The “$TARFACE” album by Tyga became infamous before I even decided to review it, and I’ll get into the reasons why in just a moment. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to track Tyga’s review scores dating back to his debut LP — after all RapReviews has been with him for his entire career. He made a decent if not overwhelming start with “No Introduction,” scoring 6 out of 10 overall. He rose to a career high 7 with his sophomore album “Careless World.” It’s been downhill ever since. “Hotel California” got a 5. “Bitch I’m the Shit 2” got a 3. There was a brief reversal in 2019 for “Legendary” where he got back to 6 largely due to the album’s production, but “NSFW” returned to the backward slide. Throughout all this the scores for Tyga’s lyrical efforts have been plunging even faster, landing at a miserable 3 out of 10 for last year’s release.
And with that introduction out of the way I’m happy to reveal why “$TARFACE” has been controversial since its release on July 31st. Rather than try to improve his writing process to not make such banal, monotonous tracks, Tyga gave up all pretense of trying and farmed the work out to AI. Initially this was just an accusation levied by reviewers in response to how artificial the music sounded, until Tyga actually admitted it was exactly what he’d done in a defensive interview. In a very small way it’s admirable he decided to tell the truth knowing the backlash he’d get for doing do. That doesn’t mitigate the fact he could have just as easily hired a ghostwriter for the lyrics and a vocal coach for the singing.
What Tyga decided to do here is generously described as a “conceptual album” inspired by the excess of 1980’s greed in the United States, heavily inspired by the motion picture Scarface, which would of course make Tyga the Tony Montana of our story. The stink of being a low rent Tony Montana imitation emanates from “Gave U Racks” before you even hit play, and actually listening to it fills you ears with a pungent malodorous stank that’s hard to shake. A significant part of the problem is that AI models are trained on real people, and Tyga is a terrible lyricist, so the best it can regurgitate are equally awful bars that he’s now singing. “Left me for the better life/I hope you enjoy that bitter life.” It didn’t try to generate a better match than rhyming “life” with “life” because that’s exactly what Tyga would do.
“Affection” screams I’M RICK JAMES BITCH without having any human soul behind it or in it. For all I know the music video could be AI generated too. “Counting chips up on the table, nothing stable/Your golden touch was just a fable.” I long since stopped expecting much from Michael Ray Stevenson but this is low even by his own standards. It’s worse than if his bars were merely trite or simplistic. We’ve graduated to the point they are now completely disposable. All you have to do is cue up the RAM sucking, power hungry generative model of your choice and enter a few prompts. It will regurgitate this slop for you and it will sound just like anything on this album. To create “Powdered Dreams” you just have to say “Make a 1980’s song about cocaine, but have Tyga sing it.” Done.
I’ve previously mentioned that writer Matt Jost and I had a strong debate over whether a “0 out of 10” score was even possible. Drew Millard of Pitchfork was not party to that discussion. He happily and unapologetically gave the album that score and opined “its very existence has made the world a worse place.” The moral, legal and environmental debate about artificial intelligence will rage on long after the fervor about this album dies down, but the precedent it sets has fundamentally altered rap in a way we can’t solve with a finger snap. Who will be next to let a model trained on their work make their music? Snoop Dogg? T.I.? Paul Wall? No one knows. Someone will though. We’re going to have to live with artists who are too caught up in their lifestyle to even bother creating their own art; and quite possibly tour to perform songs they had no part in even creating.
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