Boy George Lorne Thomson/Redferns Boy George has spent more than four decades singing “Karma Chameleon.” What he hasn’t spent four decades doing, he says, is controlling it.
The Culture Club frontman is launching a new venture called Artists Included that aims to give legacy artists a way to reclaim ownership of their biggest songs through AI-assisted re-recordings. The company’s first release, unveiled Monday, is a newly recorded version of “Karma Chameleon” that uses artificial intelligence to recreate George’s 22-year-old voice while preserving a performance recorded today.
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“It’s hard to get excited about something that you don’t control,” George tells The Hollywood Reporter. “This gives me an opportunity, not just me, but other artists, to have a different relationship with those songs.”
The project arrives as the music industry continues to wrestle with AI’s implications. Labels have spent the last two years battling unauthorized voice cloning and generative music startups. George and his longtime manager Paul Kemsley, better known as PK, are attempting to flip that narrative. Their pitch is simple: What if AI could help artists reclaim value rather than strip it away?
According to Kemsley, the idea emerged after a major licensing deal involving “Karma Chameleon” highlighted how little control many legacy artists retain over their signature hits. Kemsley says a Virgin anniversary campaign licensed the song for roughly $4 million over multiple uses, with the money flowing to the owners of the master recording and publishing rights rather than to George himself.
“Four million changed hands,” Kemsley says. “George didn’t get anything at all.”
The experience became the catalyst for Artists Included. Rather than pursue a traditional re-recording, George and Kemsley began exploring whether AI could recreate the singer’s original 1983 vocal closely enough to compete for future sync licensing opportunities.
“When I heard it, I was absolutely gobsmacked,” George says of the finished track. “It sounds like another take from that original session.”
The company insists its approach differs from the kind of synthetic voice generation that has drawn criticism from artists and labels.
George recorded a new vocal performance, which was then processed using an AI model trained on archival recordings and materials associated with his own voice. The result, they say, is not an AI-generated Boy George performance but a new performance by Boy George filtered through technology designed to recreate the sound of his younger self.
For George, the appeal goes beyond ownership. Hearing the song again, he says, felt like revisiting a younger version of himself without losing the perspective that comes from age and experience.
“It has the sound of me at 22 years old with all the experience of everything that I’ve learned,” he says.
Kemsley describes the effort as an evolution of the strategy popularized by Taylor Swift’s re-recording campaign, though one powered by technology rather than simple recreation.
“If AI is used correctly, it can return value to the original creators,” he says.
Whether the model works as cleanly as Taylor Swift’s re-recording strategy remains an open question. Swift’s “Taylor’s Version” releases are clearly new copyrighted works that she owns outright. AI-assisted re-recordings exist in a less settled legal landscape. Artists Included contends its tracks are fundamentally human creations, built from new performances by the original artists, but courts are still wrestling with where human authorship ends and AI begins, leaving open questions about who ultimately owns these works and how far they can go in competing with the original recordings.
Artists Included plans to court other heritage acts whose most valuable recordings remain controlled by record companies. Kemsley points to artists from the 1980s and 1990s as particularly fertile ground, arguing that many no longer own the masters behind their biggest hits.
Whether labels embrace that vision remains to be seen. The legal landscape surrounding AI-generated music remains unsettled, and questions about copyright, ownership and licensing continue to ripple through the industry. But George, who says he already uses AI as a creative tool in his writing, sees little value in resisting a technology that is rapidly reshaping the entertainment business.
“I’m not frightened of it,” he says. “You still need imagination. You still need an idea. You still need a desired outcome.”
For now, the experiment begins with the song that changed his life. When “Karma Chameleon” was first presented to the rest of Culture Club, George recalls, the reaction was less than enthusiastic.
“They all laughed at me,” he says. “I kept saying, ‘This is a Number One record.'”
The singer spoke with THR about turning 65 (his birthday was yesterday), discovering that children still know every word to “Karma Chameleon” and why he remains just as baffled by the song’s famous riverboat video as everyone else.
You said hearing the finished version of “Karma Chameleon” was emotional. What was your reaction?
I was absolutely gobsmacked. When we first discussed doing this, I thought it would never work. But when I heard it, it sounded like another take from that original session. It has the sound of me at 22 years old with all the experience of everything I’ve learned since then.
Did you always know “Karma Chameleon” was going to be a hit?
Completely. The rest of the band thought it was terrible. I took a cassette of it to Egypt with me and played it all the time while I was on holiday. I just knew it was going to be Number One. They resisted putting it on the album. I had to threaten to leave about 30 times.
Where did the title come from?
I was obsessed with Bowie and T. Rex. They always had these amazing song titles. “Moonage Daydream.” “Drive-In Saturday.” I knew you needed a great title. “Karma Chameleon” came first and then I built the song around it. Most of my songs back then were really diary entries.
Forty years later, are you surprised people are still discovering it?
Completely. Mothers come up to me and say their four-year-old loves the song. I always think, really? It has a life of its own now.
You said the song was inspired by your relationship with Culture Club drummer Jon Moss. Was that obvious to people at the time?
Not really. Most of my songs were about what was happening in my personal life, but in the ’80s everything was wrapped up in metaphor and subtext.
The “Karma Chameleon” video is iconic. Whose idea was the riverboat?
If you can explain that to me, I’d be very happy. Looking back, it was kind of like Bridgerton before Bridgerton. That’s probably the closest explanation I’ve got. Everybody else is in period costume and I’m dressed like some alien who’s landed in the middle of a Gone With the Wind scenario. It’s so funny. That was very typical back then. The songs were often very personal, so you didn’t want to make a video literally about what they were about. Everything became abstract and metaphorical.
How do you feel about turning 65?
I couldn’t give a shit. I actually enjoy being older. When I was a kid, I hated being a kid. I always wanted to be an adult because it meant being in control of my own life.
A lot of artists are nervous about AI. You’re not. Why?
Because I don’t think there’s any point panicking about new things. I use AI myself when I’m writing. You still need imagination. You still need an idea. You still need a desired outcome. It’s a tool.
If you could give one piece of advice to younger artists, what would it be?
Keep everything. Demos, recordings, scraps of ideas, notebooks. Become the curator of your own life. You never know what’s going to be useful 40 years from now.
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