Drake’s new track “Push Up,” a diss directed at Kendrick Lamar, Rick Ross, The Weeknd, and others, took the rap world by storm on Saturday. Then, a little later, Rick Ross’s response to “Champagne Stories,” a remarkable day became unforgettable. Hip-hop heads of a certain age were hit with a wave of nostalgia thanks to the way both songs were released. A clip of “Push Up” was circulating on Reddit and Twitter before DJ Akademiks legitimized the track and played a studio-quality version on his stream. Rick Ross then sent his response to Academics a few hours later.
The two veteran rappers take us back to a time when songs weren’t uploaded to streaming platforms at midnight. Big singles, especially diss tracks, almost always go through a step-by-step process before the full version reaches the masses. The song might end up on the radio, on a message board or on a blog, and people would play the poor quality version until we finally got a studio quality file – then called CDQ, the now obsolete term “CD quality”. refers to “Drake’s 36-year-old fans know the era of oversized clothes, Funkmaster Flex bombshell rap disses, and Rapid Share file-sharing links.
There was Drake, who promoted his book of poetry. Titles ruin everything. By taking out full page advertisements in newspapers across the country Trying to replicate the energy of last year, 2006 era? Questions still remain about how “Push Up” was released. Was the song intentionally leaked to gauge the reaction before sealing it? Did Future and Metro Boomin’s “All To Myself” leak in Drake’s crew prove true over the weekend? But the most troubling question is the first question we heard when we heard the first version of “Push Up:” Was it real or AI?
Fans who were surprised when a song of this magnitude was leaked thought it would be the work of AI, which has become increasingly popular in the rap world. TikTok is clearly inundated with deepfake Drake disses, which is why it’s no surprise. Many fans wondered if a troll decided to write lyrics about Drake’s enemies, recite them, and then transfer them to the rapper’s voice. Still, even before the academics confirmed it, most listeners felt like the quality of the song’s vocal inflections — and references to Kendrick’s contract within baseball and The Weeknd’s manager XO Cash — made the track genuine. Confirmed.
That wasn’t the case with the subsequent fake Drake and Kendrick disses that surfaced on Monday. These songs were very easy to listen to because of the hard sound. A Twitter account claimed that the Kendrick song they uploaded would be released in full on April 16, clearly trying to pass it off as the real thing. On Saturday, savvy music fans scoffed that some fans would think the AI was sophisticated enough to replicate what we heard from “Push Up.” But the day will come when AI technology will surpass the understanding of these experts, and will represent another weapon in the toolkit of those looking to spoof the music world. Rap fans hungry to hear the next barbs in the Drake vs. the World gauntlet will naturally listen to these “leaked” disses on the off chance that they might be the real thing.
Last year, an AI music creator named Ghostwriter dropped a fake Weekend and Drake song called “Heart on My Sleeve” that he planned to submit to the Grammys (after “Push Up,” AI Probably the only way we’ll hear anything is a Drake and The Weeknd collaboration). Eventually, the song was pulled from streaming, and labels put in place safeguards to prevent commercial retailing of AI vocals. Universal Music Group, which includes Drake and The Weeknd, asked DSPs to block AI services from using their platforms to build their databases. And last October, music publishers Universal, Concorde and ABKCO filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against AI company Anthropic, setting a precedent for how the industry’s infrastructure will deal with AI services. But these developments haven’t stopped those who have decided to use AI for entertainment – even Ghostwriter recently released a full-length AI music project.
Last May, Timbaland posted an Instagram clip of a song he created with the voice of AI portraying The Notorious B.I.G. “I always wanted to work with Big, and I Never had a chance like this until today,” he quipped before playing a similar song. sounded like buggies but referred suspiciously to modern-day slang like “it’s not giving.” Reaction to the song was mixed, and Timbaland has not officially released the song. Recently, Playboy dropped an entire fake Carti project with AI vocals as Carti fans eagerly await his next album. One of the comments on an Instagram post promoting the AI album noted, “If you enjoy AI music idk what to say other than rethink it all.”
Fake statements have many consequences: Misinformation will further poison a blogosphere already overrun with fake news presented with obscure sources. Rap fans now have to rule out vocal intonation, end rhyme pronunciation, and digital artifacts when evaluating the accuracy of a track. The suspense of anticipating the next dis will be ruined as we keep getting fake diss, and finally feel like “it’s about time” we got the real thing.
Fake tracks can also step in ways that the artists planned to explore in their real scenes. Would fans accuse artists of using fake diss for support if they heard similar lines? And while we know Drake and Kendrick are already at odds, what happens when the AI creators decide to create a feud between artists who don’t have a problem? There are less fair artists than Kendrick or Drake who can be fooled by an AI diss towards them, killed, and say something to another artist that they can’t take back, and then things get real. becomes a reality before