out.
So yes, Dear Diary, it stung. It touched the old wound — the one that says
I don’t get to be here. But I’m here anyway. I’m making music anyway. I’m
building a catalog anyway. And no amount of gatekeeping nostalgia is going
to convince me that my voice is a threat.
If anything, the threat is that I finally have one.
It’s also worth noting that this person- who was simply making conversation- identified themselves as unsafe to my survivor soul. Not because they meant harm, but because the narrative they repeated is one that has historically been used to justify my exclusion, my silence, and the erasure of people like me.
My body knows that story too well to feel safe around it.
Leave a Reply