The Pitchfork Score Isn’t The Most Important Detail
So, at this point, we have all seen the Pitchfork score given to Tyga’s $TARFACE album, right? The dreaded and not very often applied goose egg? The same goose egg applied to the likes of Australian garage rock Dittos Jet’s Shine On, Robert Pollard’s “comedy” album Relaxation of the Asshole, and This is Next, the compilation that tried to NOW! That’s What I Call Music the bubbling Indie scene at the time? Well, you cannot say that the blog didn’t draw as much attention as it did when Chris Brown received a failing grade for his overlong BROWN album. But I wonder if people care to pay attention to the reasoning as to why it received such a thing.
The Pitchfork review brought up a very important thesis worth discussing: everytime a rapper wants to make music outside of their usual wheelhouse, a good amount decide they want to tackle a genre that is way out of their depth and skill set. Even if they do have a set knowledge, ti feels like they refuse to waste time on developing an identity through it and just use the aesthetic. While you can apply this to plenty of rap artists, Pitchfork decided to begin with a fellow target: Young Money general and Hip Hop’s equivalent to Vince Neil, Lil Wayne.
“In the late 2000s, Lil Wayne was the biggest rapper in the world. But for a guy as creative and groundbreaking as Wayne, being boxed in by antiquated notions like genre was stultifying,” writer Drew Millard notes. “He wasn’t just a rapper. He was a rock star.” By further discussing what it took for Lil Wayne’s polarizing Rebirth to come to light, they used the resident album to highlight Rap/Hip Hop’s rock star ambitions, save for the hedonism that came with it. He wasn’t wrong to bring up Lil Wayne, as opposed to Kid Cudi, whose rock star ambitions and alternative leanings were present BEFORE Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven came to light. Because the intent was to highlight rappers always wanting to do more than the usual. Often crassly, they describe it as saying they want to be an “artist”, and not a rapper. (You COULD just say that you want to be multi-dimensional with your artistry or something. Anything that doesn’t sound like you are cheapening the art.)
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But Drew was able to see the fuckery in it all. “There’s something admirable about the fact that Weezy F. Baby effectively convinced his label to let him erect a pyre of money, douse it in gas, and toss a lit match onto it, KLF-style. The record stands today as a work of accidental outsider art, something so strange and boring that it could have only been made by a genius.” This is something you could never say about the multi-talented Childish Gambino, someone who made a Funkadelic-flavored album (Awaken, My Love!) and even effectively made a mixed bag of an album in Bando Stone and the New World. You can’t even say it about Beyonce, who dropped a GRAMMY-winning album in Cowboy Carter, a country album made by someone who had not made a country album before. (Only a song in “Daddy Issues”.) The gripe in the whole post melds the frustration in hearing ANOTHER rapper try to tackle a genre with a baseline understanding of the genre with the exposed usage of A.I. Say what you want about 93PUNX. Vic Mensa is least likely to use A.I. to make a pop-punk album. But this time, it is a genre that has been tackled multiple times: an 80s themed pop album. Something that people have pointed out was already tackled by Tory Lanez.
As someone who, despite being born in the late 80s, will not entirely agree with the idea that music from the 80s sucked — Hello! Philadelphia soul? 80s funk? Prince? Luther Vandross? — , nothing annoys me more than when someone makes music that sounds like a sanitized facsimile of the 80s. The A.I. was egregious enough. After all, A.I. is a degraded medium trying to sand the edges off of music in general. The singles feel like he is trying desperately to stay within the poppy sound of the times. Imagine if you first learned about the sound of the 80s from getting Rickrolled by vinyl. I would have been better off hearing what it would be like if he just put a band together…or worked with Tyler the Creator. Has he heard the way he tackled some 80s tracks on Don’t Tap the Glass? (“Ring Ring Ring” gives ol’ school hip hop, “Sugar On My Tongue” bangs with the retro-futuristic edge of 80s funk and synthwave, “Tell Me What It Is” even applies a modern take on dramatic pop music, but with his own flare).
The thing is most people think that 0.0 is nothin more than a way for Pitchfork to get attention by putting down an album, and that would be an incredibly shortsighted idea if you had NOT read the review. Yes, it said it was a piece of shit, but not for nothing. Millard says, “If you want to get a sense of what $TARFACE actually sounds like, I suggest going to the free-to-use music AI music generator Treblo (née Sonauto), allegedly the one that Fenix Flexin used to create his hit single “Rubberz,” and typing in the following tags: “tyga, 1980s, synthpop, new wave, 80s pop, tyga, tyga, tyga, sung, thriller, synth.” (You have to type “tyga” a bunch of times to make the model realize you want Tyga’s vocals; do not, under any circumstances, try to add a “Fenix Flexin” tag to get your AI Tyga to sing because it’ll just spit out Fenix Flexin vocals.)” Continuing, Millen points out that he is “not saying the record is AI-generated; all I’m saying is that I was personally able to generate a song that sounded exactly like $TARFACE, assuming it had included a song about a critic trying to write a review of a Tyga album.”
Near the end, Millen discussed that the boneheaded embrace will only ever price out musicians who truly wanted to make music, and that will only be as much Tyga’s loss as it would have been the musicians in wait. “If Tyga had blown an Apocalypse Now-sized hole in his label budget by clearing a bunch of samples from sleazy ’80s synth-pop and disco records — or hiring out session players, a vocal coach, and acquiring vintage equipment — he might have fucked around and made the album of his life, if only so he could make the money back and not get dropped,” quips Millen. “Instead, $TARFACE is smug and complacent, an amalgam of ’80s synth-pop and disco slapped together by someone who’s seemingly never cared to listen to one synth-pop or disco record in his life. Given the amount of actual effort or even labor put into $TARFACE — which is to say, about zero — the margins on this thing must be amazing.”
Before $TARFACE, plenty of rappers and R&B singers have been threatening records in rock, metal, punk, and other genres to varying degrees of creative success. Fuck anything else attached to it. Hell, this isn’t even confined by specific genres. Remember Chris Gaines? How about Thunderbitch? But as Millen pointed out through Tyga, you don’t come across a lot of aspiring musical adventurers who truly know what they are doing outside of merely copying and pasting the aesthetic of its time. (Post-punk/goth artists trying to revive the corpse of Joy Divison and Bauhaus, I am looking at you.) This is where A.I. will sadly thrive. The folly of A.I. lies in squeaky clean “perfection”, and often underneath recordings that is engineered to sound like it was ripped off of vinyl. Real people cannot remake the “cleanliness”, the edgelessness of what is produced.
If he did it with a band, Tyga will at least walk away from the album knowing he has his own real take on what he was going for. It didn’t matter if it would be good or not, but there is effort to really bring something potentially original and unprompted. (He’d have creative copyright over everything, but that is a conversation for another time.) Did you hear about how the pop-punk-infused Rebirth influenced artists like Lil Uzi Vert? Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven still has its admirers, despite Fantano’s applied goose egg. Instead, $TARFACE is another confirmation that more artists of lesser variety will very lazily hop the bandwagon and edge out real effort for the sake of musical or financial convenience, regardless of the cost. Say what you want about the original intent, but as a singer-songwriter and keyboard player, I agree that is worth the 0s alone.
