Hip-Hop's Stars Have Normalized "New" Songs With Dead Music Icons

The use of artificial intelegenice in music creation continues to be a hottly debated topic, but it doesn't seem to be going away. Last year, Drake turned to the machines to deepfake the voice of Tupac in an attempt to diss Kendrick Lamar. The machines fired back with "BBL Drizzy," the first AI-generated song to recieve a sample clearance. Metro Boomin', the creator of the "BBL Drizzy" beat, apparently didn't know the voice on the track was AI-generated, which is concerning due to the legal precedent he's now set.

Maybe Young Guru, Jay-Z's personal sound engineer, was right when we spoke to him in 2023 about criticism he leveled at his peer Timbaland for promoting an AI-assisted program that he intended would allow anyone with a mic to produce a song featuring the voices of dead rappers like The Notorious B.I.G.

Between artificially generated songs and music videos, the real troubling (and frankly, pointless) A.I. era of music creation has added chapter after chapter to a saga that can't end soon enough.

As if making music by and for robots wasn't enough, artificial intelligence's early infiltration of the music industry through Over The Bridge was a sign of things to come. The Toronto-based non-profit "fed" Google's Magenta A.I. program the songs of deceased music icons to bring attention to mental health discussions within the music community by having it create new compositions by artists who very publically struggled with depression and substance dependency. Because nothing pays tribute to an artist or their legacy like suggesting they could be replaced by a computer program. The product of this "feeding" was a four-track EP called Lost Tapes of The 27 Club, which features A.I.-generated songs in the keys of Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse, Nirvana and The Doors.

"We took 20 to 30 songs from each of our artists as MIDI files and broke them down to just the hook, solo, vocal melody or rhythm guitar and put those through one at a time," says Sean O'Connor, a board member of Over The Bridge, in an interview with Rolling Stone. "If you put whole songs through, Magenta starts to get really confused on what [the song is] supposed to sound like. But if you just have a bunch of riffs, it’ll put out about five minutes of new AI-written riffs, 90% of which is really bad and unlistenable," O'Connor admits, sparking hope that we may still be a few years out from a total A.I. takeover.

Since the original April 2021 publishing of this story, Lost Tapes of the 27 Club has been removed from Spotify.