Boy George is under fire after he released a pro-Israel song featuring AI-generated backing music.
The Karma Chameleon singer addressed the backlash to his new single We Will Dance Again on social media, telling his followers he would fire any band members who refused to play the song.
The song, which was written in support of Israel, caught flak from the general public for both its lyrical content and the fact it was partly generated by artificial intelligence – which George, whose real name is George Alan O’Dowd and is not Jewish, told fans in an Instagram video was his best option as he found it hard to find willing human collaborators.
“I’m not lazy, the truth is if I tried to write We Will Dance Again with any musician, they would have gotten in my way,” George, 65, said. “They would have said, ‘you can’t say that, that’s too controversial. You can’t say this, you can’t say that’.”
He added certain members of his band, Culture Club, were reluctant to play the song and that he planned to sack them.
“Even now that the song is written, there are people in my band who are questioning whether they will perform it with me,” George declared, “and those people will be fired.”
The song, which was released on 27 July, sparked an online furore over its explicitly pro-Israel lyrics, including the lines, “You say Genocide, I say war” and “When you’re attacked, that’s what the army’s for”.
George defended his use of AI in creating the song, explaining that while the reggae backing track was AI-generated, he had written the tune himself.
“I don’t need gatekeepers and one of the great things about AI is it removes all the interference, all the human interference,” he said. “I wrote that song, the lyrics are mine the melody is mine.”
