Hip Hop, AI and the question of authenticity
Today we have the power to create more music, more easily than ever before: sometimes even without human contribution. But at what cost to our connection with the music itself?
If you’re not equally awestruck and terrified by the world of AI music right now, you may not have been paying enough attention. In 2024 alone we’ve seen an AI-deepfaked 2pac hop on a song with Drake, Suno (among others) generating some pretty damned good beats with just a few words’ prompt, the creation of fictitious AI bands ripe for sampling, not to mention every software developer on the planet touting AI music plugins designed to help you write better chord progressions, generate new soundscapes, or write entire tracks for you. Many outlets are predicting that working musicians will lose over a quarter of their income to AI in the next four years.
Some (perhaps too many) are already predicting the AI apocalypse. Others see it as a great democratisation of creativity, drawing comparisons to the increase in computing power during the early 00s which made access to music production tools ubiquitous. Where the previous generation needed to invest in physical drum machines and multitrack recorders at considerable expense, suddenly anyone with a laptop and a cracked copy of Fruity Loops was free to express themselves. It’s an era I lived through, having saved up to buy a Tascam four track in the late 90s only to throw it away a few years later when it became viable to run a full recording session on my home computer.
What we’re seeing today goes far beyond that, however. We’re experiencing a paradigm shift in the means of human self-expression. One which raises questions about the definition of creativity itself…is typing a one sentence prompt into Midjourney an act of creativity? One of many questions I'm not qualified to answer.
The likelihood is that AI will have both positive and negative impacts on musicians, their fans, and the music industry itself. Time and perspective will be needed to accurately judge how these advancements affect the world around us.
What then, if anything, might we be able to predict about the near future for both music makers and fans alike?
Modes of engagement
In Wired Magazine’s recent 2025 annual, an article from Brandon Ogbunu and Lupe Fiasco suggests that in 2025 and beyond our creative engagement with AI could take on three broad forms:
What Brandon and Lupe describe as ‘full surrender’. Leaning fully into the possibilities of AI, embracing the capability to generate endless ideas. In this scenario, the machines become the artist, creating terabytes of music for our consumption. Humanity is injected into the equation through a DJ-like curation process made up of critics and commentators: an evolution of our existing online influencer culture.
A more Indirect embrace, comprising a hybrid of human- and machine-based approaches. Here both machine and person play the role of artist, collaborating on all aspects of music creation together: either under the guise of a single artist, or a human + AI combo. A rap duo consisting of a flesh and blood rapper and his AI-trained sidekick for example.
To quote the article directly, “AI art will forment a new appreciation for classical human-made relics.” In other words, as the pure volume of AI-generated music quickly eclipses that of humans, man-made content will become rare and therefore more valuable: in the same way that you’d naturally value an artisan-made table more than a mass-produced item from IKEA.
It’s an interesting hypothesis and one which accounts for the different views among artists around where and how AI could (or should) show up in the creative process. Nothing is ever going to be one-size-fits-all and Hip Hop is already a broad church in terms of demographics, perspectives and approaches. From this viewpoint, it’s easy to imagine a future in which various AI-generated strands of Hip Hop might exist adjacent to a more human-centric, AI-free branch of the culture.
The very foundations of Hip Hop are built on seizing the latest technological advancements (see: sampling), not to mention repurposing technology for new and unique purposes (see: the invention of the DJ mixer). It's an artform founded on innovation. It would follow then, that AI should be a natural fit for such a forward-thinking medium.
The problem is, at over 50 years old, Hip Hop is also an analog-era artform with a strong authenticity bias. Don’t believe me? Go ask the legion of folks still making beats on 30-plus year-old machines like the MPC60 and SP1200, chopping up samples from Jazz and Soul records that might be 70 years old. Analog is in our DNA. Music created by a faceless algorithm could quickly become a moral quandary for an artform which often cites ‘keeping it real’ as a cornerstone of its aesthetic.
