Despite outcry from musicians, AI slop is creeping into the charts as record labels scramble to adapt to a new normal where hits can be made at the click of a button
This year, the battle for song of the summer has been eclipsed by a much more complicated – some would even say disturbing – debate. That’s because we find ourselves asking not “What’s the song of the summer?” but rather “Is the song of the summer even real?”
Among the top contenders for the title is Fenix Flexin’s Rubberz, a single released in June that has ascended to No 58 on the Billboard Hot 100 and racked up more than 35m Spotify streams. It’s not the sort of fare Fenix usually cooks up. The artist is known for his trap music as part of the rap duo Shoreline Mafia, but Rubberz is a mildly noirish, 80s-inspired synth-pop track featuring a voice nothing like his. The song has drawn comparisons to Morrissey, but it more closely resembles Men at Work’s Down Under, or a Weird Al Yankovic parody of Men at Work. It’s pretty awful. But more importantly, it has an uncanny quality to it. It sounds off.
Almost immediately after it came out, skeptics accused Fenix of employing artificial intelligence to create the track, if not entirely at least partly. He and the song’s credited producer, Purps on the Beat, initially denied it, with Fenix insisting that he’d just used Auto-Tune and a phoney British accent. The kerfuffle culminated this month when indie DJ-producer Medasin posted a video that he said proved that Rubberz had been made using the free generative music tool Treblo.
