Rap music—an art form that turned fifty this year despite being pronounced dead many times over—supposedly died again on April 19, amid the ongoing contest of champions between Compton and Toronto’s respective favorite sons. The culprit was Drake (who, depending on who you ask, has committed this crime several times before). The murder weapon was “Taylor Made Freestyle,” a goofy and clunky but conceptually brilliant Kendrick Lamar diss in which Drake used AI as a literary device, borrowing the voices of both 2Pac and Snoop Dogg to “coach” Kendrick for nearly four minutes.
A wave of alarmist, reactionary soothsaying followed immediately. The arguments: That the diss was dirty pool. That Drake had released a malevolent genie from its lamp, helping normalize AI robbing dead (or living) artists of all control over their art, their brand, their very souls. That an AI diss will eventually get someone killed. That AI threatens the fabric of reality. That the “Taylor Made Freestyle” will inevitably become sentient and produce an army of mimetic polyalloy skeleton soldiers to travel back in time and wipe out humanity's last hope.
I’m of course intentionally being dickishly flippant about these raised points, because I thought “Taylor Made” was a decent bit, and because you’re ostensibly reading this for entertainment. Concerns about the ethics of AI manipulation in art, and the dark future they portend, are absolutely valid. AI will inevitably reshape our relationship with all art, not just rap. It’s already reshaped rap. When Drake dropped “Push Ups”, a “conventional” (and, if you ask me, masterful) response record to seemingly every rapper he’d ever collaborated with turning against him, there was a long beat of indecision online, as everyone debated whether the song was really by Drake or a talented digital forger. This was followed by an actual AI diss track from Sy the Rapper fronting as Kendrick Lamar. This is a new kind of conversation—an insecurity injected into the way we receive music.
After the Sy the Rapper drop, many critics and fans suggested that in the future, rappers will be able to release tracks, gauge response, and then disown the work as AI if it doesn’t hit. This will probably become a next-generation version of the old “I was hacked” excuse, and most listeners will be able to suss out the truth– but it will almost certainly be a thing that keeps happening. There are also ethical questions around the usage and misappropriation of voices, particularly when it comes to the rights of the dead. It almost, sort of, resembles the conversation that took place around sampling, before that practice was regulated and licensing opened up new revenue streams for artists. Notwithstanding the legal pushback on “Taylor Made” (Drake pulled it from his Instagram feed after a threat from Tupac’s estate, although it remains available everywhere else) it’s likely that, very soon, licensing a voice will be like licensing a sample of a song, as it should be.
The point is, all this is moving very quickly, over constantly-shifting terrain. Much better critics than me have maturely and soberly addressed many of these concerns at length, and you should go read them if that’s the extent you’re interested in discussing the AI-in-rap issue. Regardless of how we feel about AI, it’s not just coming—it’s already here. And we might as well begin to consider what its normalized and refined utility in rap music could look like.
One relatively recent technological innovation that “threatened” hip hop was Auto-Tune, a pitch-correction plug-in for digital audio that, when deliberately misapplied for aesthetic effect, changed the nature of our relationship to rappers’ voices. T-Pain exploded onto the scene in 2006 as a hook assassin and artist in his own right by abusing the tech popularized by Cher on her hit “Believe." He became a mainstay on the charts, inspired an entire generation of impressionists, and defined the sound of pop rap in the late aughts. His rise also prompted a wave of predictable, reactionary takes. Purists dismissed him as a hack and Auto-Tune as a vapid gimmick. (This New York Daily News review of 2008’s Thr33 Ringz is a pretty note-perfect summary of the material critiques the Guardians of Real Hip Hop levelled at Auto-Tune back then).
The resistance culminated with Jay-Z's "D.O.A. (Death of Autotune" in 2009, a song that was received as a searing Rest In Piss eulogy for an unholy fad that was dying the embarrassing and painful death it deserves. What few could have anticipated back then is that Kanye West’s Auto-Tune-heavy 808s & Heartbreak, which was only six months old at the time, would go on to become one of the most sonically influential rap albums of the 2010s. In the hands of artists like Future, who dropped his debut album three years after “Death of Auto-Tune,” the technology would become rap’s next great evolutionary tool—the perfect instrument for our frigid, digital, emotionally detached moment, the sound of ennui filtered through apps on screens.
AI opens broader ethical questions, to be clear, but the historical precedent, the narrative arc, is ancient and universal. A new technology is introduced that threatens to fundamentally alter how music sounds and functions. Artists experiment with it, often clumsily. A new generation grows up with the tech, makes it their own, and incorporates it into their music in fascinating, entirely unpredictable ways.
Imagine: In the future, instead of just calling Drake "his number one fan," Future could jump on the "Stan" beat and write a song as Drake fawning over Future. Or, to move outside the context of this profoundly dumb and boring beef, recall the old Jay-Z song "A Dream," in which Jay raps about speaking with The Notorious B.I.G. in a dream, and then an old Biggie verse cuts in as Biggie’s beyond-the-grave response. Now imagine a version of that song where Jay can actually animate Biggie's voice, and tell himself, as Biggie, the things he wishes and needs to hear from his long-lost friend.
AI has the potential to open previously inconceivable dramaturgical possibilities. It will give rappers the ability to create new narratives, using voices from history and our relationships with them in both predictable and entirely unpredictable ways, creating their own fictions, manipulating heartbreak and catharsis to potentially-revolutionary effect. It will also lower barriers to entry in any number of ways, opening the genre up to talented mimics and marionettes but also to artists with nice pens and shitty voices.
But again, this speculation is ultimately meaningless, because only time—and a new generation of creatives—will tell us how the use of this technology will be refined and mainstreamed in rap. All we know for sure is it’s going to happen. In “Death Of Autotune”, Jay-Z applies a very classically-coded, masculine critique to autotune: That it’s a coward’s crutch, that it’s dehumanizing, that it’s moving us away from the human relationship between artist and audience and forever changing the nature of the art form he loves. It was an accurate and entirely justified teardown. It was also completely irrelevant.