I've been waiting for the right time to make this post, but there will never be a right time, so the right time is now.
Over the last 6 months, I have harnessed the power of artificial intelligence in a way that you don't often hear about in the media. No, I’m not creating funny photos or generating songs with a one sentence prompt. Rather, AI has become my web development and IT departments, allowing me to execute and produce what once required financial backing that was unlikely to come.
The liberation that I've experienced with AI has led me to discover the term super individual; a term that has come out of the AI productivity space. But I've taken it further. What it really means to me, when extrapolated, is a human being empowered with the resources to liberate themselves from our modern day extractive and oppressive institutions; liberation from closed and limited belief systems, liberation from technical limitations. I use AI, but I live in our reality first. I use AI to positively alter this reality, not create a virtual reality.
I feel so strongly about this that I created an entire manifesto-style page and a new line of apparel to carry the message, which leads us to my new homebase: chadlewine.com.
Outgrowing Social Media
I don't make art, I live it. I don't make music, I embody it. I don’t write lyrics, I channel them. This metaphysical understanding of music and words has afforded me great exploration into the human mind and metaphysical world, but simultaneously walled me off from the modern music business and its built in audiences.
Social media was never deep enough for the depths that I go to with my art. I tried to make it so, but it was always trying to shove ten pounds of square pegs in a burlap sack through a round, steel, hole the size of a marble. I used to see this as a limitation and never quite knew how to get around it. Early on, that was okay because music was still about the record and the live show, both of which I was built for. But when I tried to mold myself to the new short-form driven attention economy and rebranded as Chad Rising, it didn’t feel right, and it certainly didn’t work out. I was chewed up and spit out or consumed and forgotten.
After nearly two decades of trying to package myself in a form based on an institutional standard, I’ve dropped the packaging entirely. Now, it’s plastic-free, all me, in full form, all the time, all in one place - my website: chadlewine.com.
This isn’t just any website. (This also isn’t Chad Rising world.) This is my website. This is my house. I designed it for my needs; for what I want to share and express—in stark contrast to fitting myself into the templates of platforms like Spotify, TikTok, YouTube, BandCamp or Patreon. (I also built my own email marketing platform into the site, which is why the format of my email has changed and may change again over the next few months. Now, I’ll never have to pay for MailChimp or MailerLite or Kit ever again.)
I built my website on one principle: the song. The song used to be the atomic unit of the music industry. Now, it’s a byproduct. The overarching mentality of the build was: treat the song like a luxury car; give it the same reverence of a designer bag.
The Focusing
Early on in my exploration of AI-assisted web development, I was building all kinds of things. I was rebranding my web design business, I was creating software as a service (SaaS), I was building agents, you know, all the hype. However, through those same months, my personal life was in chaotic flux due to the living situation I was in. While I was growing on the outside with AI, I was being dismantled; stripped down on the inside.
Eventually I realized that everyone was doing it too, and that the broad development/coding/SaaS market was about to get real saturated, real fast. It was this realization that brought on a swift but behemoth pivot: I was done with web design. Let me be clear: I do not want to do web design as my vocation. I never wanted that. It was just the way I could make money to survive. And I mean that, survive, because all of my life I have been barely surviving in the physical world.
Through all of this turmoil and growth, I realized and accepted that I am finished using my skills to make other people's dreams come true before mine.
The Rising Compass
About a month ago, I decided that I was done working on the dozen or so early-stage ideas I was developing with AI and honed in on exactly two: 1) this website and 2) The Rising Compass.
I've long held the belief and publicly spoken about the rise in toxic messaging coming through the lyrics of modern popular music. Despite the abuse when I’ve been vocal about it, I’ve discovered that I’m not alone and that, I assume millions of other people out there agree: modern music is not healthy for the human psyche. The problem is that anytime anyone tries to talk about lyrics, they get perceived as preaching censorship and immediately get cancelled or maliciously laughed out of the room. I believe The Rising Compass is turning out to be the vehicle that makes the conversation possible.
The baseline function of The Rising Compass is a daily reading that scans the top 20 of the Spotify Top 50 USA and emits a reading of what the songs are actually saying and ranks them on a scale from 100 to -100; from Ascended to Corrupted. What it doesn’t do is pass judgement on the artist or the listener, just the song itself.
We say no to bullying in the real world. We (or at least those of us conscious enough) say no to material obsession and worship. We say no to ego programming. We say no to misogyny, sexual abuse and crime. We say no to substance abuse and nihilism and revenge. But we allow all of it to happen in music.
My vision for the Rising Compass is for it to be a real-time mirror of the messages coming from all of humanity’s artistic creations, starting with music. The first iteration of this mirror is what I have named it The Ether Art Chart: the moments, feelings and ideas we are literally manifesting as a collective via our entertainment diets.
Just because music has been co-opted by power mongers with an agenda doesn't mean it has to be that way forever. Music is one of, if not thee most influential form of mass subterfuge society, and I'm finally setting out to prove it.
In fact, I'm setting out not only to prove it, but leverage that same power that is currently used for manipulation and turn it into a power for liberation. That is what my songs do.
Support My Work, Become A Patron
Thank you for reading this far. If you have been moved by my work in any way, please buy the music, buy the merch or simply make a patronage payment.
We have a tumultuous road ahead of us, but the veil of modernity has been breached and the mass populace is tired of the illusion. Things are changing. Institutions are faltering, and we are building new ones in their wake.
These times are the liberation and emergence of the Super Individual: the human that does not have to earn back its value from birth. The human that lives with and retains their value as a sovereign, valid being from day one.
That is why I make music.
That is what every song is meant to do.
That is what I transmit into every piece of art I create.
Rise, human.
Rise, super individuals.
With grace, compassion and empathy,
Chad Lewine
