$TARFLOP: Why Tyga’s Latest Album Proves That AI Shouldn’t Exist in Music

Pitchfork went viral a few weeks ago after a drop in their latest circulation of ratings uncovered the publication’s first zero in twenty years. Garnering a notorious past amongst their pretentious, mu-core journalists, the critic giant hasn’t had the most popular opinions when it comes to recent releases. They’re infamously harsh when analyzing albums, so it’s not uncommon for the general public to enjoy an album they’ve rated a low seven out of ten. However, I believe that they’re completely justified with their rating for Tyga’s newest project. Tyga released what was supposed to be a total 180 in his career, $TARFACE, an album that would completely change and revitalize his sound.  

Let’s get one thing out of the way, a review. If you’re genuinely curious about how this new album sounds, don’t worry, I listened to it for you. It’s abysmal. It’s probably one of the worst pieces of media I’ve personally experienced, falling in a camp of stuff that’s so outlandishly pathetic that it’s not even ironically funny. He doesn’t even sing on this abomination, 

It’s instead an AI generated voice doing an impersonation of Tyga if he was an 80’s vocalist. It is without a doubt the most soulless piece of art to drop this decade, let alone this year, which I know... DUH! Of course an album fully written by a machine would have no ounce of character to it, but I kind of just find it astonishing that someone with the amount of fame that Tyga’s accumulated over his long career would stoop so low into making something like this.  

If everything I just stated within that last paragraph still doesn’t convince you to not waste your time with $TARFACE, then go ahead and read Pitchfork’s review on it. In fact, I challenge you to really do your research because I have yet to find a single person on the internet who believes this steaming pile of refuse is even remotely acceptable. YouTube’s busiest music critic, Anthony Fantano, boldly stated that he flat out refuses to even give the album a score due to it simply not qualifying to be labelled as music. During one of Doja Cat’s livestreams she felt so compelled to let her audience know how genuinely lame it was for Tyga to create this album, despite no one in the chat previously asking her opinions on it. The review site AOTY has seen a flood of its users review-bomb the project, where it currently sits at a 2 out of 100 averaged from over 2,000 ratings. Not a single person on the internet, outside of Tyga and his team, are defending this project. Literally all of the discourse I’ve witnessed in regard to $TARFACE is negative. There’s not one established celebrity defending this album, and audiences seem to rightfully hate it. There’s a really good lesson for the industry to learn here. Don’t use AI to write your music; it couldn't be more cut and dry than that. 

I’m honestly quite scared for Tyga’s reputation at this point, because even though he was already corny, he still had credibility as a successful musician during the 2010s. All of this credibility is now void thanks to $TARFACE, and I truly believe the hit that he’s about to take on his career will show from his absence on features and a huge decline in his streaming numbers. I mean how could you trust someone to deliver a stellar performance both on stage and in the studio when their ghostwriter is Suno? His attitude towards disappointed fans has also shown what I predict to be a critical hit to his career. Tyga is seemingly taking a stance as if he’s already ahead of everyone else, stating “there’s nothing wrong with using technology as a tool,” of course relating AI to past advancements in production such as autotune. The fundamental flaw within his argument here is that autotune has evolved from being a shortcut to a form of musical expression amongst artists and producers. It was initially created to alleviate the amount of time it would take for a vocalist to finish a song, and when it hit the market, it was attacked for the notion of gutting the standard on vocal technique.  

However, several artists have taken the tool as something more, using it as a way to push the boundaries of the genres they reside in, and influencing an entirely different direction of hip hop and pop. Artists such as T-Pain, Travis Scott, and SOPHIE have used autotune as something beyond a shortcut, heavily utilizing its imperfections to build their iconic sound. You cannot do this with AI. AI doesn’t have the capacity to creatively look at something and completely reinvent a genre. It takes what artists have made in the past, learns those patterns, and coughs up an unfeeling rendition of it. It’s honestly shocking how anyone this established in the music industry can remotely think of AI being used as a tool similar to autotune, and I believe that because Tyga cannot see this distinction (unlike literally everyone else on the internet), the support in his career will take a massive toll from his ignorance. 

Overall, Tyga did something remarkable with this album; he proved me wrong. I genuinely thought that it was nigh impossible for a musician to relish the sin of sloth within their work, as being lazy and being creative are stark opposites of one another. But here we are, the laziest album of the decade is at our fingertips. There’s one of the two outcomes that we can see as $TARFACE ages. The former is that Tyga’s career will never recover from the slop he thought would be his saving grace. The latter is that music executives will use this project as an example of what not to do before proceeding to set fully AI generated music of their own artists as the precedent for the new age of music. May God have mercy on us all if it’s the latter.