Who knew a LA street rapper had a viral 1980s-sounding New Wave hit on his hands?
It is a song that has spread quickly through the Instagram stories of such huge media influencers as Kylie Jenner. There are even murmurings of a new direction in rap taking place.
The song is also - blatantly - a creation of AI.
If you ask rapper Fenix Flexin about the song, entitled RUBBERZ, it is entirely of his own creation. A seeming love of yearning Smiths melodies and late-night Duran Duran drama kept to himself until now.
But the keen-eared can’t be fooled for too long, and the tells are obvious if you know what to look for. The strange digital artefacts persistent in the song’s audio imply that it was not a natural process of human to recording. The lack of fade-outs and the way the track suddenly ends (AI-generated music seems to have an issue understanding how songs start and conclude). Even the interesting choice of an easily replicable New Wave style, which AI has no trouble approximating and generating the sound of.
Flexin has attempted to dispute the rumours and accusations of AI use, even posting footage of him supposedly recording the song. In the brief clip posted to his TikTok and Instagram Reels, he stands in front of a high-end microphone, nodding his head while reciting the hook over the blaring instrumental. But his lip-syncing is noticeably delayed, and the swerve required in hitting those specific, synthesised high notes doesn't quite match his relaxed body language in the booth.
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An On the Radar freestyle performance of the song is similarly strange. Defenders of the hit seem to think the performance is the smoking gun that proves it’s the genuine thing, yet it clearly sounds like the audio of the song has been placed over the footage of Flexin mouthing the words rather than any actual performance occurring. Again, delayed lip-syncing abounds.
Flexin knows the world would think less of an AI-generated song, otherwise he wouldn’t be so adamant that it’s just the result of autotune and a kitschy, fake English accent (sure), but he’s also shown he has no issue using AI otherwise. The single’s cover of the rapper, gentleman dapper in front of Big Ben, screams AI. Even the official lyric video looks like an AI creation, with all the nighttime neon that a 1980s New Wave prompt could provide. How many things have to add up before the gavel is pounded?
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And then it is difficult to get around the fact that the song completely lacks the essence of his voice, of which this writer is more than familiar. Flexin was a core member of the group Shoreline Mafia, who spent much of the late 2010s dropping vibe after vibe of dark LA-infused hedonistic raps. The journey from knowing a voice buried through ears into the brain, to now being presented with RUBBERZ, is uncannily jarring and just not the result of a style change and mood switch-up.
Video: A memory of Fenix Flexin before he decided to become a robot
The song feels like an intentional experiment on the TikTok algorithm that’s gone too far, and now that it’s blown up and become popular, there’s nothing to do but deny its origins and ride the success out.
Flexin can enjoy his moment of having a viral hit and being the subject of intense discourse around whether he actually made his most popular solo career song, but the precedent it sets is a huge problem. If Flexin can get away with it, it’s not unreasonable to think others will take the opportunity to follow suit. Rap, especially, is full of imitators looking to copy what’s worked for others before. And the music industry at large is always looking to make production cheaper and easier, to cut out the complications of the artist and package music as an easily consumable product. Normalised AI use in music production is a perfect, low-risk situation for record labels.
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“AI or not, this song is a banger” is an oft-repeated example of the many online comments. But we should ask ourselves what exactly it is we’re feeling that makes such a song hit. Is it that the AI has identified sounds and patterns that it knows play well to our ears? The 1980s were full of successful, highly stylised yet formulaic songs for it to do just that. If the accusation of AI holds true, then it can’t be because our minds are tapping into a moment of genuine human emotion, considering how the song remains so abstracted from who Flexin is as a person and artist.
This won’t be the last popular AI song trying to pass off as the real deal. Eventually, these things will be able to fly under the radar easily as the technology progresses, but by then, maybe we'll reach some wider understanding of why we even care about something like music in the first place.
Derek McArthur is an artist and arts writer specialising in cinema and culture. He writes a weekly arts column for The Herald.
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