Over the years, Ye has amassed perhaps the most obsessive fan base in all of hip-hop, and some of them have carefully charted the evolution of the tracks on “Bully.” During that Laboy interview, Ye enthused about a new technology that was allowing him to make music in a different way: artificial intelligence. Ye has often used writers to help compose his music; now, using A.I., he showed Laboy how he could take a recording of someone else rapping and render it in his own voice. A year ago, Ye released a half-hour-long video accompanied by several “Bully” tracks, and many fans thought that they heard evidence of his newfound interest in A.I. Was he really delivering lyrics in Spanish, on a track called “Last Breath,” or had he merely reprogrammed a Spanish-language singer to sound like him? In a post on X last week, he seemed to announce that the new version of “Bully” would contain none of this sort of manipulation. “BULLY ON THE WAY NO AI,” he promised.
Did he deliver? Listeners have been trying to figure that out. A streamer known as ImStillDontai filmed an hour-long reaction to the album that earned about a quarter of a million views in its first twenty-four hours. He enthused about the record’s downcast finale, “This One Here,” but also voiced his doubts. “I hate A.I.,” he said. “I shouldn’t have to be thinking about this, bro. I should be able to just listen to him and be, like, ‘Oh, my God, he’s killing this.’ But now I’m, like, ‘Is he? Or is the fucking machine killing it?’ ” There seems to be a widespread perception that musicians who use artificial intelligence are engaged in a form of cheating. It is a familiar concern, because it evokes earlier arguments against sampling, and also against Auto-Tune, both of which were commonly described as a way for lazy musicians to make low-effort music. “People are, like, ‘Stay away from A.I.’—it’s a more negative reaction than Auto-Tune,” Ye told Laboy. It should be said, though, that the Auto-Tune backlash was once plenty negative; in 2009, Jay-Z released a track called “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune),” which suggested, memorably though not accurately, that the era of processed vocals was just about over.
The arguments over Ye’s use of artificial intelligence seem to have something to do with a desire for connection: fans want to be sure that the voice they hear is really his, even as new technology makes it harder to reliably distinguish between pure and impure recordings. This is a particularly vexed question in the case of Ye, who so often changes his mind and his persona, and whose discography is full of leaks and revisions and contradictions that leave listeners scrambling to figure out which releases are the “real” ones—and, for that matter, which Ye is the real one. Is the March 28th version of “Bully” the final one? Did Ye really write, or at least authorize, that contrite statement in the Wall Street Journal? Can we even be sure that that was him on Alex Jones’s show, with his entire head concealed underneath a black hood? The English musician James Blake was credited as a producer on “This One Here,” but, after the album arrived on streaming services, Blake announced that he had asked to be removed from the credits, saying that the final version didn’t reflect the “spirit” of the track he had worked on. In fact, many listeners may find that the rather spare and wobbly version of the song that appeared last year is more affecting than the plusher version on the new album, just as they may find themselves missing Ye’s slightly uncanny Spanish-language delivery on the second verse of “Last Breath.” Throughout his career, Ye has often communicated in a jittery voice that sounds overwhelmed with emotion, but on “Bully” he is uncharacteristically subdued, and it is hard not to think about a different transformative technology: the program of “medication” that he mentioned in the Journal. “Bully” is perhaps the first major album of the artificial-intelligence era—the first, that is, to be evaluated primarily in terms of how much it does or doesn’t use A.I. Not coincidentally, it’s an album that forces fans to think anew about what, precisely, might make music sound “artificial.” It is not, by any stretch, a great album. But it might nevertheless be a landmark. ♦
