Timbaland’s rollout of his new AI “artist” has not gone over with as much acclaim as I’m sure he was hoping for. He even got called out by rapper JID, who joked: “Turkish Airline Hairline Timbaland strikes again smh.”
JID made the comment in a post on X/Twitter, with lots of users echoing his sentiment. “EVERYBODY should be calling out Timbaland for this nonsense he pushin’! Fuck his “legend” status because he’s tarnishing it with this shit. Went from being one of the most creative producers to creating bullshit AI slop music,” someone else added.
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Timbaland debuted the first music video from his AI music “artist” TaTa Taktumi this week, and it’s as soulless as you expected it to be, which is something the award-winning producer/rapper previously said about real music.
The song is called “Glitch x Pulse,” which, I don’t know, for a computer masquerading as a person, that’s just a little on the nose not to be either delusionally unintentional or a pointed jab at the haters. (It’s me, I’m haters.)
Back in June, it was announced that Timbaland had signed TaTa to his new label, Stage Zero, which is designed to blend human creativity with AI-based sounds to forge new music genres such as something called “A-pop,” which is unnecessarily short for AI pop.
Really, the writing was on the wall here, because just a few months prior, Timbaland went on The Inner Court podcast and stated that he finds new music artists to be very “uninspiring” and their music “soulless,” citing the 2024 presidential election as the reason and saying that he thinks AI can do better.
“You could feel the pressure of the dividedness, and I hate that. This whole election divided us,” Timbaland said at the time. “What I mean by that is it divided the music. The music sounds bland, it sounds boring—it lacks excitement. While we frequently discuss AI, I believe it’s the only entity that embodies a genuine soul right now. It allows for the expression of true feelings, resulting in it coming out beautiful.”
“I feel like right now everything is discombobulated,” he went on to add. “Which aligns with everything in the world. Ain’t no song right now—and y’all gotta admit—that’s grabbing you. Ain’t no theme song for people’s [lives].” It goes without saying, I don’t agree.
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