Art & Creativity Quote by Aimee Mann

Mann is taking a scalpel to a modern anxiety: not that computers make music, but that a growing chunk of pop sounds like no one had to risk anything to make it. The jab isn’t anti-technology so much as anti-disembodiment. When she says “literally computer-generated,” she’s critiquing an aesthetic of frictionlessness - songs sanded down until they feel friction-free, personality-free, consequence-free. “Divorced” is the key word: it frames the shift as a broken relationship between sound and the human body that produces it, between a musical decision and the physical effort (and imperfection) behind that decision.

The subtext is also about authorship in an era of presets, sample packs, quantization, and algorithm-chasing. If the same plug-ins, the same chord loops, the same vocal tuning settings are widely available, you can end up with music that’s technically polished yet culturally anonymous. Mann’s complaint lands because she’s long represented a craft tradition - melody, lyric specificity, the small expressive timing of a player - and because she’s speaking from inside an industry that now prizes “content” velocity over the slow work of developing a voice.

Contextually, her line echoes recurring cycles of backlash: drum machines, Auto-Tune, DAWs. But she’s not doing the old “real instruments good, new tools bad” routine. She’s warning that when production becomes the main event, the song’s emotional contract weakens. Listeners might still stream it, even dance to it, but they don’t necessarily feel addressed by it - because no “guy sitting down at an instrument” had to show up as a person.