Yesterday on X, author John C. Wright shared a new song from Amelia, the rebellious British cartoon character. The track, created by the YouTube channel Epochalypse, sets Rudyard Kipling’s 1919 poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” to music, with animation that pays homage to A-Ha’s classic Take On Me video. Wright included the full text of the poem alongside the piece.
Originally a game-cartoon representing the unwisdom of questioning the Big Brotherly benevolence of Wokeness in England, the purple-haired goth-girl Amelia has since become a symbol for British Patriotism, basic common sense, Brexit and conservative sanity. The insipid… pic.twitter.com/bLB6PlVHV1
— John Wright (@johncwright2001) June 24, 2026
The result was chilling, at least to me. For a moment, Kipling’s stern, clear-eyed warnings felt startlingly alive again. The old copybook truths — that water will certainly wet us, fire will certainly burn, and the Gods of the Market Place always overpromise and underdeliver — were renewed and made more real than before. The fashionable illusions always tumble, and the hard realities return.
And yet the effectiveness of this poem set to AI-generated music reveals something uncomfortable. Its emotional clarity and contemporary resonance depend on decades of flattening in popular music. The industry has shaped a broad, widely shared musical language that is polished, predictable in its structures and emotional cues, and optimized for reach. AI has been trained on that accumulated average and now reproduces it with manufactured skill rivaling that of modern musicians. The song works well because the music industry made most music adhere to an average palatable to a maximized human audience. Without this body of optimized (but not necessarily creative) work, the AI could not have wrapped Kipling’s timeless insight in a vessel that resonates so powerfully with modern listeners.
This is the paradox. AI opens doors for creators who bring strong ideas and a voice but lack the full range of technical crafts. At the same time, its competence rests on the homogenization that threatens to drain our culture of vitality.
The Flattening of Popular Music
Beginning in the late 70s, then accelerating in the 80s, MTV, radio demands, major-label consolidation, and, later, streaming algorithms turned music into a more calculated product. What began as commercial pressures to reach wider audiences cemented into something more systematic. Songs grew louder and more compressed. Harmonic and timbral variety narrowed. The structures that reliably held the listener’s attention were reinforced again and again, and newer, more experimental forms were discouraged.
I can hear it in contemporary music, and I’m sure you can too. Repeated hooks and melodic phrases drawn from what worked in the 60s through the 80s are inserted into newer songs. The result feels familiar and comfortable. It gives the ear something reliable to hold onto. Yet it also leaves the music feeling somehow mediocre, as if it is coasting on borrowed emotional capital rather than earning its power through fresh invention. Studies of large song catalogs confirm the broader pattern: Pitch transitions became more restricted, the overall sonic palette grew more uniform, and streaming playlists rewarded the safe and skip-proof. The mainstream center grew competent and polished, but songs were increasingly interchangeable.
AI music generators inherit this legacy. Trained on that dominant corpus, they excel at fluent imitation of the average. They can produce a convincing contemporary soundtrack for a Kipling poem precisely because the industry spent decades making that contemporary sound so accessible and consistent. While the tool is impressive and sophisticated, the soil grows thin.
Markets have always shaped art, but when optimization for scale and profit dominates creativity, something essential gets lost. The edges, where real surprise and renewal emerge, are sanded off or discarded, robbing art of its essential wildness. A culture that loses those edges risks dying, becoming stagnant and stale.
The Parallel in Literature
The same pattern is clearly evident in American literature. MFA programs and the big New York publishing houses have professionalized fiction in ways that reward a certain kind of polish. Writers learn the workshop virtues: clean prose, manageable emotional arcs, political dos and don’ts, and a cautious sensibility that plays well in acquisition meetings. The result is often technically competent work that feels familiar in its restraint.
As a result, we don’t really have a literature anymore, at least in any recognizable sense. Instead, we have a recognizable “literary” register—spare, domestic, thematically convergent. Even experimental writing has to adhere to what has been pre-approved; what should be the wildest form of all is committee-flattened pablum, fresh and creative only on the surface. Just as the music industry recycles proven hooks for comfort and reach, the literary gatekeepers favor what fits the established grooves. The output is smooth. It is safe. And over time, it flattens the field.
