In the late 2000s, Lil Wayne was the biggest rapper in the world. But for a guy as creative and groundbreaking as Wayne, being boxed in by antiquated notions like genre was stultifying. He wasn’t just a rapper. He was a rock star. And so, he and a battalion of producers decamped for the studio and emerged with 2010’s Rebirth, one of the most amateurish and goofy rock’n’roll albums ever created. There’s something admirable about the fact that Weezy F. Baby effectively convinced his label to let him erect a pyre of money, douse it in gas, and toss a lit match onto it, KLF-style. The record stands today as a work of accidental outsider art, something so strange and boring that it could have only been made by a genius.
Tyga is not the biggest rapper in the world. But earlier this year, he revealed himself to be a man with a dream not dissimilar to Lil Wayne’s: to completely reinvent himself and his music. The vision was to create an entirely new character separate from Tyga, the rapper known primarily for the party songs he recorded in the early 2010s while serving Young Money’s fourth banana, and a world for that character to embody for a whole-ass album cycle. This would be a concept album that dared to ask, “What if Scarface, as played by Al Pacino, was not a drug dealer but a pop star, and also Tyga?” It was probably not part of the plan for $TARFACE, the resulting slop-pop record created by Tyga under the name $TARFACE, to immediately draw derisive accusations of blatant AI usage upon the public learning of its very existence. But hey, it’s the most publicity Tyga has gotten in a decade. While I shudder to think what Rebirth would have sounded like in the age of prompt-based pop, I can all but guarantee you it would be better than this piece of shit.
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If you want to get a sense of what $TARFACE actually sounds like, I suggest going to the free-to-use music AI music generator Treblo (née Sonauto), allegedly the one that Fenix Flexin used to create his hit single “Rubberz,” and typing in the following tags: “tyga, 1980s, synthpop, new wave, 80s pop, tyga, tyga, tyga, sung, thriller, synth.” (You have to type “tyga” a bunch of times to make the model realize you want Tyga’s vocals; do not, under any circumstances, try to add a “Fenix Flexin” tag to get your AI Tyga to sing because it’ll just spit out Fenix Flexin vocals.) I’m not saying the record is AI-generated; all I’m saying is that I was personally able to generate a song that sounded exactly like $TARFACE, assuming it had included a song about a critic trying to write a review of a Tyga album.
Initially, Tyga implied this album was 100% human-made. “Even down to the mixing, we used a lot of the old hardware,” he told People, citing the very specific examples of “delays, harmonizers.” “Everything that we used was stuff that they used in the ’80s.” But then a week later, when asked by VIBE if he used AI on the record, he pulled an about-face and said, “For sure.” He defended himself by claiming that the public’s negative attitude toward AI tools is similar to how people felt about early Auto-Tune use, that “there’s nothing wrong with using technology as a tool,” and besides, even if he got some musical elements from the record from AI, that “the writing, all the vocals are all me.” For good measure, he added in, “Why are people overexplaining how they make shit good?”
