Music mogul extraordinaire Timbaland has decided to jump into the artificial intelligence-made music game.
The rapper-turned-producer has signed AI “artist” 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 A-pop (AI pop).
Videos by VICE
Interestingly, just a few months ago, Timbaland went on The Inner Court podcast and stated that he finds new music artists to be very “uninspiring” and their music “soulless,” blaming the 2024 election as the reason and stating 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].”
Timbaland Thinks Current Music is “Soulless”
I, wholeheartedly, could not disagree with Timbaland more here. I think it’s fair to say that in the mainstream, artists are not empowered to take bigger musical risks, but, even in just the hip-hop space, I don’t understand how you could have access to new music by Kendrick Lamar, Rico Nasty, Teezo Touchdown, Key Glock, ect., and say, with a straight face, that there’s no music “grabbing” you.
At one point, I thought to myself, “How could a multi-Grammy-winning producer actually feel that way?” And then I immediately realized that it actually makes perfect sense. Because in any industry, it’s possible to succeed to a level of delusion where you can’t disassociate commodity from art. They just become inextricably fused.
Which brings us to the conversation about AI music… it says a lot about high-profile music producers who want so much control over the end product that they are willing to completely bypass working with actual human artists to go straight for a computer program that will essentially deliver exactly what they want. At that point, just make the fucking music yourself, with your own two hands, if you desperately need it to be something so specific.
I get that AI isn’t going anywhere, and I’m not really even against it entirely because I understand there are compelling arguments around artists learning to make AI work for them in low-stakes situations.
But… I just think that its dangerous to let important people go unchecked when they say shit like “oh, modern music artists aren’t doing a good enough job at pleasing me so I went out and found a computer program that gives me exactly what I want.” Now that’s soulless.