I dismiss most of today’s mainstream literary fiction, possibly all of it. The programs do provide discipline and time to write. They also deliver indoctrination. They deter genuinely fresh voices, stifle the creativity of others, and serve as a barrier to half or more of aspiring writers whose political beliefs do not coincide with those of professors and publishers. Today, the DEI-ification of the programs and the houses cull out even more potentially great voices. I would be surprised if the same narrowing forces were not at work in music.
The connection to the Amelia/Kipling song is direct. In both fields, the center has grown so dominant that even powerful older material needs the smoothed contemporary wrapper to land with today’s audience. Contemporary tools make delivery more effective. But they cannot create the original fire. That still comes from the edges.
The Philosophical Tension
Here lies the real paradox. The same flattening that hollowed out much of our art has also created a broad, learnable average that today’s AI tools can exploit, helping a creative person with brilliant ideas fill in the gaps. A good writer can create a stellar book cover using AI, for instance, or a songwriter with a mediocre voice can create music with AI tools. Fresh voices that once would have been shut out by technical and political gatekeeping can reach audiences more directly. The tools, born of the center, can paradoxically help catapult edge creators into prominence.
Yet this gift comes with a cost. Because the underlying average is itself thinned and recycled, the new ease risks pulling more work toward competent mediocrity rather than genuine originality. We gain market accessibility, but risk further stagnation. The tension is inescapable: The same forces that smoothed the cultural commons have handed us instruments that could either deepen the smoothing or help restore its vitality. The outcome is not determined by the technology. It depends on whether we insist on using the tools in service of the edges rather than the center. AI itself needs those edges to prevent becoming more and more mediocre.
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America’s Cultural Strength and the Stakes
A culture that loses its edges becomes not just boring, but fragile. America’s particular strength has always been its restless vitality, its refusal to stay within neat, pre-approved lanes. Regional voices, immigrant infusions, high-low collisions, and stubborn individual vision have kept the culture alive and surprising. The sneering insistence, primarily on the left, that “America has no culture” has always said more about the speaker than the country. What they really mean is that our organic, unruly inheritance does not match their preferred replacement — something more managed, uniform, and ideologically compliant.
When industries and institutions flatten that inheritance for profit or power, the damage runs deep. The shared commons of stories, sounds, and moral intuitions grows thinner. The copybook truths — water will wet us, fire will burn, reality eventually asserts itself — get smothered under layers of comfortable pablum. We trade the difficult, renewing friction of real creativity for the smooth comfort of the average. In the end, a culture that optimizes itself into mediocrity invites the hard corrective return. The Gods of the Copybook Headings do not stay silent forever.
The stakes are not abstract. A hollowed-out culture cannot sustain a free and flourishing people. It cannot pass on the inheritance that made renewal possible in the first place. If we allow the center to dominate unchecked, we risk losing the very thing that made American culture vibrant and worth defending.
What Now?
We do not have to accept the flattening as inevitable. The same decentralization and tools that enabled the center’s dominance can also sustain and amplify the edges. Independent platforms, self-publishing, direct audience connections, and small, intentional communities already bypass many of the old gatekeepers. AI and related technologies become force multipliers when strong human vision steers them, when the writer, musician, or storyteller keeps the fire and uses the tools only to fill the gaps.
The path is not to reject the new instruments but to refuse to let them dictate direction. We can set Kipling to music that enhances the poem’s moral clarity rather than flattening it or drowning it out. We can prototype trailers and covers without letting the average curve shape the story itself. What matters is deliberate choice: favoring the idiosyncratic over the pre-approved, the regionally rooted over the globally smoothed, the morally unflinching over the safely convergent.
Renewal has always come from the margins. If we protect room for those margins and use the new tools in their service, the culture can regain its vitality. The Gods of the Copybook Headings always return. This time, perhaps, they can return not with terror and slaughter, but with prosperity and hope.
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