As technology advances new ideas are always sprouting with the hopes of change. However, recently the artist FN MEKA has been the point of discussion as this artist is not even human. FN MEKA is an AI that is branding a style similar to SoundCloud rappers such as Lil Pump and 6ix9ne.
He first came into public eyes back in 2019 already drawing a huge following. He was created by Factory New, a metaverse company. This company was difficult to find any information on besides an adviser named Anthony Martini who works at Slip.stream, a creator-safe music platform. Many executives similar to him are extremely excited about the possibilities that virtual artists can create leading him to be shortly signed by Capitol Records.
When talking about the process of making the music Anthony martini said to music business worldwide “We’ve developed a proprietary AI technology that analyzes certain popular songs of a specified genre and generates recommendations for the various elements of song construction”. He also noted they plan on working on having the technology sing itself at some point instead of requiring a human voice.
However, the artist was not heavily accepted by many communities. FN Meka is constructed to be racially ambiguous, yet he constantly uses the n-word in songs. In addition to this, there was a post that imitated police brutality which caused public outcries. Culturally everything about FN Meka is tasteless and it is honestly surprising that companies are trying to push this.
To make matters worse one of the voices for FN Meka, a rapper named Kyle the Hooligan spoke out about issues he had with Factory New. In an interview with Kristin Corry of Vice magazine, he mentions about how the company used him for the culture aspect and failed to compensate him.
The artist was only dropped from Capitol Records because of complaints about virtual blackface. There will be more attempts of creating virtual artists as labels will see this as a way to still make money without dealing with real artists. This will take away jobs and will hurt music as an art form in its entirety. Without reverence for the genre and the culture, you will be left with a cheap gimmick such as FN Meka.
