in a way that none of the previous AI-generated tracks did, perhaps because of its popularity. It received more than 15 million views on TikTok and 600,000 streams on Spotify, numbers that would seem to be more than just listener curiosity.
That’s the very big picture. But what about looking at “Heart on My Sleeve” specifically? First off, calling it a hit hip-hop record is akin to calling a hot dog a sandwich; there may be all the prerequisite elements of a song composition, but the whole remains insufficient. The looped staccato production is dissonant, dated, and poorly mixed, a far cry from the current era of either Drake or the Weekend’s sonic tastes; the vocals are absent the character that animates both artists.
It is the foundation of much of copyright and intellectual property disputes in music: jazz musicians couldn’t copyright their arrangements because they were “too improvisational,” only to have their songs copied by White artists measure for measure; Little Richard had his music poorly covered by Elvis Presley and Pat Boone to more sales. The idea, ultimately, is to remove Black people from their own cultural productions.that “the history of Black artists within U.S.
Fans who are enthusiastic about the future of generative AI models in music are misguided at best. As a musical genre and cultural hub, hip-hop is eternally innovative, having made great strides on autonomous and creative uses of technology to advance the landscape, from quick mix breakbeats on turntables to samples on an MPC drum machine, to digital recordings.
It takes only one listen to “Heart on My Sleeve” to hear what’s lost — the magic that comes with organic performances with the human voice; the patented ad-libs that become an artist’s signature, as well as a chart for a record’s emotional tempo; the flat notes that aren’t pitch corrected because the mistake fits the emotion of the song; the way some artists are known to rap just before or after the beat, finding unique pockets that become their signature cadence.