JUNE 2026 SULLYGRAM: Who needs a calendar? Not plants. The lilacs that suddenly bloomed halfway around my house know what season it is. Not animals. The crazed bird that attacks his fantasized rival reflected in my windows knows estrus is in the air.

Does any month offer more sensory stuff than June? Pheromones, scent trails, hormonal aggression, riots of color all taking the stage…and songs. Trills, warbles, hums – every feathered flyer has its solo genre, every nocturnal gnat its johnny-one-note pitch for midnight passion. We humans, of course, access romance full senses five. Enough of black-and-white vistas our souls cry out at winter’s end. We want to go Technicolor as if we just entered Oz, get drugged by poppies, disinter sweet memories of our awakening to youthful desire and its rush of associations. The nuances are subtle. Maybe we re-discover whistling, go rogue on red roses, switch ice cream flavors to something as tangy as oranges or lemons or strawberries. Do haunting fragments of old songs come back to you, seminal songs from a time when you didn’t really listen to how dumb the lyrics were? You just felt them, right? What good is entertainment if it stays in your head and never reaches your heart?

Entertainment is emotions. Even if the entertainment delivers something substantive, we lick the frosting off the cake to get to it. Without that sugar high, intellectual content has the status of a flavorless vitamin pill. Thus, the medium may become more meaningful than the message. Which explains those mostly mindless lyrics. A young Fats Domino singin’, “Monday we were married on Blueberry Hill/now we’s so happy and I love her still!” A whole week gone by, and he loves her STILL – but who’s counting? I cherish it all, music now or echoing out of the past.

But what happens when that emotional medium turns the reigns over to a rational creator like AI? Humans handing off to pseudo humans. Can something built on rational integers resonate the emotional idioms and irrationalities of the mortal heart, the wordless human psyche? There are only 52 cards in a deck, and most creativity is simply an imaginative reshuffling. But then along comes AI, and instead of one deck, it shuffles many decks like an infinite shoe in Las Vegas. Do those dumb lyrics, so essential to feeling, get lost in the shuffle, so to speak? Methinks AI is already capturing the whole tamale. And it does so by not exposing the secret ingredients, avoiding putting too fine a point on content, the same way human emotions do.

Value judgment words, ambiguities, ambivalences – these are the slippery elements that enable broad audience identification to fill in the blanks. The technique is to never get too specific. If you do, you start to pare down the audience who can relate. It happens in other arts too, and in everyday persuasions across media and culture. Word vehicles such as books, movies, theatre, poetry, political speeches, dog and pony interviews, agenda-driven journalism all use the same trick – one size fits all feelings. Be it politics, love, or the hue and cry of the underdog, everyone can identify with emotions sans details. And so that’s what you pitch.

When I started posting vaguely analytical squibs about music years ago on FB, that was my main observation: the universality of lyrics. The more portable the lyrics, the greater the chance of charting a hit, especially to an audience of contrasting or conflicting themes, narratives and interpretations. But can AI dance that tightrope of generalities and emotions? Can it distill feelings like songs do? Why not? “Tune out…if it feels good, do it,” found instant gratification through songs in the 60s, regardless of bumping into the hard truths of a competitive world. The cultural expressions of emotion need not take it that far, and AI has already figured that out. Start with the emotion, make it a given, a premise, an assumption, and everyone’s truth will seem to go along for the ride. So, I’ll repeat my question. Can AI perform that presto-chango legerdemain of all-purpose emotions bridging to ambiguous causes? Exhibit One: the musical link I’m including at the end of this Sullygram is a prime example of what is currently emerging.

“For the Brave” is a happening, a social event reminiscent of the 60s. Self-righteous tropes of “justice,” “empathic togetherness,” and “morality” are especially applicable to the rebellion and idealism of youth that sees itself as martyred and suppressed. No matter the surrogates used for kicking over traces, any political stripe or relationship can find itself in value judgment language. Seductive and nebulous, AI generalities can sell twitterpated romance, balm for sour relationships, or pure counter-culture venom. The thumb on the scale may be attached to the left hand historically, just because our culture is weighted so far to the Left with music, media, TV, the Internet, education, journalism, Hollywood and those patterns and associations that came to dominance in the decades after the 60s. But the full political spectrum will use the same AI savvy to put their individual slant across. Let me dare to offer a couple of contrasting paragraphs to illustrate the kind of wall-to-wall content that fits under the same generalities of feelings in the lyrics of the song. Bear in mind, please, it’s not the content of my examples that matters; your lists might well be different. The one-size-fits-all universality of lyrics is the point.

For the Left… Empathy – check! Compassion – check! Overthrow the greed that underwrites all inequality, slay the sacred cows of holier than thou achievers, lower standards that keep people from doing and being anything they want. It takes a village. Big Tent. Up with people. Let the caring elite run the world until everything heals. Results run second to good intentions because what really matters is that you play the game with tolerance and good will…except for violence in the name of social justice (“any means to an ends,” The Communist Manifesto of 1848).    

For the Right… Restore the meritocracy – check! Keep society from going off the rails – check! Halt the sheer lunacy of re-defining fundamentals such as gender, crime, national borders – check! Stop the Left from undermining standards and filling the vacuum with charades, fraud and corruption. Protect the young and gullible from toxic Kool-Aid. Teach thinking skills instead of indoctrinating with dogma. Celebrate hard work, perseverance and high expectations as opposed to the instant gratification and addiction to orchestrated warm fuzzy mobs with Tower of Babel advocacies.

Again, your politics may or may not be part of my two illustrations. AI will bypass specifics and turbo-charge emotions of any mix. In a somewhat ominous fashion, "For the Brave" calls to mind the dystopian ring of another long-ago sea changer that had cultural impact...the 1932 novel by Aldous Huxley "Brave New World." https://www.facebook.com/reel/26269939699277618  .

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan