It seems almost futile to point out the sheer artistic (and moral) bankruptcy occurring in mainstream music these days. Taylor Swift likes to rub shoulders with MAGA and gush at her Neanderthal husband's junk, Chappell Roan likes to victim blame and punt kids like footballs, and Tyga, apparently, likes to outsource his music to AI slopbots. By the same token, it seems pointless to litigate the offensive nature of such a thing, because it's all too prevalent in our culture these days, to see even the wealthiest among us take a shortcut for no good reason. I'm sure in recent months, you've seen several of your favorite artists announcing tours on social media, with attached imagery depicting the dates they're playing and the cities they're visiting being very clearly generated by ChatGPT or Grok, one of Elon Musk's many digital scourges on society.
I say all of this to say - we already knew better than to take any kind of emotional stock in what rich and powerful people do, because they very obviously don't care about us, but my goodness. What an affront to everything that's good in the world this heap of auditory fecal matter is. As if it were bad enough that Tyga has demonstrated himself to be a misogynist, a creep, a poser, and a domestic abuser. Now we know he's also a creatively destitute clown. The only shreds of solace one can take from the fallout surrounding
Starface are that Tyga is no longer anywhere near the vanguard of mainstream hip-hop like he was a decade ago, and that public sentiment regarding the use of artificial intelligence in music is so overwhelmingly hostile that one has to ponder what compelled him to try it.
The dude was already nothing of a singer to begin with. I didn't need to hear him moan vacantly into an utter abyss of nothingness like he does on every lame excuse for a song on this album. The lyrics, which he says he wrote without any technical tools, are as repetitive as the vocals are vomitous. It's like someone gave the writing crew from
South Park a hefty budget and told them to do what they've been doing for thirty years. If that were actually the case, this might have made for a good laugh, to distract us from the fact the world is on fire, rife with anxiety and displacement. That's when the word 'futile' reenters the fray. We really need to stop expecting, or even hoping, that artists are going to use their platforms to do anything tangibly beneficial for us. We don't ask for much, and certainly most other artists aren't going to stoop
this low, but now we know that hell has a basement. And how frightening it is to not only know it exists, but to look inside.
