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The artist formerly known as Kanye West’s use of, and comments on, A.I. in the run-up to his first new solo album since Donda have been an ongoing source of contention among fans. In a new interview with Justin LaBoy, Ye compares the reaction to A.I. at large to the criticisms leveled against Auto-Tune earlier in his career.
About nine minutes in, notably after Ye discussed how the Grammy-nominated “Carnival” marked his latest attempt at making his own song akin to The White Stripes’ unintentional sports anthem “Seven Nation Army,” with Ye citing both “Black Skinhead” and the Paul McCartney-featuring “All Day” as his previous efforts, the topic of A.I. and its intersection with music was broached.
“Now the vocals, people are like ‘stay away from A.I.,” Ye, who in 2022 told Alex Jones “there's a lot of things that I love about Hitler,” said. “It’s a more negative reaction than Auto-Tune. I remember, like, I did Auto-Tune because people thought, they were like, ‘Man, this Auto-Tune is trash.’ As an artist, I could take anything, I could sell a piece of shit for like 10 million dollars and shit.”
As Ye sees it, A.I. is “in the same family” as Auto-Tune, “except people have a more visceral reaction” to it. Asked if he sees the tech as either the “future of music” or merely a “crutch,” Ye pointed to how it has eased the process, from his perspective, of sampling. Namely, the ability to extract stems “is like a dream come true,” with Ye underscoring his point by quickly reflecting on how the process of sampling could be far more laborious in earlier years.
“Right now, you can take any song and separate it,” he said. “Just get the vocals, just get the bass line, the drums. Completely separated.”
Ye went on to compare this aspect of A.I., which was a core component of his and Kano Computing’s brief Stem Player collaboration back in 2021, to George Lucas’ pre-Star Wars film THX 1138.
Ye went on to shout out the importance of The Legendary Traxster as the “clutch shooter” on Vultures sessions, specifically, before quickly stating that Mike Dean would be involved with Bully. Footage was included in the interview of Ye and an engineer splicing stems from a sample, with a later clip showing Ye directing the engineer to “chance his voice to my voice.”
It’s unclear whose voice, exactly, is the one being swapped out from the original recording, though it sounds like a child. We then hear a Ye-emulating version of the same vocal using the original recording as a reference.
“It’s like the new version or next version of sampling,” Ye added during the session. “Like, when sampling happened, the musicians, they hated it. When EDM came in, there were musicians that hated that. There were people who hated Auto-Tune. Now there’s people who hate the concept of A.I. It’s like, people hated the ass shots, then they became a standard.”
The A.I. portion of the interview concluded with a nod to porn, like so: “A.I. ain’t made nothing yet that I could jerk off to.”
Bully, if Ye's remarks in the LaBoy interview are held to, is set to arrive this June.
English (US) ·