Equally, the younger generation of Hip Hop heads have grown up in an almost entirely digital world. While they might put a VHS filter on their latest Instagram story, that’s about the extent of their analog allegiance. This is why Brandon and Lupe’s hypothesis is so compelling: it accounts for the generational splits we’re likely to see in AI adoption both within, and outside of, the sphere of music. Hip Hop might end up being more fragmented than most.
Me personally? I recently passed over the 40-year age threshold, officially classifying me as an old head. I grew up on MPCs and cassette multitrack recorders. AI won’t be chopping my samples for me anytime soon.
I’m still a firm believer that everyone has the right to decide how best to express themselves. I won’t be looking sideways at anyone who decides to create their next record using AI, but I may equally choose to abstain from supporting it. As Common famously said, “If I don’t like it, I don’t like it, it don’t mean that I'm hating.”
The thing is, I genuinely care that Dilla played his drums into his MPC by hand, unquantized. I care that I can feel his rhythm. I care about the backstory behind my favourite records, enough so that I've read ‘Liner Notes for Hip Hop Junkies’ a dozen times and even written about some of those records myself. It still matters to me who does and who doesn’t write their own raps. It’s not just whether the music sounds good: it’s also about authenticity, narrative and connection.
Music is equal parts artist and audience
This morning I listened to Andre3000’s New Blue Sun in the car on a long drive. Andre is a man who went from kicking rhymes about sipping a fifth in 1993 (stop sleeping on Player’s Ball younguns), to exploring space-age psychedelic soul music a decade later, then recording a jazz flute album a full thirty years after his first releases with Outkast. It’s a creative arc of continuous reinvention that few artists would dare to attempt, much less pull off to critical acclaim.
Listening to New Blue Sun, the music is shaped by that context. It’s shaped by who Andre is (or was) during the recording of the album. By his history. By his evolution as an artist. By the ideas he’s trying to express. Sure, I could ask an AI algorithm to generate an album of new music based on it - maybe also train it on some past releases from co-collaborators Carlos Nino and Nate Mercereau too - but would that music hold the same value without the story and the intention of the artist who created it? I’d argue not.
Music isn’t simply music to human beings. Our experience of it is informed by the people who created it, when and where it was made, where we were and who we were with when we first heard it, and countless other factors. It’s the reason your heart swells when you hear your mum’s favourite song. The reason why an entire group of my high school friends still burst into tears every time they hear Good Riddance by Green Day.
Take Common’s ‘Like Water For Chocolate’ as another example. For me, that album will forever be about kinship. It’s a record about the growing comradery between Common and Jay Dee, who features and/or claims production credits on three quarters of the album’s songs. The two would go on to live together in California in the years before Jay’s passing. It’s also about the kinship of the Soulquarians, the short-lived but immensely impactful creative collective that solidified around Electric Lady studios in the late 90s. The likes of D’Angelo, The Roots, Erykah Badu, and Common himself, all creatively feeding off one another to create some of the last truly classic recordings of the 20th century.
For me personally, the record is also about friendship. In early summer 2000, I was introduced to it by my high school friend Eyad. As someone who shared the majority of my musical quirks, the exclamation of “you HAVE to check the new Common record out” was the only encouragement needed to dive in. That record became the soundtrack to a hazy early-summer afternoon in his mum’s garden. Then to the rest of the week, the month, and the entire summer that we hung out through. It’s a staple in my record rotation 20-plus years later and still reminds me of him.
I’m not convinced that AI-generated content could ever hold that level of reverence, or that depth of emotion for me.
Generational impact
Seismic shifts in society come maybe once a generation. AI certainly feels like it may be ours, much as the emergence of the internet was one of the final ‘big shift’ of the 20th century.
Looking further into the past, another notable tectonic event which draws parallels with our current time is the Industrial Revolution. Where people once made things individually, often by hand, and on a local level, new technological advancements gave way to the assembly line and the concept of mass production. Today the majority of things we own and consume are mass produced, yet the world has not been rid of artisan craftsmen or makers. These people still exist, their work still has value: a value often far exceeding its mass-produced counterparts. The artist persists, as does the art.
Whether the challenge is AI or something yet to come, there will always be a place for artists.
I think we can all take some comfort in that.