W.A.S.P.'s BLACKIE LAWLESS On A.I.-Powered Music Creation: 'It's Not Gonna Affect Me'

During a VIP question-and-answer session before W.A.S.P.'s September 20 concert at the House Of Blues in Houston, Texas, W.A.S.P. frontman Blackie Lawless weighed in on a debate about people using an A.I. (artificial intelligence) music generator as a tool to create melodies, harmonies and rhymes based on artificial intelligence (A.I.) algorithms and machine learning (M.L.) models. Blackie said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): " It's not gonna affect me. I really don't know, to tell you the truth. Remember Y2K [widespread panic in the late 1990s that the turn of the millennium would cause global computer crashes, infrastructure failures, and societal collapse]? After all was said and done, more was said than done… Well, I mean, there's a place for [A.I.], I'm sure. But we'll see. I'm not particularly excited about it one way or the other. If it becomes a tool that helps people, then so be it."

Lawless continued: "You know what it's all about?! If you listen to a rock station or a country western station, the songs ain't that different. What is different is the people doing 'em. A.I. can't do that. At least not yet. If it gets to a point where it can think like an individual and stuff like that, then you're just gonna have another really potentially — I wouldn't say human, but at least an individual making records. So how many of those would be able to make something worth listening to? I don't know. So we'll cross that bridge [when we come to it]."

Addressing the fact that the Recording Industry Association of America, representing the three major labels, initiated legal action against various A.I. music companies for copyright infringement, alleging they had trained their A.I. platforms on the labels' artists without their permission, Blackie said: ""This is going to be, how do you prove it? It's gonna be difficult. But the lawyers for the record companies were asleep at the wheel when the Internet was being developed, and I think they've learned their lesson now, and certainly publishers have. If you look at a publishing agreement — I have a couple of things from, THE BEATLES from the early '60s, and the publishing agreements were embryonic for the time. I mean, they were really pretty minute by comparison that you would see today. And I remember when we signed our first contract with Capitol, EMI, it said, 'For any now known sources or unknown sources in other galaxies.' And I looked at that, and I thought it was a joke. And I [said], 'Hey, this is real funny.' And they were not laughing, because they had learned their lesson when it happened. STEELY DAN went back to Warner Brothers in the early '80s and said, 'You know what? You have our records from '70s, and it says for albums and cassettes. Didn't say anything about CDs.' And they sued Warner Brothers. They literally were able to rewrite their contract. Every other band could [do the same thing] that. THE BEATLES waited till last, and Capitol and EMI both were shoveling records out the back door, records they never got paid for. THE BEATLES knew. And they said, 'Okay, you wanna do business with us? Let's talk.' So it ended up being the kind of thing that there was some revenge involved, but by the time we came along, the record companies had become very hip to that, and they thought, 'Never again are we literally gonna get caught with our pants down' — until the Internet came along... But they were able to survive."

W.A.S.P. kicked off the "1984 To Headless" 2026 U.S. and Canada tour with KK'S PRIEST on September 10 at The Magnolia in El Cajon, California. The 17-song setlist from the Lawless-fronted outfit consisted mostly of songs from W.A.S.P.'s first four albums — 1984's "W.A.S.P.", 1985's "The Last Command", 1986's "Inside The Electric Circus" and 1989's "The Headless Children" — opening with URIAH HEEP's "Easy Livin'", a song W.A.S.P. covered on "Inside The Electric Circus" but had never performed live. Blackie and his bandmates also played "Mr. Cool", a song that originally appeared on a demo from Lawless's pre-W.A.S.P. band SISTER, which later evolved into the track "Cries In The Night" from "The Last Command".

W.A.S.P. is again offering fans VIP tickets that give fans a chance to meet Blackie, get a personal photo with Blackie, autographs, a W.A.S.P. traveling museum with new items added since the last U.S. tour, and take part in a very personal Q&A with Blackie. VIP tickets can be purchased at waspnation.myshopify.com.

W.A.S.P. will take the "1984 To Headless" tour to Europe and the rest of the world in 2027.