It seems that we are all agree: Kendrick Lamar beat Drake in one of the most gripping rap battles of the decade. To add insult to injury, Drake also got himself into legal hot water when he impersonated the late rapper Tupac.
Tension between Lamar and Drake dates back decades, but this latest flare-up began last fall when J. Cole released a song calling Drake, Lamar and himself the “Big Three” of rap. Last March, Lamar finally responded, dismissing Cole’s claim with a scathing verse that dissed him and Drake. The battle heated up, and soon a legion of other hip-hop artists weighed in, releasing music and taking sides against Drake.
The weeks-long argument turned into one of the most intense rap battles of the digital age. There were side battles (between Chris Brown and Quavo) and white flags (J. Cole apologized to Lamar and deleted his dissing response to the rapper). In the meantime, campaigns created on social networks and gifts against Drake, and support for diss tracks against him has appeared in everything from Japanese rap to Indian classical dance.
The feud also sparked a conversation about the increased role of technology in rap, in addition to how and when AI should be used in music.
A pivotal moment came on the track “Taylor Made,” where Drake attempted to criticize Lamar using the AI voices of Snoop Dogg and Tupac, a rap icon who was killed decades ago. Drake did not get permission from Tupac’s estate to use the late rapper’s vocals and was threatened with legal action unless he removed the track. Even though Drake removed it, his decision to use AI singing promoted discussions among music lovers and technicians.
(Lamar and Drake could not be reached for comment at the time of publication).
Rap battles have become chronicles online
An artist like Tupac, who died in 1996, could not have imagined that artificial intelligence could imitate his voice so convincingly that one of the most popular rappers of the moment would insert it into a song. Nor could he have understood how the nature of the social Internet would shape the future of music, where “every stream is a vote.”
At first, rappers had to release their dissident tracks via radio, releasing physical albums and mixtapes while giving interviews throughout the years of feud. Responding to a challenge could take days at most, whereas today it can take just seconds.
Lamar issued a dissenting response to Drake within 20 minutes of Drake dropping his track against Lamar. Lamar insinuated that there were leaks in Drake’s camp that allowed him to fall so quickly, and that’s divisive in itself. Before the Internet was so ubiquitous, this speed would have been impossible.
Drake’s response to his feud with Meek Mill almost 10 years ago saw him release two songs in four days. But Lamar dropped four songs in five days during this battle, including two in one day. No one needed to rush out and buy CDs or stop their car to listen to the radio, as one of the founders remembers doing during Jay Z’s famous feud with Nas. Instead, the tracks were quickly dropped on YouTube, shared on Twitter, and then streamed on Spotify.
The speed of these releases has its drawbacks: In another viral moment, Lamar’s words confused actor Haley Joel Osment and televangelist Joel Osteen.
Fans also called Drake “chronically online” during the rap battle, as their real-time rap posts seemed to influence him. Some fans accused him of referencing popular tweets and memes about him during the feud, then passing them off as his own thoughts and rapping about them. Many people online commented that it felt like Drake was writing his responses specifically for his fans to hear, rather than responding to Lamar. This almost instantaneous feedback loop stood in stark contrast to Lamar’s raps, which were poignant in their attacks solely on Drake.
This battle may also be the first time such meat has extended to large-scale technology platforms. Lamar fans used Google Maps to virtually vandalize Drake’s mansion, renaming it “Kendrick’s Property.” Streamers spent long hours on platforms like Twitch, YouTube, and Kick, waiting to see if they could be among the first to react to a newly released song.
Anthony Fantano, a popular music YouTuber, has posted no fewer than six different live reaction videos responding to Drake and Lamar’s songs being dropped over the past two weeks. These kinds of reaction videos became so popular that creators say that Lamar (or his team) removed the copyright restrictions from these songs, which means that they can enjoy their videos. This move alone could give more meaning to the role of hip-hop reaction expert.
AI has entered the chat
The Kendrick-Drake feud is also the first mainstream rap battle to use AI.
Artists of all genres are considering the coexisting threat and potential of this technology. Some saw AI as an opportunity: art pop duo Yacht trained an AI on 14 years of their music to create the record “Chain Tripping” in 2019; Holly Herndon and Grimes have both developed tools that allow other artists to generate AI deep fakes using their voices. Other artists like Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry have protested the use of AI to undermine human creativity.
Consent is a major concern in artists’ discussions of AI-generated music. Artists care so much about what their peers are doing because the use of AI involves them all: unbeknownst to them, their music can be used to train an AI model that another artist uses to complete their music .
While Herndon is at the forefront of musical experimentation with AI, she also advocates for artists to maintain control of their work. She uses AI in her art, but she’s also the founder of Spawning, a startup that creates tools for artists that help them remove their work from popular AI training datasets. Meanwhile, chillwave musician Washed Out just released a controversial music video made entirely using Open AI’s Sora, a text-to-video conversion model that has yet to be made public.
Tupac’s estate reportedly argues that Drake crossed a line because he did not have consent to imitate the late rapper. But Rich Fortune, co-founder of AI-based social scheduling app Hangtight, said it was creative that Drake was one of the first artists to use AI in a song, especially on one dissident track. Fortune telling: “There are no rules in a battle. »
“If there was a time to see what the reaction would be, it would be now, because you don’t strike in war,” he continued. He believes more artists will now look to use AI singing since Drake, one of the biggest artists in the world, effectively sanctioned its use.
In fact, a diss track against Drake in this feud used AI-generated work and has since turned into a meme against him. Producer Metro Boomin took an AI song called BBL Drizzy and sampled it on a track that became one of the rallying cries against the rapper.
Meanwhile, artists as big as Beyoncé have taken a stand against the growing presence of AI. In one of the few public comments she made about her album “Cowboy Carter,” Beyoncé said, “The more I see the world evolve, the more I feel a deeper connection to purity. With artificial intelligence, digital filters and programming, I wanted to get back to real instruments.
Fortune said the biggest hurdle now for artists who want to use AI is simply getting permission. Living artists may not be as eager to be replicated by AI, but estates of deceased musicians might be. The problem is that many deceased old-school artists, like Tupac, cannot consent to being imitated because AI-generated music was not a technology designed before their deaths.
“I don’t know if it’s necessarily a good thing, but it’s the direction we’re heading in,” Fortune said of using the work of deceased musicians. At the very least, he says, it opens up a new source of income for artists’ estates who don’t worry about them being artificially reincarnated.
The Kendrick-Drake feud also exposed another point about AI: its potential ability to imitate artists with less unique styles. Luke Bailey, founder of fintech Neon Money Club, said Drake’s most recent music lacks depth. That, coupled with allegations that Drake so directly and deliberately took inspiration from what he saw on the internet, raises fears that he’s doing something an AI robot could one day do.
“There are two types of musicians: one who can play what someone tells them to play and one who can create something original from scratch,” Bailey said. “AI is the first at this stage of its development.”
Bailey is right. Large language models (LLMs), the type of artificial intelligence that powers most deepfake tools, are inherently uncreative. These models synthesize gigantic swaths of data, then respond to a user-generated prompt by predicting the most likely answer.
But the most famous music often takes the opposite approach: Just look at Kendrick Lamar, a rapper whose bars are so complex that he remains the only non-classical and jazz musician to win a Pulitzer Prize. He is often considered one of music’s greatest thinkers and is known for his comments on race and politics. AI currently lacks the cultural nuance to form its own thinking about society, let alone something as nuanced as race.
“(The AI) can’t copy Kendrick’s depth, only his voice,” Bailey said, adding that fans have heard some pretty compelling AI-generated Drake songs in the past. “AI doesn’t have any powerful bars yet.”
techcrunch
