Timbaland Debuts Some Fake Sh*t

This week, super producer Timbaland announced on his social media accounts that he was starting a new label and had signed a new artist; the only problem is the artist isn’t real. 

How does that happen, you ask? Well, the artist is an AI artist—an Asian AI artist to be exact—who will be spearheading the new genre of A-Pop, , as in already appropriated but let’s do it even more.. Timbaland’s new AI-generated artist goes by the cool name of Tata. There is no news on whether that was her birth name or a nickname she received as a tiny bot, but alas, Tata is set to burst onto the scene because, well, she doesn’t have anywhere else to go. 

According to Rolling Stone, “Tata and other potential artists from the company will have their music created via a collaborative process between human creators and AI music platform Suno.” 

Yes, that’s right. Potential artists. Is there, like, some auditioning process?

Also, instead of having artists—you know, those who do art—they will be creating art behind the scenes, using a computer to access things they could have never imagined but want to cite their imagination as the source. 

Many social media users were booing the concept.

In all fairness, the synthetic sound is not new to music, so sure, there is absolutely room for it, but when has watering down the potion ever been beneficial for its efficacy?

There is no way that a sound produced by the fullness present in a band like the Isleys could ever be replicated by a man tinkering in a studio, hopped up on coke, five-hour energy, and Door Dash. At the very least, there is still a real human laying the vocals.

Not to mention, Timbaland is forgetting the ever-so-important detail in liking an artist’s music, the likability of the artist. Take Rihanna, for instance, arguably the writer of this article’s favorite celebrity, down to even having a Rihanna-themed birthday party, including a Rihanna-themed cake. 

Rihanna’s vocals aren’t the sharpest; she’s never gonna sing the girls down, but, she is magnetism personified. She is allure. She has ‘je ne sais quoi.’ She has whatever the fuck she has that makes people not only want another album from her, but they also want to—wait for it—SEE HER IN CONCERT. She cannot be generated by an algorithm. Nobody wants to see a hologram in concert unless it’s Tupac. People want to connect with their artists. They want to ignore their bad shit and love on them anyway; they crave them, and the opportunity to be noticed by them is a golden ticket of dopamine. 

Nobody gives a fuck about what Tata is doing because there is nothing for her to do.

There are so many undiscovered artists with new and innovative sounds, so finding artists is not the problem; it is paying them. If you can create music with your computer and create an artist to sing the music, you don’t have to pay the artist. Timbaland is absolutely within his right to use a computer to be ‘creative,’ but that does not mean he can recreate the human experience and that it will resonate the same with very human people. Who knows? Maybe people will gravitate towards this; after all, mumble rap is a thing, but it feels like a way to cut the artist out of art. 

Music is the result of experience. You can fake creativity. Hell, you can even fake the creative, but you can’t expect people to not want a real experience or person experiencing it to relate to.